Soviet and Russian UFO crash retrievals
Soviet and Russian UFO crash retrievals refers to a series of alleged recovery operations purportedly conducted by the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation in which unidentified flying craft were reportedly retrieved, studied, and stored at classified facilities. The primary source for detailed accounts of these programs is Anton Anfalov, a Ukrainian historian who spent decades interviewing KGB and GRU insiders, military personnel, and scientists with direct involvement in the operations.
Known retrieval incidents
| Date | Location | Description | Recovery details | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1945 | Uście, northwestern Poland | German flying disc wreckage recovered by Soviet troops occupying Poland. | Craft exploded during initial studies, killing several Russian and Polish researchers.[3] | Anton Anfalov via Michael Salla |
| 1987 | West Siberia | Boomerang-shaped craft, approximately 20 meters wide, carrying a live non-human crew.[4] | Compartmentalized retrieval in phases; separate teams transported the craft via Siberian river routes.[5] Sourced from a KGB informant in the department's most secretive division.[6] | Anton Anfalov via Michael Salla |
| Spring 1989 | Pacific Ocean | Oval or E-shaped craft found on the floor of a harbor.[7] | Soviet Pacific Fleet divers recovered the craft; surface ships positioned directly above during the operation.[7] | Anton Anfalov via Michael Salla |
| 21 August 1989 | Czechoslovakia | UFO retrieved from Eastern Europe during the 1989–1990 wave of intense UFO activity across the Soviet bloc and Western Europe.[8][9] | Details not specified. | Anton Anfalov via Michael Salla |
| Unknown (multiple) | West Siberia; Kola Peninsula | At least three separate UFO recoveries documented from informant testimony; a witness was flown to a military air base on the Kola Peninsula and shown a recovered craft inside a hangar.[10] | Witness transported by aircraft to the air base.[10] | Anton Anfalov via Michael Salla |
Storage and reverse engineering facilities
Baikonur / Site 92
The facility known publicly as the Baikonur Cosmodrome conceals a secret crash retrieval storage installation, according to Anfalov. The name "Baikonur" was itself a deliberate misdirection — the actual railway station serving the site carries a different name, chosen to mislead foreign intelligence services about the true location. The crash retrieval installation is designated Site 92, part of what Anfalov describes as the "NIITS-5" — the N's Scientific Research and Test Site Number Five. Craft were transported there by helicopter, including a Mil Mi-10K sky-crane helicopter used for lifting heavy loads over distances.
Taganay National Park, Ural Mountains
Since approximately the year 2000, the main Russian facility for crash retrieval, reverse engineering, and storage has been located underground beneath Taganay National Park in the Ural Mountains. The park itself is publicly accessible with visitor entrances; the facility entrances are located dozens of kilometers from the public access points.
The underground complex uses a network of tunnels — some up to 30 meters wide — originally part of a natural or ancient alien-built tunnel network under the Ural mountain ridges, expanded with human-built connecting passages. The concentration of scientific institutes in the Ural region — specializing in materials research, rocket science, and machine building — is cited as the operational logic for centralizing the program there. Almost every craft recovered on the territory of the Russian Federation or nearby countries since 2000 is described as having been transferred to this Taganay facility.
Aerospace reverse engineering — Sukhoi and related bureaus
Anfalov names the Sukhoi Design Bureau as one of the Soviet aerospace entities involved in back-engineering recovered craft, with a special secret department dedicated to anti-gravity research that he compares to the American Skunk Works — but smaller and more compartmentalized. Anfalov also identified Kapustin Yar as a site where reverse-engineered anti-gravity discs were flight-tested.
Alien involvement in Soviet/Russian programs
Anfalov describes the Taganay facility and Soviet crash retrieval operations more broadly as operating under direct alien supervision. He claims the Soviet Union had contact with several alien races — including the Anunnaki, transmitted initially through captured Nazi documents — and that non-human entities exercised control over military and FSB personnel at the facility. He also claims that tall white alien beings were personally observed entering Russian President Vladimir Putin's residence near Sochi on at least one occasion, and that a separate incident inside the Kremlin involved the same type of non-human visitors.
Ancient spacecraft beneath the former Soviet Union
Anfalov argues that several large ellipsoid or egg-shaped objects of apparent ancient origin — identified by him as Space Arks — are buried in the territories of the former Soviet Union. One is under the Black Sea between Crimea and the Caucasus; another beneath the "Potemkin crater," detected by electronic subsurface scanning as approximately 600 meters long and at great depth. He noted that the Potemkin crater object's ellipsoid form matched descriptions given by JP of objects encountered during covert U.S. missions, which he treated as independent corroboration.
Nazi Germany's recovered craft and Soviet reverse engineering
The Soviets overran several top-secret facilities that the Nazi SS had built under the Owl Mountains (Eulengebirge) of Lower Silesia — now part of Poland — where seven separate tunnel systems had been constructed for the development of "super weapons" under the overall project named Riese (Giant), including the Nazi Bell Project and flying saucer prototypes. The Soviets captured some of these German flying saucer prototypes and initiated an independent R&D program based on the captured technologies. Salla notes that the Soviets subsequently shared knowledge of captured Nazi saucers with Chinese scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, who had unique insight into what the US Air Force was doing with similar exotic technologies, resulting in a three-way exchange of intelligence on captured Nazi and possibly extraterrestrial craft.
Nazi flying programs used mercury-based amalgam fuel with radioactive isotopes; the Soviets attempted to replicate this design after recovering the Uście disc (see table above), including an interceptor variant conceived in the late Soviet period as a high-speed replacement for the MiG-25. German aerospace experts were relocated to Soviet facilities, including to locations in Samara (formerly Kuibyshev) and on Gorodsky Island deep inside Russia.
Geopolitical knowledge of the Russian UFO program
Independent analysts have assessed that the Russian government's knowledge of the UFO phenomenon is at least comparable to that of the United States. Richard Dolan noted that "Russians have every bit as much of a history of interacting with this phenomenon as the Americans, and they have every bit as much secrecy on it," but that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s caused some UFO data to leak — including the "KGB blue files" obtained by journalist George Knapp. Dolan further assessed that Vladimir Putin inherited comprehensive knowledge of the Soviet UFO program through his KGB mentor Yuri Andropov, who was "deeply into UFO" and "extremely knowledgeable about this" during his tenure as KGB chairman and later Soviet premier — and that Putin "has access to all of Andropov's papers."
Attorney Daniel Sheehan, when asked whether there was intelligence-sharing between the US and Russia on crash retrieval programs, stated that "the answer to that is negative" — attributing the lack of cooperation to the antagonism established by the neoconservative foreign policy from the George W. Bush administration onward, which "set up such antagonism with Russia and with China that there's very little cooperation that's going on in this area."