On May 22, the Pentagon released the second tranche of U.S. Department of War records on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the official term now often used for what are commonly called UFOs, through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, known as PURSUE.
The first batch, published on May 8, included a 1994 State Department cable about a Tajik Air crew’s report of an unidentified object over Kazakhstan.
The new PURSUE release includes a CIA intelligence report describing a 1973 sighting at the Soviet Union’s Sary Shagan weapons testing range in Kazakhstan. The report itself is not new to the public record. The CIA first released it in 1978 in a heavily redacted version, leaving the brief UAP account as the only section that remained substantially readable. A fuller copy was cleared for release in the agency’s December 19, 2019 response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request filed by John Greenewald, founder of The Black Vault, a website that publishes declassified U.S. government records obtained through public-records requests.
Much of the document deals with missile systems and warhead handling. It also refers to “rumored laser research” and includes a brief account of what the report calls an “unidentified phenomenon.”
The CIA describes the source as a “former Soviet citizen who served…,” with the rest of the line obscured. Given the report’s detailed references to Sary Shagan sites and facility layouts, the file appears to rely on someone with firsthand knowledge of the range, though the released copy does not clarify the nature of the source’s connection to it.
According to the report, on “one evening in late summer 1973,” the source stepped outside at Site 7 during a Canada-USSR sports broadcast and saw “an unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass in the sky.” The object was west of the site at an estimated 70-degree angle, though its altitude was “undeterminable.”
After 10 to 15 seconds, the “green circle widened” and “several green concentric circles formed around the mass.” There was no sound, and the object disappeared within minutes.
Sary Shagan, near Lake Balkhash in central Kazakhstan, was established by the Soviet Union in 1956 for anti-ballistic missile testing and was the site of what is widely described as the world’s first successful interception of a ballistic missile warhead on March 4, 1961. Russia still leases parts of the range, while Kazakhstan controls other areas.
The file also refers to the System-75, or SA-2, a Soviet surface-to-air missile system, and to the System-300/Aldan, which a CIA field comment identifies as the ABM-1 Galosh anti-ballistic missile. “According to hearsay,” the report says, experiments involving laser weapons were being conducted somewhere at the range and “supposedly” involved “powerful antennas,” though the file gives “no further details.”
A better-known Soviet-era UAP case is the Petrozavodsk phenomenon of September 20, 1977, named for the city in Karelia in northwestern Russia, where the most widely publicized sighting was reported. Accounts of unusual lights also came from locations in northern Europe and further afield in the Soviet Union.
Unlike the green circles reported at Sary Shagan, a TASS dispatch preserved in the CIA Reading Room described a “huge star” that spread out over the city “in the form of a medusa,” sending fine rays downward. A version of a 1977 USSR Academy of Sciences report reproduced by AstroNet described the sighting in stages, from a small bright object inside a translucent shell to curved rays that gave it a jellyfish-like shape.
The incident drew official attention and, along with an increase in reports in 1977-1978, prompted the USSR Academy of Sciences to approve a research program on anomalous atmospheric phenomena. The program was code-named SETKA-AN, referring to the Academy of Sciences, and ran alongside SETKA-MO, its Ministry of Defense counterpart.
The phenomenon has often been linked to Kosmos 955, a Soviet satellite launched from Plesetsk in the early hours of September 20. However, later accounts painted a more complex picture and questioned whether a single high-altitude object could account for the reports.
A separate, much less firmly documented Kazakhstan-related case appears in Thread Three, a translated Russian UFO document file made available through 8NewsNow. The file is connected to George Knapp, a longtime UAP journalist and chief investigative reporter for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, whose September 9, 2025, written testimony to a House Oversight hearing described Russian UFO records he said he obtained from the Russian Ministry of Defense and affiliated organizations during the 1990s.
In that testimony, Knapp said the committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets had received copies of the Russian documents. He also said some of the material had previously been shared with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies and the Defense Intelligence Agency for translation and analysis. Knapp referred to a later program dubbed “Thread III,” which he described as an analysis effort that monitored UFO cases, news reports, and Western government interest.
The Thread Three file includes an account concerning Derzhavinsk, a town in northern Kazakhstan’s Akmola Region. According to the translation, the alleged incident occurred on June 27, 1979, when a group of Soviet Young Pioneers from the Berezka camp went for a walk to a mound identified as “Lisaya.” Members of the group, accompanied by an adult educator, noticed a flash near the forest edge and later encountered figures described in the translation as tall, dark, and slender, with large pink eyes. That evening, a teacher and a girl were said to have seen one of the figures near the campsite.
Older accounts of the same story trace its earlier circulation to a July 19, 1979 letter to Tekhnika Molodezhi and local follow-up reporting by Turgayskaya Nov’; those accounts give the date as June 26.
The Derzhavinsk account has not been verified through an official archive and should be treated as unconfirmed.
