Soviet astronaut, USSR Hero Vladimir Kovalenok spent 217 days of his life living in space. The astronaut does not exclude the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. "When I was working at the Salyut orbital station, I saw something strange in a porthole one day. The object was the size of a finger. I was surprised to see it was an orbiting object," Kovalenko said at the press conference in Moscow on Friday.

The astronaut added he called his partner Viktor Savinykh to take a look at the unidentified object in space. "It was hard to determine the size and the speed of an object in space. That is why I can not say exactly, which size it actually was. Savinykh prepared to take a picture of it, but the UFO suddenly exploded. Only clouds of smoke were left. The object split into two interconnected pieces. It was reminiscent of a dumb-bell. I reported about it to the Mission Control immediately," the astronaut said.

Vladimir Kovalenok said they had not managed to photograph the object, Interfax reports.

"The Soviet press headlined the event widely. Soviet newspapers and magazines published a lot of articles and messages about it, but they were mostly critical articles. Journalists excluded the existence of the extraterrestrial reason," Kovalenok was quoted as saying. The astronaut said nobody knows, what happened that day, when he saw the strange object in space. "It was probably a UFO, but it was definitely not mysticism - two people watched it at the same time," said he.

When on Earth, Kovalenok learned specialists had registered considerable radiation emission the day the astronaut saw the object. "I do not believe it when astronauts say they have never seen anything extraordinary in space," concluded Kovalenok.