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ON THE BORDER OF UMMO: THE SO-CALLED UFO LANDING AT VORONEZH, RUSSIA, 1989:

A context of shere sensationalism

With the Glasnost, the new policy of transparency and opening inaugurated by Gorbachev which put an end to the Soviet Union in the form that it had during the cold war, many Russian newspapers realized that the subject of UFOs, just like any "paranormal" or unusual topic, was very popular and started to publish weird stories and reports of UFOs regularly, without paying any attention to the veracity of the story and without consulting with serious ufologists, since it was a matter of getting more readers and not to investigate the UFO phenomenon. There was thus a new surge of magazines and reviews briskly mixing UFOS, astrology, poltergeist, sex, disappeared ancient civilizations and largely sensationalized mysteries of all sorts.

Russian ufologist Boris Shurinov tells the revealing example of the discovery in July 1989, along an artery of Moscow, of a simple burned grass patch of eight meters, that a delirious ufologist, A. Kouzovkine, claimed to have been caused by the strong radiations emitted by some flying saucer that nobody actually saw, and which according to the firemen, was simply the remainders of a haystack that took fire.

A three eyed extraterrestrial robot walks in the park:

It was in this context that on October 1989, and in the middle of a flurry of journalistic hoaxes and ordinary hoaxes, that the sensational story of an extraterrestrial landing in downtown Voronezh - a city of 800.000 residents approximately 500 kilometers of Moscow - was revealed.

The first report of the Voronezh wave appeared in the Soviet newspaper Kommuna. This particular incident took place at a park in the city during the course of a soccer game. The witnesses were said to include many teenagers as well as over forty adults. They described seeing a pink/red light which turned into a dark sphere. The sphere circled an area of the park at an extremely low altitude (approximately thirty to forty feet above the ground) then flew away. After only a few moments it reappeared and again hovered over the park. This time a door opened in the bottom, a being could be seen looking out, surveying an astonished group of witness. The door closed and the craft descended and then landed. As it did so, it came into contact with a large poplar tree. The tree was bent over to the side and remained in that position.

Tass agency then publishes the following news item, which will be read in the western countries:

Which appeared in France as this news release:

The next days, many newspapers worldwide publish the story, for example, "Le Courrier de l'Ouest, France, on October 10, 1989:

Which gave, translated by the Associated Press on October 9, 1989:

Normally, any sensible ufologist would have raised a suspicious eyebrow by reading the stories of sandstone unknown on the earth requiring further studies and of research of "experts" turned scientists, by "the technique of biological magnetism", i.e. in reality: the divining rod. But the Tass Agency then reported other details:

At this time, the press worldwide grabs the story and generally ridicules it. Ufologist Boris Shurinov goes to the offices of the French TV in Moscow, views a videotape of a report on the case, gives his negative opinion: knowing the implicated ufologists for their unslung sensationalism, he smells the hoax.

In the Pravda newspaper, an article reports the cas and concludes with irony that it is an obvious hoax. In France, "Le Monde" echoes this more or less acurately:

But the echo will be a worldwide one. Any newspaper of any country publishes the case, such as for example the Saint-Louis Post-Dispatch, USA, October 11, 1989:

As of the New York Times, they translates the alleged "biolocalisation" of the traces of passages of the entities by "bilocation", whereas "biolocalisation" is simply the term that russian use for the art of the waterfinder and radiesthesy in general.

In Voronezh, sensationalist ufologist Ajaja, big fan of Jacques Vallée and his theories on mysterious "controlling intelligence" from a "parallel" or "interdimensional" world, declare that the event is real, that it is "the landing of the century". But for him, these were not extraterrestrial beings of course but: "something that comes from parallel worlds."

The world press benefits from all this, a good story to sell, and publishes without complex with the necessary mocking remarks on ET and the little green men, and generally omitting to make any research, or even to consult the Russian press which is not entirely devoted to sensationalism. Thus, "Literatournaya Gazéta" presented less glittering aspects of the case, gathered by their correspondant on the location, N. Efremov, who put his report at the disposal of the Western news services:

On October 28, Agence France Press published a new more informed dispatch: a commission directed by the vice-president of the University of Voronezh had carried out analyses and checks on the site of the landing, and refuted all the rumours: no radioactivity, no anomaly. The chief of the Laboratory of Geophysics of Voronezh specified that so-called "rock unknown on Earth requiring more analyses" was merely a piece of iron ore.

