The Sasovo Blast (1991)

The roar came first. Then an explosion shook Sasovo, a small town in the Ryazan region of central Russia, shortly after midnight on 12 April 1991. TASS put it at 01.30. High-rise blocks rocked as if in an earthquake. The shock wave tore off roofs in places and knocked out windows and even their frames in a good half of the town's buildings, Pravda reported. Nobody was seriously hurt, though schools and kindergartens closed for a time. In a field outside town lay a crater 28 metres across and three and a half to four metres deep, with a big bump of earth in its centre. "There are people who supposedly saw a moving fiery sphere," A. Rozhkov, head of the district soviet, told Pravda.

What is on the record

Both records are Soviet press reports that the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service relayed or translated. Neither is a CIA investigation. The first is a TASS English-language report of 12 April by correspondent Anatoliy Kakovkin, headed "Strange roar precedes mysterious blast in Sasovo". The second is a translation of Pravda of 15 April by N. Kireyev, headed "Saltpeter blown up from UFO?".

TASS has the crater 1.5 kilometres from town and 3.5 metres deep where Pravda has 1 kilometre and about 4 metres. TASS adds that the military reported no unidentified flying objects over the area. Emergency teams found no change in radiation or in the chemistry of the air.

The ordinary explanations come from the papers themselves. Rozhkov told TASS that the crater's shape almost ruled out a bomb or shell. Scraps of paper bags pointed to stored saltpetre going up. Military visitors blamed ammonium nitrate. Pravda noted that 30 tonnes of it had been brought to the field on 5 April while 10,000 tonnes from the same consignment sat quietly in local warehouses. Townspeople blamed everything from buried wartime munitions to a meteorite or UFOs. Later Russian reporting describes a second blast near Sasovo in June 1992. A correspondent to Science Frontiers wrote that by 1993 a tectonic origin was the one theory left standing.

Why it sits where it does

L1 · SINGLE CHANNEL. No witness is named in the records and both are press reports from one channel. The explosion itself is not in doubt. The tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What caused the blast, and whether anything was seen in the sky, is not resolved here.