27 Sep 1989, 6:30 PM: in this industrial center -- population 900,000 -- a dark red, flattened sphere, about 15 x 6 m in size, circled 12 m above ground in South Park, disturbing the grass underneath. It flew away and, a few minutes later, returned and was witnessed as it hovered near ground, by twelve lower-school children playing soccer and 30 - 40 adults waiting at a nearby bus stop. They saw a hatch open in the bottom. A burly three-meter-tall entity appeared, filling the hatch. The entity had no neck and its head seemed too small, "more like a knob than a head". It wore a silver jumpsuit and bronze boots. It allegedly had three luminous eyes -- the outer two whitish and the middle one slightly above, red, pupil-less and moveable, "swiveling around like a radar". It also had a disk-shaped object on its chest. The entity appeared to scan the terrain slowly and then closed the hatch. The UFO came lower, brushing against a poplar tree, which bent and stayed in that position. Hovering at about 1½ m, the object extended four supports and landed gently. The entity and two others like it emerged with a heavy gait, accompanied by something resembling a robot, with push buttons on its chest. One of the entities adjusted something on the robot's chest, causing it to move in a mechanical way. The whole group walked near the UFO, examining the ground, and appearing to take soil samples. One entity made sounds which seemed to be orders, and from its chest came a beam of light that delineated on the ground a number of luminous rectangles, about 30 cm x 50 cm. These faded after a short while. During the incident, one of the boy witnesses cried out in fear. One entity looked at him and the boy instantly froze, unable to move. The entity's eyes seemed to be emitting light. All the witnesses starting shouting and, somehow, the UFO, entities, and robot vanished on the spot. But five minutes later, the UFO and entities reappeared. Now one entity had at its side a tube about 50 cm in length. A 16-year-old boy was nearby. The entity pointed the tube at the teenager, a luminous beam was emitted, and the teenager instantly disappeared. The entities then reentered the UFO, which flew away, gradually increasing its speed. The teenager then reappeared. An additional sketch from the children shows an illuminated emblem on the side of the UFO: the Cyrillic alphabet character "zhe". Voronezh residents interviewed later claimed they had observed this UFO not just during the above incident but also many times on September 21, 23, 29 and October 2, between 6 and 9 PM. Some of these incidents involved a different entity: small, with grayish-green face and blue overcoat resembling a loose raincoat. TASS carried details of the incident, which was officially investigated by Soviet Government and private agencies, at instigation of the Mayor of Voronezh and the local Parliamentary Deputy. A dowsing rod was used at one of the landing sites to identify an 18 m diameter circle, located where the witnesses had seen the object land. Within it, depressions were found at the four corner points of a rhombus. Measured anomalies in the local magnetic field and background radiation are circumstantial, because South Park was built on a trash dump. Sources: Flying Saucer Review 34, 4; MUFON UFO Journal 259 and 260, and UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union.