UAP Timeline

Click to zoom · drag to pan

Senator Richard Russell's party reports objects rising near a Soviet rail line; the CIA debriefs them

October 1955 · Near Alyat, Azerbaijan SSR (Baku-Tiflis railway) · Sighting · Primary document linked

Senator Richard Russell and three companions were travelling by train from Baku to Tiflis when, at 19:10, about ten minutes beyond Alyat, Russell saw a small greenish-yellow glowing ball rise quickly; the others then saw another object. In a memo of 31 October 1955 to the Director of Central Intelligence, Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence Herbert Scoville Jr. summarized debriefs of all four. Russell saw only a luminous ball; one companion saw two lights like eyes; Colonel Hathaway saw a shadowy object with a light on top and rotating lights like exhausts at the base, unlike any aircraft or missile he knew; a fourth reported a triangular object with three lights apparently ejected from a launching site. Scoville wrote that only Hathaway's testimony supported 'radically unconventional aircraft', that the rest could probably be explained as steeply climbing aircraft or missiles, and that the evidence was not firm enough to conclude the Soviets had a radically new type of aircraft.

Era: Project Blue Book · Threads: Intelligence and the FBI

Why it matters (3/5)

A U.S. senator's sighting inside the USSR that the CIA's scientific intelligence office investigated at Top Secret level.

Caveats

The memos give no date for the sighting; a Prague dispatch about it is dated 13 October 1955. A second Scoville memo found that one witness's account, given at dusk and after Russell's remark that he had seen a 'flying saucer', could not alone confirm an unconventional aircraft. The same memo notes the Air Force was then funding Avro Aircraft's 'Project Y' saucer-like aircraft in Canada.

Sources

See every event on the map and timeline