The Tver River Sightings

Two separate episodes at Tver sit under this heading, and the archive is clearer if they are read apart. In the first, cameramen from local television filmed an object moving back and forth across the river on a foggy morning. In the second, an object is described flying past the Volga, hovering, banking several times, landing on the opposite bank and departing.

What is on the record

Two tellings on a single channel, three claimants including the named Alexander Pavlov and Alexei Vasilyev plus two schoolboys, and no documents. The grade is testimony.

The photographic strand is the more substantial. Around eleven photographs are described as taken by the schoolboys, and a Major Beloychik is recorded as investigating, with negatives and statements said to have been confirmed as authentic in Moscow. An assessment of negatives is a real test, and the fact that it was carried out by a Soviet officer during the last months of the USSR gives the episode an institutional context most cases lack. None of that paperwork is in our archive, so the confirmation exists inside the account.

The dating in the record is inconsistent. One telling places the events on 3 March 1991 and the other on 4 November 1991. The archive holds the first as the case date. That discrepancy is left visible rather than smoothed, because two dates eight months apart may indicate two events rather than one.

Why it sits where it does

L3 on multiple tellings and multiple claimants from one channel. What the cameras at Tver recorded is not resolved here.