Article/Document:
Russian General Speaks Out On UFOs
Michael Hesemann
original source | fair use notice
Summary: Interview with Major-General Vasily Alexeyev of the Russian Air Force. Space Communications Centre, Moscow, 1997
Russian General speaks Out!
Interview with Major-General Vasily Alexeyev of the Russian Air Force.
Space Communications Centre, Moscow, 1997
On behalf of 2000 FILM PRODUCTIONS, Michael Hesemanns internationally active company, our Russian co-worker and correspondent Valery Uvarov interviewed one of the most knowledgeable Russian/Ex-Soviet Generals, Major General Vasily Alexeyev, on the subject of UFOs. The text was released exclusively in the German edition of MAGAZINE 2000plus in May 2000.
VU - Valery Uvarov, VA - Major General Vasili Alexejev
VU: As a military man when did you first hear about or have to do with UFOs?
VA: If we are speaking about my military capacity, it was in the 1980s when I happened to be serving not in a regular unit, but in the central staff. Work in the central staff entails close links with the units in the field and a large amount of travelling. There were many reports from unit level regarding a large number of observations of unexplained phenomena. You should bear in mind that at that time much was simply denied. The subject was to a large extent a closed one. On the ground, however, people wanted to find out what was what, to separate truth from fiction. In that period a lot of things were presented in such a way that you lost the desire to believe. Accordingly an attitude to the subject became established, where not only was there no desire to believe, it was even undesirable to believe.
Nevertheless the information coming in from the bases was of interest if only because it was not merely talk and rumours; there were eye-witnesses to phenomena and that was reflected in specific documents and the reports of officials. At times this information was of such a fascinating nature that it was impossible not to believe it. Later the question no longer seemed so fantastic and began to be examined at the level not only of the Defence Ministry, but of other government departments as well. This interest specifically expressed itself in certain experts being sent to investigate, especially to those places where UFOs, let's call them that, appeared quite frequently.
I know a whole number of military bases in that category. As a rule they are objects of strategic significance, rocket complexes, scientific test establishments, in other words the places where there is a high concentration of advanced science and, to some degree, danger. Because every nuclear rocket, every new airforce installation represents a breakthrough both in science and in military terms; it is first and foremost a peak, the summit of human achievement. And that is where UFOs appeared fairly often. Moreover, individual officers and commanders on the spot who knew about the phenomenon and had no official instructions on the matter, acted on their own initiative to investigate UFOs, recording data, and so on. I know that in some places they even learned to create a situation which would deliberately provoke the appearance of a UFO. A UFO would appear where there was increased military activity connected, say, with the transportation of "special" loads. It was enough artificially stimulate or schedule such a move for a UFO to appear. In other words, some kind of conditional relationship emerged. And they detected it. We're an intelligent nation, nothing escapes us. I know that at certain testing ranges - I won't name them, although it's no longer a secret - they even learnt to make contact of a kind.
What did that consists of? First the UFO appeared; in most instances it was a sphere, but there were other kinds. Contact was achieved with the help of physical indications of behaviour - pointing your arms in various directions, say, and the sphere became flattened in the same direction. If you raised your arms three times, the UFO flattened out in a vertical direction three times as well. In the early 1980s, on the instructions of the then Soviet leadership, experiments using technical devices (theodolites, radar stations, and others) were carried out as a result of which the unidentified objects were firmly recorded as instrumental data.
VU: Can you say on what level those researches took place? While studying the material from those observations and the contents of certain documents I formed the impression that the prime reason for circulars and orders on this matter in the armed forces was that they most likely considered UFOs a new sort of weapon belonging to some hostile country. Isn't that why orders were issued on the rigorous investigation and examination of the appearance and behaviour of UFOs by all available ways and means? What was the nature of the recording, on instruments and in written documents, of the time of appearance, trajectory and other characteristics?
VA: I think that on the whole there were two reasons. First, a great deal of information of various kinds was coming in from all over. I know of a case when workers from one of the research establishments outside Moscow flew to Novosibirsk, I think it was, to investigate an air crash. When they came back they wrote a report that they had had an encounter with a UFO that accompanied their plane in the air. Being sensible people and inclined to scientific analysis, they managed to share out their roles so that during the observation some watched and dictated, others sketched, a third group kept track of time. In that way the observation acquired a certain scientific grounding. It wasn't just a sighting, but a scientific team at work, carrying out a sort of real-time experiment. Reports of UFO sightings came in regularly. And evidently somewhere nearer the core of our leadership in the sphere of the Defence Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and so on, a lot of this kind of information began to build up. And not only from ordinary laymen, but from scientists and professionals as well. Military men in general are not inclined to fantasise. They only report what they see, what actually occurs.