Russian ufologist Boris Shurinov would later note: "the case collapsed like a house of cards and the journalists who raveled on the spot found themselves vis-a-vis kids burning with the desire for being interviewed and very ready to declare themselves witnesses."

Ufologists of the French ufology group S.O.S OVNI had also contacted their Soviet correspondents, and thus learned that the alleged landing gear prints of the saucer existed before the date of the landing.

Among certain Russian ufologists, delirium reached new heights, however. "I think that this flying saucer was nothing other than the appearance of Christ", told Alexandre Mosolov, "Member of the special Commission of investigation of the incident of Voronezh." Why? Because only children, "innocent spirits", were witnesses.

A S. Boulantsev, of the TASS agency, fought for the preservation of the case: the traces were authentic, the object weighed eleven tons, the radioactivity was high.

All kinds of reporters of the Western medias furrowed the city. They heard to say that in addition to the four children, there had been hundreds of adult witnesses. They found none, except if you count the mother of one of the children who stated that at a certain time whereas she went to a family celebration, she saw a flickering of red, green and yellow lights above the roof of a house. Nobody cared to check if her description of ordinary plane lights related to an ordinary plane or an extraterrestrial spaceship, however.

Quite quickly, AK.E. Barrio publishes an article in the Spanish magazine Cambio-16 in 1989 to explain that all the case is without reality:

"Voronezh turned into a Mecca for foreign journalists accredited in the USSR. Local authorities organized trips for the representatives of the press. In spite of the fact that all the witnesses are children and that the only scientist, persuaded of the reality of the event, uses of very particular research methods for the demonstration, some Soviet people are convinced that for their first contact with humanity, the aliens had chosen the perestroïka society."

Ummites

It so happened that one of the boys, Roma Torshin, which had claimed to see the UFO of Voronezh and made a drawing of it, placed there a symbol which was going to give the goosepops to certain ufologists:

It did not matter that the other children by no means neither saw or drew the symbol, and that the drawings as the reports were rather contradictory, nor that the "experts" were obviously ranging from mild eccentrics to pure and simple falsifiers: for some, it became obvious that the symbol is the proof that all the case is true, since they judged impossible that young Russian children could know about the Ummo case and the famous Ummo symbol.

It also did not matter that the so-called Ummite symbol was, to any Russian citizen able to read, nothing more than one normal letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, transcribed "zh" and pronounces a little like the "J":

Jean-Jacques Vélasco

In theory, Jean-Jacques Vélasco, who was then the official "Mister UFO" in France within the SEPRA, a service then well forgotten of the CNES supposed to deal with UFO matters, carries out his investigations only in France, and when French ufologists were astonished that SEPRA seemed to have nothing to say regarding the UFO wave in Belgium, he would reply that Belgium is not part of his strictly national jurisdiction. However, perhaps intrigued by some AFP communiqué, or by the worldwide media repercussion on the case, or intrigued by the Ummo story, Vélasco reported in his book with Jean-Claude Bourret to have carried out a discrete investigation on the Voronezh landing.

It seems that he contacted by phone the ufologist who was presented as the "scientist" that investigated the case, Silanov, and there was an exchange of letters between the two men.

But what happened is that Silanov innundated Vélasco of "extraordinary scientific discoveries": a print of a humanoid in the mesozoïc deposits dated back to 140 to 150 million years, a "photograph in ultraviolet ray and infra-red of one of its descendants", and telepathic contacts with these beings...

Vélasco first wonders whether he is taken to a wild ride by some Soviet secret service, and finally drops his opinion:

"I'm afraid that all this does is pure invention."

But others are not there yet.

Renaud Marhic

Renaud Marhic, a French journalist author of novels and books and articles about cults, sects, and pseudo-science, who pushed the thesis that the Ummo affair was a secret operation of the Soviet KGB, writes that Ummo is closely related to the USSR, because "in 1989, a UFO with the Ummite sign landed in Voronezh, in the south of Moscow." He did not seem to find relevant that the case was a hoax, that dispatches of the news services had said so, and he did not seem to realize that the famous Ummite symbol of the alleged saucer did not have anything really convincing or of significance. He speaks about the "official" report of the Tass Agency, which actually had nothing "official" to it, and that only reproduced the remarks of local newspapers and did not communicate the least official opinion. He would talk of the "circular trace" where there were simply holes, and would relay the evocation of a "fragment of extraterrestrial rock discovered on the place" and of a "abnormal radioactivity."

