Mystery Thread

[AstroWolfie]

Some of the other ones, such as the "Jellyfish" or "TicTac" videos are interesting though. I'll put the "Jellyfish" article here:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/11/jellyfish-ufo-uap-iraq-video/72194125007/

[SunlitZelkova]

5 hours ago, DDE said:

TL:DR is that a schizophrenic hoarder found it, neighbors called the doctors on her for walking around with an imaginary baby, an alcoholic acquaintance stole it and tried to make it stop stinking (through use of copious alcohol), then bribed a cop with it, cop called the news but a UFO cult showed up first and took the body off of him, before - surprise- handing it over to an actual pathologist, who disposed of it, only for individual cuktists to spread stories about burying it at Yevpatoria's deep-space array or on the grave of Baba Vanga (crossover - check!)

There might have been that one Soviet astronomer or physicist... I read about him on Wikipedia years ago and can't remember his name... who said that "you Americans have us beat when it comes to UFO reports" but when it comes to conspiracy culture, Russia (and maybe the other former Soviet states too?) certainly give America a run for its money.

I wonder if that comes with being a superpower. In Japan UFOs are treated more like mythology or simple tales of monsters rather than "tin-foil hat territory", at least by my observation.

But getting back to UFOs in the ex-USSR, I had a theory that the reason there weren't many reports coming from there during the big waves of the 50s and 70s was because-

1. "Culture of staying low"- granted this comes from my very Western biased view of what it's like in an authoritarian country, but I assume one wouldn't want to attract the attention of the police for lights in the sky and what when it comes to life and death, one is probably better off assuming was a hallucination. "You gotta keep your head low", so says many American dramas set in police states.

2. Classification of police records- Anything reported wouldn't really come out in the first place.

3. Lack of interest from scientists and authorities- Now this is an iffy one. Jacques Vallee claimed in his book UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat that Soviet scientists had actually undertaken a great deal of UFO research throughout the Cold War. But beyond his first two books, Passport to Magonia and The Invisible College, he seems to have drifted from his original championship of free thinking and become the very thing he once despised; espousing ideas such as full-on ancient alien theories and UFO crash tales (the former of which he distanced himself from in his first book, and the latter of which he noticeably omitted from the second book, perhaps correctly seeing that that incident is very much a fabrication).

*deep breath*

So, I don't know how accurate it is. But if there were people like Nikolai Kozyrev studying things such as time as a substance as late as the 1970s (and I did even find MSU articles on the subject dating from the early 2000s) who knows what they study? But, as I said, it's iffy. In the high stakes environment of the Soviet Union where a project can get cancelled with a few wrong words (allegedly the Tu-91 was cancelled when the officer showing it to Khrushchev said it "had the firepower of a cruiser" instead of "more than the firepower of a cruiser", to which Khrushchev said "then why do we have cruisers?", laughed, and promptly cancelled it), would scientists really risk their career on lights in the sky? Would military men risk it? Let alone politicians. Especially when such a circus was going on in full view in the West. Perhaps it is something they wanted to be above.

[DDE]

12 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

But getting back to UFOs in the ex-USSR, I had a theory that the reason there weren't many reports coming from there during the big waves of the 50s and 70s

The Petrozavodsk Phenomenon of 1977 isn't big enough for you?

[SunlitZelkova]

5 hours ago, DDE said:

The Petrozavodsk Phenomenon of 1977 isn't big enough for you?

Well I did say many.

Perhaps Russian language sources have more (although I don’t how reliable such a count would be), but the more well known Western cases of that decade are at least in the 10s.

[AstroWolfie]

The Third Man Syndrome, aka Third Man factor. 

Third man factor - Wikipedia