They are people you can believe. You should not forget that the arms race was still going on at this time, a struggle for military and other priorities. New discoveries in science and technology were being made all the time. The UFOs were something new and not understood. And there really was an idea that they might be some means of gathering intelligence. I don't think that it only happened here. For example, one of the reports of a state commission that worked on one of the testing-ranges in Volgograd region proposed several versions for the origin of the phenomenon. They referred to possible natural processes that we have failed to recognise, but did not exclude the possibility that it was a form of reconnaissance.
At that very time, and slightly later, a whole group of disguised electronic intelligence-gathering devices were in reality discovered on those testing-ranges. But it is interesting that one of the official versions from the commission, included among the final points, was the possibility that UFOs belonged to an extraterrestrial civilisation! That was very interesting!
VU: At what level was investigation carried out? To what extent was there a scientific approach, or was it simply recording data?
VA: It was more like recording data. By the nature of my work I received information from various military units across Russia, the Soviet Union as it then was. I know that that material was sent on without any explanations or annotations to the relevant bodies higher up. I was aware that there were groups engaged in investigating UFOs, and perhaps something more, but at that time the level of secrecy over this question was such that all that took place was receiving information and subsequently sending it on higher up: people came to see me, but, as we were military men, there were no explanations of any kind. They simply said they were interested in this or that. Then they came up with a table with pictures of all the shapes of UFOs that had ever been recorded - about fifty, ranging from ellipses and spheres through to something resembling spaceships. Witnesses were asked what it looked liked, then they pinned down the locality and so on. After which all the material was passed on. As a result it is hard to say how the work was continued, to what extent it was scientific.
I knew that some kind of work was going on in the Defence Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and the intelligence services. But things were such that those who weren't directly connected with the investigations didn't know what was going on. We only provided the information. I must admit that there was an awful lot of information. And here, around Moscow, above many air-defence sites, testing-ranges and other installations - those are the places where UFOs appear most often.
VU: You just said that people came to you who were interested on information about UFO sightings. Then that information was passed on up. Some intelligence services were engaged in analysing the information. What do you think - as a man of experience who has attained such a high position and rank - regarding the interests of humanity as a whole, was the information you provided gathered and used to positive or negative ends? In the West the idea is firmly established that when gathering information about UFOs the intelligence services in America, and in Russia too, were and are guided not by the interests of humanity as a whole, but rather the opposite.
VA: I think that politics interfered with science here. Investigation of what was unidentified and not understood was carried out above all in order to clear matters up. Military specialists and military science in general has an immense potential that can be compared with that of the Academy of Sciences, and in some spheres that potential is even greater. Military technologies have always been the most advanced. I don't imagine the intelligence services were inferior. Behind the military and intelligence services' interest in UFOs lay the desire to get to the bottom of the new phenomenon, where it was leading, what it was all about. What if it did represent some kind of threat, from the object itself? That was why they had to get to the bottom of it. But I don't think, in fact I practically exclude the idea that the Russian military were scheming in some way. It is simply out of the question. The very structure of the military organisations, the intelligence services and the Academy of Sciences make it impossible to decide matters of that kind without the intervention of the government and other state institutions.
Anyone with common-sense, knowing the structure of the state, will have to admit that such a thing is simply impossible. The more so as the work on investigating UFOs was being duplicated by several bodies. Even if only one department of state had studied the question, and some maladjusted individual working there tried to conceal information and use it to his own ends, that too would have been impossible. If, say, the Defence Ministry had had a monopoly on the question, the intelligence services would in all likelihood have known about it, reports would have been passed by various channels anyway. After all, we don't have one organisation that does the checking, ours is a system with lots of facets and lots of channels, which absolutely rules out the possibility of making selfish use of the results for hidden goals.
VU: Thank you. That is a very important question that worries people not only in Russia, but around the world.
VA: I agree. It is a global issue, a geopolitical one. I am sure that the Americans and other countries have built up a large quantity of this kind of information. I am certain today that there is a great deal of this information. And anyway, this issue, like thermonuclear weapons, is a global one. It is a question of the survival of humanity, considering how poor our conceptions about the environment and energy resources are, the ecological problems that are emerging. We burn up the oxygen and do a lot of other things, and in the last resort it is hard to say where we will end up and to what extent these processes are irreversible. A way out has to be found; there must be some kind of breakthrough. With those problems in mind, the study of UFOs may reveal some new forms of energy to us, or at least bring us closer to a solution. Therefore questions bound up with UFOs and all the accompanying phenomena are, I believe on the whole, the concern of all mankind.