He then wrote in 1993: "are we confronted to a hoax? Yes, probably, insofar as, no matter what occurred to Voronezh, it did not have the importance that one wanted to describe", that is to say a rather doubtful manner to present a hoax. He would prefer to seek further: "The authors? Children with wild imagination? Perhaps. But in this case, why did they add to their drawing of the UFO this symbol [the Ummo symbol]?"

And, boldly: "Who told then this detail that they could not know, logically?" While announcing that "Muscovite Boris Shurinov had, a long time before, published an article where one could see the Ummite symbol." A weakened story when compared to what Shurinov would indicate. And in Mahric's book, the Voronezh landing will appear as confirming his thesis of the KGB as origin of the Ummo fraud: "I am tempted to see in this a new faking of the Soviet intelligence services."

Jacques Vallée

"The giants in the park of Voronezh left a clear message: the ufological mystery was more extreme and puzzling as ever".

- Jacques Vallée.

Three joined factors attracted the French, US resident ufologist Jacques Vallée towards this doubtful story: first of all, he had often maintained the position that they are "military personal" or mysterious "secret agencies" which are behind the UFO phenomenon. He naturally then been fascinated by the Ummo affair, seeing there the sophisticated deeds of such a mysterious human agency. In his book "The Invisible College", he had written fifteen pages on the Ummo case. He repeated faithfully what was known about it, and concludes as if all that were proven, by one of its favorite theses initially: "the phenomenon systematically lies to exceed logic", seeing a "psychic bond" between Ummo, Uri Geller, the UFOs and all the field of the paranormal. Then he adds a different conclusion: the Ummo business seems to show "that there must be a mysterious group" on Earth of people who know about the nature of UFOs and uses it for its own goals."

Also, he knew that he would find in Russia sympathetic ears to his paranormal and other "psychic aspects" or "interdimensional" worlds thesis. Where a judicious ufologist would have smiled at "the scientific apparatus" of the famous Russian "experts" supposedly proving a "biomagnetic activity" on the alleged spot of the landing of Voronezh through what was nothing else than the good old divination rod, Jacques Vallée rather heard resound a peasant paranormal tinkling. And these aliens "too absurd to be extraterrestrial" thus "lures of aliens" product of some "higher intelligence" was probably also irresistible for him.

In January 1990, he arrives to Moscow in company of Martine Castello, a scientific journalist of the French newspaper "Le Figaro" who prepared a book on the Ummo case, and was amazed to see the Unno symbol on a drawing of a saucer by a child of Voronezh at the television news. They thus intended to meet the Soviet ufologists, in particular those of Voronezh hoax and those having made the promotion of another hoax in Perm.

Castello and Vallée then meet the promoters of the case, V. Ajaja, A. Malikhine, A. Mosolov, in the presence of Boris Shurinov who is much more skeptic and would later tell about the meeting in detail in his book:

Vallée tries to know if the story in Voronezh is true and if there was really a "Ummite symbol" on this UFO, thinking that if it is the case, Ummo becomes a serious business. All tell him that the symbol is known to Russian ufologists, but not to the child who drew it. Vallée asks whether it is true that the aliens made one of the children disappear, and hears that it was "in the newspapers" but that it was perhaps invented.

Shurinov explains that the Ummite symbol was drawn by a boy who was not with the others at the time of the alleged landing, that he drew this symbol because one of the ufologists of Voronezh had shown him the alleged Ummite saucer photograph of San Juan de Valderas to make the story more solid by attaching it to a European case, without knowing that the European case was dismounted as a fraud. Castello would note in her book that a certain Boris Shurinov convinced them that the child drew the Ummite symbol because it was in his book, and that the symbol is known in the area since 1984, the Ummo story being circulated for a long time in the country.

One of the fakes photographs of a saucer "from Ummo" in San Juan de Valdeiras.

