The Craters near the Kursk Nuclear Plant

Nobody heard the blast that should have made them. Two craters seven to eight metres across were found in the side of a ravine near the Kursk nuclear power station, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on 28 May 1994. Specialists said hollows like these could only come from a 500-kilogram bomb. Yet no explosion had been heard anywhere in the district. There was no spoil thrown out of the craters and no metal fragments or traces of fire. Radiation stayed within natural background levels. Soil and water samples from one crater showed nothing out of the ordinary, and no seismic tremor was recorded in Kursk Oblast.

What is on the record

The archive holds a translation by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service of Nikolay Yefimovich's report "Atomic Anomaly Near Kursk", filed under the heading "Meteorites May Have Caused 'Mysterious Craters' Near Kursk". It is a Russian newspaper report that FBIS translated, not a CIA investigation.

The report gives two working ideas from the staff of the Civil Defence and Emergency Situations service and the specialists with them. The first and main one was that a large meteorite had fallen. Several days earlier, it says, many people had seen "a fiery body in the heavens" and "pillars of fire in the vicinity of the mysterious craters". The second idea was that "this may quite well have been a UFO". The translation ends there. It names no witness, gives no date for the fiery body and does not place the ravine more closely than near the power station. No later report of what the investigation found has come to light, in English or Russian.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. One translated newspaper report carries it and names no witness. No other source sits beside it in the archive. The tier measures sourcing, never truth. What opened the ground near the Kursk plant is not resolved here.