The Soviet UFO cables: full transcription
Declassified Foreign Broadcast Information Service cables recording the Soviet government's own UFO investigations as the USSR ended. Each is a genuine intelligence channel product, with its original routing headers, serial numbers, and classification markings intact. These are translations of Soviet state media and official statements. They are primary source evidence of what the Soviet state and Soviet military figures said publicly. They are not US confirmation of the underlying claims. Released by the CIA in 2011 in the "UFOs: Fact or Fiction?" collection. First full searchable HTML transcription.
R 230835Z MAY 90
FM JOINT STAFF WASHINGTON DC
R 220815Z MAY 90
FM FBIS LONDON UK
TO RUCCAAA/FBIS RESTON VA
INFO various defense and intelligence addressees
BT
CONTROLS: UNCLAS
COUNTRY: USSR
SUBJ: USSR, PRC SCIENTISTS IN JOINT STUDY OF UFO'S
SOURCE: MOSCOW DOMESTIC SERVICE IN RUSSIAN 2100 GMT 21 MAY 90
SERIAL: LD2205081590
TEXT: ((Text)) A report from Vladivostok. Scientists of the PRC and the Soviet Far East have begun joint study of UFO's. The first meeting of ufologists of the two countries has ended in the small maritime townlet of Dalnegorsk.
The Soviet and Chinese specialists on anomalous phenomena have mapped out a program for investigating incidents that are already known and have also arranged to directly exchange video and photographic materials on new similar phenomena. Dalnegorsk has not been chosen by chance as the place for such acquaintance. In the last few years the number of cases of visual observation of UFO's has noticeably increased there. In just the last four years alone no less than 10 UFO's have been recorded. Specialists link their heightened interest in places here with the variety and wealth of useful minerals in Maritime Kray. Similar incidents have also occurred in mountainous regions in China whose climatic conditions and natural landscape resemble our own.
((End text))
CLASS: UNCLAS / LD PMU
SUBJ: TAKE 1 OF 2, FOREIGN PRESS NOTE, FB PN 91-003, USSR
SOURCE: FOREIGN BROADCAST INFORMATION SERVICE PROD GROUP
TEXT: USSR: UFO SIGHTINGS NO. 3, DEPUTY MINISTER OF DEFENSE INTERVIEW
Leading Soviet newspapers have increased their reporting on UFO sightings in recent months.
In the interview, Moroz asked Tretyak if the Air Defense Forces regard the flight of UFOs in Soviet air space as a violation of the sovereignty of the USSR. Tretyak replied that it is premature to see the UFOs as a threat to Soviet security or sovereignty because, although pilot reports indicated the UFOs appeared to be of artificial origin, their real nature has not yet been determined.
SUBJ: UFO REPORTEDLY LANDS IN MOUNTAIN PASS NEAR YEREVAN
SOURCE: MOSCOW
The cable reports, translating the Soviet source, an account of an unidentified object that reportedly descended into a mountain pass in the area of Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. The report is one of several from the period in which FBIS recorded Soviet regional and central media carrying accounts of UFO landings and close observations, reflecting the sharp rise in such reporting across Soviet media that FBIS noted elsewhere in the collection.
Consistent with the cardinal principle applied across this site, the entry records what the cable states the Soviet source reported. It does not assert that the event occurred. The value of the document is as evidence that the report entered the Soviet press and was captured and distributed through United States intelligence channels.
The joint study cable refers to Dalnegorsk as a place where UFO observation had concentrated. The reason, well known in the Soviet research record of the period, was the event of January 29, 1986, when residents reported an object striking a hill designated Height 611 above the town. Soviet investigators, including members of the Academy of Sciences Far Eastern Branch, collected residue from the site that they described as small metallic mesh structures and glassy droplets, and they published analyses in the Soviet technical press. By 1990, as the joint study cable records, the area had logged repeated sightings, and it became the natural site for the first Soviet and Chinese ufologists' meeting.
The cables on this page belong to a documented surge in Soviet UFO reporting during glasnost. The single most internationally visible case was the Voronezh report of late September 1989, carried by the official Soviet news agency TASS, in which several children described a large object landing in a city park and tall figures emerging from it, accompanied by a smaller robotic form. The TASS dispatch was reported worldwide. The FBIS cables represent the parallel intelligence channel record of the same era: the means by which the United States government tracked, in near real time, a closed adversary state publicly confronting a phenomenon it had long suppressed.
These cables do not prove that any craft or entity is real. They were never intended to. What they prove is narrower and, in its own way, more durable: that the question was taken seriously enough, at the level of a superpower's defense and intelligence establishment, to be monitored, translated, classified, and routed through the Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. A Deputy Minister of Defense answered a sovereignty question about UFOs rather than refusing it. Two Communist scientific establishments agreed to pool their data. A foreign intelligence service filed it all away for two decades.
The interest itself is the documented fact. The cables are the proof of the interest. That is the record.
Document 1: CIA FOIA 0005516230, "USSR, PRC Scientists in Joint Study of UFOs," Joint Staff Washington, 23 May 1990, FBIS serial LD2205081590
Document 2: CIA FOIA 0005517677, "USSR: UFO Sightings No. 3, Deputy Minister of Defense Interview," FBIS Foreign Press Note FB PN 91-003
Document 3: CIA FOIA 0005517731, "UFO Reportedly Lands in Mountain Pass Near Yerevan"
Collection: CIA FOIA, "UFOs: Fact or Fiction?" special collection, released 2011
CIA FOIA Reading Room: Document 0005516230 →
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.