The Chelyabinsk Pilot's Burns

When the pilot landed, the account says, the exposed skin of his face had gone numb and felt like cork. It then puffed out by about half an inch and was diagnosed as burns. In the air he had been flying acrobatic loops in a Czechoslovak trainer south-west of Chelyabinsk. On three of those loops he saw a long greyish cigar hanging motionless in the sky. Radar showed nothing.

The published record names him as Vladimir Kuzmin and the aircraft as a two-seat Aero L-29 Delfin. It dates the sighting to about three in the afternoon on 24 December 1989 and gives the watch as more than eight minutes. The NASA-affiliated scientist Richard F. Haines investigated with Soviet researchers, and the archive's account says he hypnotised the pilot in Russian to recover more detail.

What is on the record

The archive's single video lists two claimants: a retired Soviet fighter pilot and his wife, entered as corroborating. The archive's source does not name the pilot. The wife's entry reaches us through the same account and adds no separate sighting.

The archive's source places the encounter before Perestroika. The published record dates it to 24 December 1989, and this page follows the record. The two also differ on the injury. In the archive's telling the swelling lasted two to three weeks. The published record says the crust-like burn lasted more than eleven days.

The case reached print through Haines's write-ups in 1991 and a 1992 compilation by Timothy Good, which makes two published origins. No official finding was ever released and no explanation is on record. The archive holds no medical paperwork and no flight records.

Why it sits where it does

The two entries put the case at L3, the tier for independent claimants to one connected event. In substance it is one pilot's sighting and one pilot's injury, recorded by a credentialed investigator who spoke to him directly. The physical effect is what lifts it above an ordinary sighting, and it is also the part least documented here. What hung over Chelyabinsk that afternoon is not resolved here.