The Metal Disc in the Pokhara Crater

The object came in from the north flashing on and off and blew apart with a sound like thunder. A CIA information report distributed on 11 April 1968 gives it a single table row. The date is 25 March 1968 and the local time has one smudged digit; later press accounts say 8.15 in the evening. The entry reads: "a blazing object, flashing intermittently, accompanied by big thunder sound disintegrated over Kaski region". Then comes the find: "A huge metallic disc-shaped object with a six-foot base and four feet in height was found in a crater at Baltichaur, five miles NE of Pokhara." Portions of a similar object were found at Talakot and Turepasal.

What is on the record

The archive holds that report, CIA-RDP81R00560R000100070007-8. It is the CIA's own field reporting, classified Confidential and barred from foreign release. It tabulates bright objects seen over Ladakh, north-east Nepal, Sikkim and western Bhutan in February and March 1968. The Kaski entry is one row. The subject line and source are blacked out. A 1974 index printout from the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division is filed with it and some press stories give the report that date.

Others have followed the fragment further. The National Security Archive has published State Department papers on "unidentified fragments that fell in Nepal and which were not claimed by any country". Nepal let an American team examine them. The team "could not determine the country of origin" there. In 2024 the Nepali Times traced the find to a farmer's field near Batulechaur on Pokhara's northern edge. Villagers there remember a metal sheet about two metres by one. The paper reports that the US Embassy told Washington in August 1968 the object could be Soviet and possibly from the rocket that carried Kosmos 208. No one knows where the sheet is now, it says.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. A primary government record carries it but names no witness. The villagers are named only in journalism, which does not raise the tier. The tier measures sourcing, never truth. What came down over Kaski is not resolved here.