Case · C-040

Petrozavodsk 1977: the luminous “jellyfish” in the sky of Karelia

Petrozavodsk, Karelia (then USSR) · Russia · Sep 20, 1977

In flight Mixed witness types

What happened

On the night of September 20, 1977, the residents of Petrozavodsk saw for a few minutes a large luminous object that spread out “like a jellyfish” over the city, and reports came from a vast area, from Copenhagen and Helsinki to Vladivostok. The witnesses included militia officers, port workers, military personnel and airport staff; the TASS agency reported the news and the Academy of Sciences began a preliminary analysis, which remained inconclusive. The case prompted the Soviet authorities to launch in 1978 a state program for the study of anomalous phenomena (“Setka”), which continued until 1990 and which later attributed most mass nighttime sightings to rocket launches.

Proposed explanation

James Oberg and then Yuli Platov of the IZMIRAN institute attributed the phenomenon to the launch of the Kosmos-955 satellite from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, which took place shortly before 4 a.m. that night, and the Setka program traced most mass nighttime sightings to rocket launches. The preliminary report for the Academy of Sciences (1977) judged the phenomenon unexplainable with the available data; one of its authors, the astronomer Lev Gindilis, objected that the object was moving westward while the rocket had been launched toward the northeast, and an appendix of January 1978 reported sightings that occurred before the launch.

Official investigation

USSR Academy of Sciences; from 1978 the state programs “Setka” of the Ministry of Defense and the Academy of Sciences

Sources

1. Boris Sokolov and Yulii Platov, “A History of State UFO Research in the USSR”, Skeptical Briefs, December 2000 (analysis, skeptical)
2. Wikipedia (en) – Petrozavodsk phenomenon (other)

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