The Soviet UFO cables: what US intelligence recorded the USSR investigating
In the last two years of the Soviet Union, as glasnost loosened state control over the press, Soviet newspapers and television began openly reporting UFO investigations that the government had kept quiet for decades. The United States was watching. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the open-source intelligence arm that monitored foreign media, translated these reports and pushed them out over military intelligence channels: Joint Staff Washington, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Pacific Command, the State Department. The cables sat classified for two decades. The CIA released them in 2011 inside a special collection. They record a sitting Soviet Deputy Defense Minister discussing UFOs in Soviet airspace, a joint Soviet and Chinese scientific program to study the phenomenon, and reported landings and entities in the Soviet press. This is the first time the core cables have been transcribed as searchable text in one place.
Precision matters here, because this subject attracts a great deal of material that is not what it claims to be. These cables are products of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, known as FBIS. FBIS did one thing: it monitored, recorded, and translated foreign radio, television, and print media, then distributed the translations to the US government. An FBIS cable is therefore primary source evidence of one specific thing: what a foreign government or its press said on a given date.
That is exactly what makes this set valuable and exactly where the boundary sits. These documents do not show the United States confirming the existence of UFOs or entities. They show the United States recording, through its intelligence apparatus, that the Soviet state and Soviet military figures were publicly engaging with the phenomenon as the Cold War ended. The routing is real. The classification was real. The translations are verbatim government products. What the underlying Soviet sources claimed is a separate question that the cables themselves do not resolve, and this site does not resolve it either. We transcribe what the record says and let the line stay where it is.
This distinguishes the documents on this page from a separate, widely circulated CIA file describing Soviet soldiers supposedly turned to stone by aliens. That file is an FBIS translation of a story that originated in a tabloid, and it is treated here as exactly that. It is not transcribed on this site, because a translation of fiction is not a record of an event.
The anchor cable, dated May 23, 1990 and routed from Joint Staff Washington, reports that scientists from the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Far East had begun a joint study of UFOs, with their first meeting held in the small mining town of Dalnegorsk in the Soviet Maritime Territory. The cable translates a Moscow Domestic Service radio broadcast from May 21, 1990.
Dalnegorsk was not chosen at random. The town was the site of a January 1986 event in which an object reportedly struck a hill known locally as Height 611, leaving physical residue that Soviet scientists collected and analyzed. By the time of the joint study, the cable reports, no fewer than ten UFOs had been recorded in the area in four years. The Soviet and Chinese specialists agreed to exchange video and photographic materials and to jointly investigate known incidents. A program of cross-border scientific cooperation on the phenomenon, between two Communist powers, recorded by US military intelligence, is not something most people know exists.
A second cable, an FBIS Foreign Press Note from 1991, translates an interview with General Ivan Tretyak, a Soviet Deputy Minister of Defense and the head of Air Defense Forces. Asked directly whether the Air Defense Forces regarded the flight of UFOs in Soviet airspace as a violation of Soviet sovereignty, Tretyak gave a measured answer: that pilot reports indicated the objects appeared to be of artificial origin, but that it was premature to treat them as a threat to Soviet security because their real nature had not been determined.
The significance is not what Tretyak concluded. It is that the question was put to a sitting Deputy Minister of Defense, in the Soviet press, and that he answered it as an air defense matter rather than dismissing it. US intelligence captured the exchange and moved it through defense channels. It is a rare instance of a senior military official of a nuclear power addressing the phenomenon on the record, preserved in a primary source.
The collection includes additional cables from the same period: a report of a UFO landing in a mountain pass near Yerevan in Soviet Armenia, and a broader FBIS survey noting a sharp increase in UFO reporting across Soviet media in the final years of the USSR. Taken together, the cables document a specific historical moment: a closed society opening up, its press suddenly free to report what had been suppressed, and a foreign intelligence service methodically recording all of it.
The most famous Soviet case of the period, the September 1989 Voronezh report in which children described tall entities emerging from a landed object, was carried by the official Soviet news agency TASS and picked up worldwide. The cables on this page are the US intelligence counterpart to that public record: the quiet, classified channel through which the same events flowed into the American government.
Word-for-word transcription of the declassified FBIS cables, including the full routing headers and serial numbers that establish them as genuine intelligence channel products. The Dalnegorsk joint study cable, the Tretyak interview, and the related landing and survey reports. First full searchable HTML transcription.
Document 1: "USSR, PRC Scientists in Joint Study of UFOs": CIA FOIA Document 0005516230, Joint Staff Washington, 23 May 1990, FBIS serial LD2205081590
Document 2: "USSR: UFO Sightings No. 3, Deputy Minister of Defense Interview": CIA FOIA Document 0005517677, FBIS Foreign Press Note FB PN 91-003
Document 3: "UFO Reportedly Lands in Mountain Pass Near Yerevan": CIA FOIA Document 0005517731
Collection: CIA FOIA, "UFOs: Fact or Fiction?" special collection, released 2011
The Interference begins with a patent. US3951134, filed in 1974, describes a device for remotely monitoring and altering human brain waves without physical contact. The patent is real. The USPTO granted it.
What precedes that patent is a documented institutional record. In 1960, the CIA funded MKUltra Subproject 119 at Texas Christian University. The stated objective included techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means. The contractor was unwitting. The budget was $6,370. Sidney Gottlieb signed off. In 1952, an ARTICHOKE field team produced total amnesia in two overseas subjects held in a guarded safehouse with eyes taped shut in transit. Their dispositions after the operation were outside the team's responsibility. In 1963, the CIA Inspector General recommended termination of unwitting testing on American citizens. The program ran for another decade. In 1983, a U.S. Army Intelligence report filed in the CIA's STARGATE collection treated the brain as an electromagnetic organ that could be entrained to external frequencies. Not as theory. As established fact.
The Colonial Authority in The Interference is what that timeline produces if you follow it forward rather than stop at the declassified record. The mesh program James Harlan carries inside his skull is built on the physics in these documents. The fiction begins exactly where the public record stops answering questions.