The St Petersburg Lights

The lights appeared over St Petersburg in the early evening of 19 February 1997, at roughly seven o'clock, and were still being watched twenty minutes later. They were orange-red. They changed and moved. Reports came in from more than one part of the city, and at least three people had cameras running by the time it ended.

What is on the record

The archive resolves four claimants from a single telling on a single channel. The strongest element in it is where some of the observation came from. Air traffic controllers at Pulkovo airport are described as watching the lights and sketching them, and a crew on an aircraft on the runway is described as confirming the sighting. Controllers and aircrew are trained observers of the sky and their working environment gives them reference points that a person at a window does not have, which is why their presence in an account carries more weight than an equivalent number of casual witnesses.

That said, the weight is in the description, not in any document. The archive holds no sketch, no controller's log, no aviation report and no footage. Everything above reaches the file as a claim made in one telling. The amateur videos are referred to rather than held, and none of them has been authenticated by anyone.

The named claimants are Pavel Surchenko and Yuri Arzametsov, with the Arzametsov family and the Pulkovo controllers entered as groups rather than individuals, so the count is people and clusters of people mixed together.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3, several claimants describing one connected event over a short window on one evening. It stays there because nothing beneath the testimony is in the file. No official paperwork, no authenticated video and one channel carrying all of it. What was over St Petersburg that evening is not resolved here.