Vallée raises questions: "some reports say that the aliens had three eyes." "Actually, the majority only spoke about two eyes, with something between them, in the face, and some thought that it is a third eye," the Russians tell him.

Shurinov also notes that Vallée was not convinced by the video of the ufologists of Voronezh handling their waterfinder's "measuring device".

Not only Shurinov but other people too reported details of the meeting. "And the radar of the area?" asked Vallée. They did not detect anything. Vallée explains: "Maybe these objects are invisible for the radar under certain conditions."

The following evening, Vallée has a supper with Ajaja and others of these Russian ufologists who make the despair of Boris Shurinov. Vallée is called on the phone, someone tells him of a UFO that flew over the nuclear thermal power station and burned the road with a ray. Vallée tells: "I keep in mind the assumption that somebody can have flown oval balloons on Russia with the Ummo symbol on it, painted in obviousness on a side. If the Ummo cult in Spain is the result of a psychological operation, anybody can play the game. But this assumption is not enough to explain all testimonys of Voronezh. We got from these meetings an appreciation of the complexity of the entire problem."

Vallée and Castello still would meet members of the Soviet Academy of Science, the cosmonaut Valentine Zudov, director of the space flights teams, and would discuss together various theories on UFOs.

Martine Castello later wrote in her book with Philippe Chambon and Isabelle Blanc on Ummo some rather astonishing things: it seems to her that "USSR is today the seat of ufologic phenomena of great importance", that according to the Russian, "not a day occurs" without an appearance of alien UFOs, landings and abductions, and that ufology has become in USSR an "official science" practiced by academicians "with the blessing of the authorities." But she described the Moscow meeting with the investigators of Voronezh as something less glittering: investigators in blue jeans and parkas with the tired face due to the trip, and especially, the difficulty of the translation: they speak all at the same time and she does not understand much. She notices that for Jacques Vallée, the case is closed: the child drew the Ummo symbol because he read Shurinov's article who introduced it or because one of the investigator pressured the kid to draw it to give more credit to the case.

As for Jacques Vallée, he would come out with a new book, "UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union" and would boldly describe the case of Voronezh like that of a dozen adults in addition to the children, of a round spacecraft, and giants with three eyes, and a robot who accompanies them, he would write on "engineers" who examined landing traces of the craft, which would have weighed 11 tons. He would tell that Ajaja confirmed the "abductions of the witnesses of Voronezh". He would even publish a list of so-called witnesses coming from a doubtful gazette.

The worst is the reasons which push Vallée to present the case as true when it is clearly hoaxed. He reports that a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, Vladimir Migulin, had allotted the landing traces to a rocket launched in Stalingrad. Since this explanation is rather ridiculous, Vallée benefits from it to pretend to give weight to the case: "Migulin's skeptical attitude is not very different from what you would get from our own National Academy of Science [in the US]."

He then speaks of "the weight of the craft", an allegation without base, since relating to an alleged depth of the holes of the feet of the machine whereas the holes were there before the claimed landing. The weight of the machine, according to him, "is in the ranges of estimates reached by French scientists studying physical markings left by UFO landings in France." You do not dream: it is because in the investigation into the encounter of Marius Dewilde in Quarouble, France, in 1954 had shown marks in railroad woodpieces where the machine was said to have landed, marks which had made it possible to (real this time) engineers of the SNCF, the French railay company (and not "French scientists") to estimate as of 30 tons (and not 11 tons) the weight exerted to leave these marks, that Jacques Vallée finds that the saucer of Voronezh must be "true"! Vallée simply listened to Yuri Lozotsev, "expert in materials" of the group of the promoters of Voronezh, who told him: "We find 11,5 tons. This is coherent with other figures which you reported in one of your books, concerning the French Air Force measurements in Quarouble." Vallée naturally was very astonished, and probably flattered, to have readers in Russia, 11,5 or 30 tons do not matter, and he answered him that the American ufologists "did not know these figures."

As for the beings, giants with three eyes or robots, Vallée does see that they hardly resemble those described in the most reliable reports or even with those described in general, but they virtually authenticates them by announcing that there was a "very similar case in Argentina in 1978."

He finds all these reports coming all of a sudden from USSR "very significant", with the reason that "With the chaos spreading over the Soviet Union I felt there was genuine information coming out from the witnesses."

