RUSSIAN PILOT ENCOUNTERS A UFO

MY ENCOUNTER WITH A UFO by Lev Vyatkin
Fighter Pilot of the 1st Class Lieutenant-Colonel Lev Vyatkin was born in Perm, Russia, on October 20, 1931. In 1953 he finished the Komarov Higher naval Aviation College in Yeysk, and in 1974 graduated from the Mechnikov State University in Odessa, Ukraine.

In his own words:
On August 13, 1967 I took off in my interceptor for a training flight. The time was several minutes past 23 hours. I turned on the afterburner in order to climb to 10,000 meters. I maneuvered the plane to face the beam, determined my location, reported to the Flight Commander and smoothly banked the plane to the left.

It was a calm, moonless night. The bright constellations added to its charm. The plane had performed half of the turn and was facing the sea. The lights of Yalta, a Black Sea resort town, glimmered below along the half moon of the beach. I made a routine check of the flight instruments. The engine murmured behind my armored chair. Everything was O.K., the flight conformed to all standard procedures.

At that moment I caught sight of the thing that later kept returning to my memory and troubling me, making me recall the details of my night flight, time and time again, searching for explanation for what happened then. I saw the Object when I looked up from the instruments: it was a very large oval-shaped object which was somehow fixed to the port of my plane. A strange object so close to my plane could not help but worry me so I requested the Flight Commander Major Musatov at once: "Who is in the zone?" He consulted his instruments and answered to my surprise that there was nobody in the zone as all the other planes had already landed.

I banked the plane to the right, trying not to lose sight of the strange object which worried me a lot. Attempting not to approach the object too closely, I tried to determine in what direction it was moving. However, several seconds later its lights went gradually down as if a rheostat switch had been turned off inside.

Meanwhile the plane made a complete right turn and came back to the starting point. I considered my next move and then decided to make the left turn I had planned, trying to be as careful as possible. Hardly had I banked the plane to the left and adjusted the speed and thrust when I saw a flash of bright light from above straight on the course of my plane. Then a slanting milky-white ray appeared in front of my plane. The ray was closing in on the plane. Had I not leveled out, the plane I would have run into the ray with the fuselage or, to be more exact with the cockpit.

All the same I hit the ray with the left wing. I was approaching the ray at very high speed, not taking my eyes off it, so I had time to notice and feel something very strange. No sooner had the wing touched the ray than the latter broke into a myriad of tiny sparkles like those you see in a spent firework. The plane shook violently and the instruments read off the scale.

"What's the matter? Is the ray solid?" I thought instinctively, with my eyes still on the strange sparkling pillar which stretched downwards. Soon the light above and the ray below disappeared.

Flying back to the airfield I kept searching the starry skies above for more surprises but everything was quiet. My night flight ended safely. For many days afterwards the surface of the wing which had come into contact with the strange ray shone at nights as if to remind me of the phenomenon.

One knows from experience that there is no such thing as "solid rays".* And yet it was me, a pilot, who happened to encounter the impossible phenomenon in real life. I felt some relief when the popular newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" published an article entitled "Cosmic Ghosts" (October 17, 1989). The article stated that "solid rays" really existed and I had not been the only person to come into contact with them. V. Selyavkin, the police chief of Voronezh, Russia, described a similar experience he had when he found himself at night on a road in the town suburbs. "Suddenly a ray of light fell down on me from above. It was so bright and powerful that I felt it physically. You won't believe it, but it pinned me to the ground with its weight. Then the ray moved aside and disappeared. I will not forget it as long as I live..." Many other sources mention this phenomenon so characteristic of UFOs. Another feature of the ray is no less strange. It can project itself from a UFO like a telescope support or a probe. It terminates abruptly.

None of the physicists can explain these pecularities. The nature and functions of the ray are not clear. Is it a ray at all? There is a need for a different name, but what? Which physical laws govern it?

Both the impact on contact and the frantic running of the instrument needles suggest that it is not a ray of light but a pillar of fluorescent, highly magnetized gas. By confining gas within a "magnetic tube" or a "pillar" it is possible, in principle, to achieve the effect of a "solid" ray which can project and retract itself.

It means that a protruding ray which has an "end face" may turn out to be nothing but a pillar of magnetized gas. I know that I am speculating over disputable and poorly investigated issues but circumstances forced me to express my opinion.

* Once again, we find proof that the rays emitted by UFOs are solid to some degree.