Pentagon UFO Files Add CIA Report on Kazakhstan’s Sary Shagan Range

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...

Pentagon UFO Files Include 1994 Tajik Air Report Over Kazakhstan

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. The same cable had previously appeared in CUFON’s archive of State Department UFO records, released in 2000 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. 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...