UFO hype reached a fever pitch in 2025, as President Donald Trump’s order to declassify and release military and intelligence documents related to UFOs began to flood the internet. One document in particular received some extraordinary attention, relaying the story of a Soviet Red Army infantry unit that was attacked not only by a UFO, but by its alien crew.
A story reprinted in the Ukrainian newspaper Ternopil Vechirny (meaning “Ternopil Evening”) alleged that the American intelligence community received a 250-page file from the KGB’s archive after the fall of the Soviet Union. That file was said to contain documentary evidence (including photos) of an attack on a Soviet infantry unit in Siberia.
Related: 6 urban legends about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
The KGB documents supposedly report that the unit was conducting a regular training exercise, when a “quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above” them. For reasons that no one really knows, one of the soldiers suddenly fired a surface-to-air missile at the craft. The UFO crash landed “not far away” and “five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes” emerged from the downed vessel.
The file says that two surviving Red Army soldiers reported that the aliens “merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.” The shape began to buzz and hiss, then turned a brilliant white, growing bigger and bigger before it exploded in a bright white light. Instantly, 23 soldiers had been turned into “stone poles.” The two soldiers had been standing behind trees, which they believed helped them survive.
The KGB report said the UFO wreckage and the 23 stone poles were transferred to a scientific research institution near Moscow, where they discovered the molecular makeup of the petrified soldiers was similiar to limestone.
“Specialists assume that a source of energy that is still unknown to earthlings instantly changed the structure of the soldiers’ living organisms,” the report says, in what has to be the most obvious conclusion ever drawn by humans anywhere in the world.
Although the CIA complied with the presidential order to release the UFO report, the report itself was cleared for release in 2000, and the CIA has never commented on it. The original story was published in 1993, citing a trove of KGB archival files that made its way to the West after the USSR’s dissolution in 1991.
It’s true that in 1992, KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom with a trove of KGB records and handwritten notes that filled in intelligence gaps through 1985. It included a list of KGB assassins hired to off Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, details of bugging operations agains Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and disinformation campaign surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, among others.
The story of a UFO that turned Soviet troops to stone was likely not in the archive. The CIA report is a reprint of a news story published in Kyiv, and intelligence officers sending news stories back to headquarters is a pretty common practice. It’s part of open-source intelligence collection, using information to create a comprehensive, all-source intel picture. Analyzing local news provides agencies with insight and context that may otherwise unavailable.
There might actually be 23 petrified former Red Army soldiers somewhere in a Russian warehouse or laboratory, a source of energy that is still unknown to earthlings that can change the structure of living organisms, or both. Or neither.
Probably neither.