And here our leaders at the relevant level should take matters seriously and find an acceptable solution. Many prominent scientists of world rank have spoken of the need for such an approach. Why it hasn't come about yet is hard to say. At the present moment it is probably bound up with the formation of a new Russia. At times our funding is irregular and not very well organised. Well, God willing, we'll struggle through. Many countries today have reached a certain level in science and in the study of this question. We have obtained certain results, and at present the issue is the creation of some single body that would bring together all our knowledge on this matter. I believe things would be easier then. The Americans have got something interesting, so have we. Conclusions have been made and data assembled, for years gone by as well, and now they have been "shelved" somewhere. Perhaps it would be enough to put one thing together with another for the whole question to appear in a completely different light.
VU: How are things today as regards investigation, recording and so on, in your sphere, for example.
VA: Much worse today than they were before. But that is not due any decline in interest. What is the chief concern in the armed forces now? - How to survive! Who's going to bother about UFOs? The question has, I think, temporarily become secondary purely for economic reasons. We will resume this work as soon as we get a bit stronger.
VU: Are you personally interested in the question of UFOs?
VA: I have a strong personal interest. While still a schoolboy I dreamt about extraterrestrial civilisations; I looked for life on Mars and even on Venus. Sometimes I regret that I have never myself observed a UFO in an active manifestation like some people - when it was not simply a glowing sphere but something more intriguing. And there are a great deal of facts like that, right up to contacts with aliens.
VU: During our last meeting you said a lot about encounters between military personnel and UFOs.
VA: There was a case with us outside Moscow when two warrant officers felt an inner urge to go outside. And one of them found himself directly at the landing site of a flying device. He made mental contact - not at the level of speech, but telepathically, in thought forms. He was given a invitation to visit the space-ship, but due to fear or some purely personal reasons he couldn't accept. Later he made some interesting drawings of the ship. I saw the their explanatory notes and drawings depicting what they had seen. Their account was supplemented by the reports and drawings of the duty officers and their deputies and a whole number of conscripts who were on guard duty. In all the accounts the place and time were compatible and the drawings of the ship flying away had much in common.
VU: After talking to you I form an impression I would like to hope is true - that you are the person who is willing and able to help get to the bottom of this phenomenon.
VA: Yes, when you have the mass of documentary material which I have worked with, from specific people, eye-witnesses, and that over a period of several years, in different regions, then your attitude to the UFO phenomenon naturally changes. You know I have kept some photographs for myself. Here they are fixing an object with instruments that determine the distance to it, measure its angular velocity and so on... They start to probe it with the locator. As soon as the locator touched it, the object disappears and the observers see it in a different place. The object runs away. There are a large number of facts like that, inexplicable for contemporary science. As if some kind of intelligence was reacting.
VU: Can I ask your opinion on the question you have probably asked yourself lots of times? What do you think - are UFOs representatives of other civilisations?
VA: I think it highly possible.
VU: What in your opinion draws them here?
VA: I think that if their level of civilisation allows them to move in space across great distances, possibly in other forms of material - and that is indeed the case - then at their level of development, when it comes down to it, they are also concerned about normal relations between people, some sort of progress, ultimately the survival of intelligent life, if it does exist in the world. And if we look at the Earth from that point of view, then our whole history is a tale of wars, a tale of self-destruction, and not creation. Its the history of murders and the death of whole peoples. Not a single truly civilised society could tolerate that. Life has a different meaning. No normal person can walk past if a child is drowning! They will save it, if only because that child represents their future. And the higher the level of civilisation, the greater the awareness of that. If that works at the level of the single individual, then it will also work at the level of civilisations. But they do not interfere nevertheless, because each civilisation should develop independently, according to certain laws.
Outside interference in natural processes is always a risky business. But some sort of correction, not allowing processes of disintegration to begin when they will bring the history of civilisation to an end, is evidently included in the plans of the Higher Intelligence.
VU: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I really hope that this will not be the last time we meet. We will probably think of more questions for you.
VA: I wish you every success. I hope you find help not only from God, from your active engagement, but that you encounter people who will help you to realise what you have conceived, because it is not only important for the whole of humanity, it also demands serious investment. But it seems to me that you have sufficient energy and enthusiasm. The main thing is that you have plenty of people alongside you who provide moral support. That is very important. All the best.
Interviewer: Valery Uvarov, Moscow, March 1997
Copyright © 2000 Michael Hesemann.
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