Whereas, particularly in France, Vallée is surrounded of an unshakeable prestige, particularly among promoters of "ultraterrestrial" or "paranormal" theories on the UFOs, who regard him as a completely serious investigator, more judicious ufologists did not fail to be amazed by the "Vallée method" still illustrated in this new book. For example, Michael Swords, a professor of the Western Michigan University and also ufologist and director of the Journal of UFO Studies, noted: "As for Vallée's book, it sounds like "What I Did on My Last Vacation." Vallée may have met a lot of interesting people and heard a lot of interesting tales, but he doesn't document things properly, and if he has, he never seems to share it with anybody."

When the ultraskeptics ones of CSICOP laughed their guts out at his book and in particular of its endorsement of the case of Voronezh, noting that "the high size of the aliens of Voronezh is not in conformity with the standards established by Center for UFO Studies", the ufology group founded by J. Allen Hynek, and that the case is thus "to be logically rejected by the ufologists," Vallée would without fear of ridicule fight back that "this position illustrates the sad state of American ufology"!

He would speak again of his visit in the USSR to a Brazilian newspaper in 2006. Owing to the fact that I am not blinded by admiration for Jacques Vallée, I am often told by his supporters in France that I have a closed mind and that the "open mindedness" of Jacques Vallée makes ufology progress; therefore it is perhaps useful to listen to what he had concluded from all this:

"Yes, but I did not hear a case of true wounds [caused by UFOS] in Russia although I heard an account concerning rays which dissolved asphalt. I spent one week to Soviet Union with a journalist Frenchwoman. Think that the basic approach for me, it is that to understand that the phenomenon UFO is not a system. If it were a system we could, probably, understand it. We are very good to analyze systems when these systems are social, or "material" systems or physical systems. I think that we cannot explain some systems yet because we need to inquire into the phenomenon, not as into a system, but as being a metasystem. In other words, it is a system generating of systems. To offer a simple analogy, suppose that we want to study a civilization about which we practically do not know anything. Then, we see, one Saturday evening, that a crowd moves towards the line. We ask "why do they go there?" And they answer: "Oh, it was sensational we saw Bambi." We regard the experiment as very coherent, since, at the base, all say the same thing. We cross the street and ask the same question to another crowd, which moves towards another building, and these people answer: "we saw Rambo." A quite as coherent information, but different from the other one. The next step is to go to the buildings to check by ourselves. All that we see is a white screen and a series of chairs facing the screen. The obvious theory is psychological, these people like to come there and their consciences create myths starting from their own imaginations. The ones like Bambi and the others, Rambo. We suppose that there is no physical reality in the whole. We can be dubitative of this assumption, but it is a theory to be developed. People do the same thing about UFOs. They say: it is a mythology, that came from the unconscious according to times. Sometimes that resembles to the Virgin Mary, other times they are like the fairies, and at other times, they like to resemble spaceships."

And of course, by mistaking obvious hoaxes and the likes for a "metasystem", some people manage to agitate a lot of hot air...

REFERENCES:

• Flying Saucer Review 34, 4.
• MUFON UFO Journal 259 and 260.
• "UFOs: The Secret History", book by Michael Hesemann, Marlowe and Company publishers, pp. 249-255, 1998.
• "The UFO Encyclopedia, Volume 1: UFOs in the 1980s", book by Jerome Clark, Apogee Books publisher, page 214, 1990.
• "OVNI en Russie: les deux faces de l'ufologie Russe", book by Boris Shurinov, Guy Trédaniel publisher, pp 191-210, 1995.
• "Le Collège Invisible", livre par Jacques Vallée, Albin Michel publisher, 1975.
• "UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat", book by Jacques Vallée, Ballantine publisher, 1992.
• "La Conspiration des étoiles - les Ummos, terrestres ou extraterrestres?", book by Martine Castello, Philippe Chambon and Isabelle Blanc, Robert Laffont publisher, pp 155-162, 1991.
• "L'affaire Ummo, les extraterrestres qui venaient du froid", book by Renaud Marhic, 1993.
• "OVNIS - la science avance", book by Jean-Claude Bourret with Jean Jacques Vélasco, Robert Laffont publisher, 1993.

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