The Kok-Tyube Patrol (1991)

At 200 metres a few red rays swept across the patrol car and it stopped dead. The militiamen had been approaching Kok-Tyube, the mountain above Alma-Ata where the city goes to relax, late in the afternoon. They noticed a kind of fire at the top. They watched the flames rise and fall, and then an array of red rays burst out of the centre. Other militiamen saw it too. The driver said he and his comrades drove up to the "flaming object" until the rays reached them. When the men moved towards it, the object dimmed its "searchlights" and disappeared. Back at the police station the patrolmen found that none of them could recall the way back from the mountain. In the report's words, all memory of the passage "had been completely obliterated."

What is on the record

The source is Soviet journalism. The Alma-Ata evening paper Vechernyaya Alma-Ata carried the story, and TASS correspondent Vasiliy Danshin put it out in English on 19 April 1991. The CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service transcribed the TASS item, and the archive holds two copies. One is the FBIS teletype. The other is the same text as relayed from FBIS London and resent by the Joint Staff, with a distribution list that ran to NORAD, US Space Command and NASA. It is a foreign press report the US government collected, not a CIA investigation.

The item says the radio traffic about the object was recorded on tape and that there were "impartial witnesses". Neither the tape nor those witnesses appear in the file. No officer is named and no date is given beyond the day TASS reported it. The original newspaper article was not found online.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. One news-agency item carries the case. The archive's two copies of it count as one source. The patrol is an identified body on duty, but no primary record and no named person sit in the archive. The tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What burned on Kok-Tyube is not resolved here.