On May 8, the Pentagon released the first batch of U.S. Department of War files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), including a State Department cable describing a 1994 sighting by Tajik Air pilots over Kazakhstan.
The new archive, called the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, was created in response to a directive from U.S. president Donald Trump. It covers unresolved cases where the government cannot make a definitive determination from available data, with further releases expected “every few weeks.” The department uses the current term UAP as well as the older term unidentified flying object (UFO).
The release includes a three-page unclassified State Department cable from the U.S. embassy in Dushanbe. Dated January 31, 1994, it is titled “Tajik Air Pilots Report Unidentified Flying Object” and carries a State Department “Released in Full” stamp dated February 25, 2026.
According to the cable, Tajik Air chief pilot Ed Rhodes, identified as a United States citizen, and two American pilot colleagues reported that they had encountered a UFO on January 27, 1994, while flying at 41,000 feet in a Boeing 747SP. The location was given as latitude 45 north and longitude 55 east, over Kazakhstan.
The pilots described the object as an intensely bright light approaching from the east at high speed and at an altitude far above their aircraft. They said they watched it for about 40 minutes as it moved in circles, corkscrews, and 90-degree turns. Rhodes reportedly took several photographs with a pocket Olympus camera and said copies would be sent to the embassy and to the Tajikistan desk at the State Department if they came out. No such photographs appear in the released cable.
The crew could not identify the object’s shape because it was dark. They described its light as resembling a “bow wave,” and later said the aircraft flew beneath contrails left by the object after sunrise. Rhodes estimated those contrails to be at about 100,000 feet.
The embassy suggested that the object might have been a meteor entering and skipping off the Earth’s atmosphere. Rhodes and the other pilots rejected that explanation, saying their years flying passenger aircraft for Pan Am had given them extensive experience with meteors and space junk. Based on the object’s reported speed and maneuverability, Rhodes expressed the view, which the cable says his crew seemed to support, that it was “extraterrestrial and under intelligent control.”
The U.S. government recorded what the pilots said, but the cable does not confirm what they saw, as demonstrated in the file’s cautionary note: “We have no opinion and report the above for what it may be worth.”
The release adds an official U.S. record to a regional history in which unexplained aerial reports have surfaced in Soviet research programs and, more recently, in media and online claims.
During the Soviet period, reports of anomalous aerial phenomena from Central Asia were collected through Soviet research programs. According to a 2013 account in the Ukrainian journal Space Science and Technology (Kosmichna Nauka i Tekhnolohiia), the Soviet Union added two research programs to its 1978-1980 defense research plan: “Setka MO,” under the Ministry of Defense, and “Setka AN,” under the Academy of Sciences. An English-language account by Boris Sokolov and Yulii Platov in Skeptical Inquirer said the project drew on “the great observational potential of the entire Soviet military and many civil organizations.” It also noted that UFO reports could be useful to intelligence agencies when assessing Soviet space activity. That point is relevant to Kazakhstan, where Baikonur was established in 1955 as a secret Soviet missile site and later became the launch site for Sputnik 1 and Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight.
In January 2014, a related “extraterrestrial”-themed incident saw activist Makhambet Abzhan turn up at the KazCosmos building in Astana dressed as an alien, after Kazakhstan’s space chief Talgat Musabayev had dismissed anti-heptyl protesters as “sick.” Abzhan said he “wanted to take Musabayev to Mars.”
More recently, videos showing glowing lights over Astana circulated widely online, with some users describing the footage as a possible UAP. A related report to the U.S.-based National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) dates an Astana sighting to May 1, 2025, and describes a golden object hovering motionless for about 30 minutes before disappearing. The report also states that more than 20 people observed the event. Given the online spread and the unverified nature of the NUFORC entry, the episode is best described as a viral sighting claim rather than a confirmed UAP case.
Uzbekistan has also surfaced in UAP forums and murky documentary material. A Reddit post about alleged UAP sightings over Tashkent in 1990 and 1992 compiled photographs purportedly showing objects in the sky above the city. The same Tashkent claims are also associated with UFO Phenomenon: A Look Through the Lens, a documentary credited to German Konstantinovich Kolchin, a retired colonel and UFO researcher described in Russian biographical listings as a former deputy chairman of the Russian Geographical Society’s Commission on Anomalous Phenomena.
Another Reddit post revived claims of Soviet-era UFO reports from Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert, including stories of bright lights and military interest. No government or military source has been found for those details. The better documented oddity is a 2004 U.S. Embassy cable about the Union of UFOlogists of Turkmenabat, a UFO-themed NGO in eastern Turkmenistan that U.S. officials viewed as an effective civil-society partner. Its president attributed the group’s success partly to support from local authorities and partly to a more universal fact, “everyone is interested in UFOs.”
