UFOs ‘practically began WW3’ by triggering soviet missiles as world was ‘minutes from wipe out’
The bizarre incident in 1982 almost set off the Soviet Unions’s nuclear weapons which were trained on New York City, which would have triggered almost certain nuclear Armageddon
UFOs are said to have triggered the USSR’s nuclear missiles(Image: Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF)
UFOs almost sparked World War 3 by triggering the Soviet Union’s arsenal of nuclear missiles, newly uncovered documents claim. A Red Army propaganda chief said intercontinental ballistic missiles somehow started their launching procedure without authorisation.
The missiles, which were trained on New York City, would have sparked a nuclear Armageddon had they gone off. Soviet files show the chilling incident happened just outside Usovo in Ukraine, at the same time swarms of UFOs were spotted by Red Army soldiers.
Witnesses told Soviet Ministry of Defense investigators the crafts performed unbelievable aerial feats, changed shapes and color, vanished and reappeared, flew at high speeds, and stopped in mid-air, triggering the activation of the missile launch mechanism.
With just minutes to spare before the missiles launched toward the US, they deactivated when the UFOs flew off, Radar reports.
Details of the incident, which happened in 1982 at the height of Cold War tensions between the communist empire and the US, have been uncovered in a dossier smuggled out of the US by tv reporter George Knapp more than 30 years ago.
The legendary journo, 73, snuck swathes of documents out of Russia in 1993 in a suitcase filled with caviar under the nose of the KGB after the fall of the USSR in 1991. He quietly released them in January, revealing the extent the USSR probed the phenomenon.
The communist government officially deemed UFOs a concoction of war-mongering “American imperialists” in 1953 as tensions between the super powers intensified.
But the documents, given to Knapp from a Russian physicist and national security advisor named Dr Nikolai Kapranov, revealed the USSR commissioned several studies of UFOs beginning with the “Network-AN” program in 1979.
And it carried on with “Galaxy-MD” from 1981-1985, “Pluton 7” in 1989 and 1990, and the continuing “Thread 3” program.
The files, which also describe other amazing accounts of UFO activity in the USSR, include at least three incidents in which Russian fighter pilots were blown out of the sky by unknown craft.
The reports finally became public three months after Knapp testified before Congress about his UFO investigations.
The Usovo incident echoes a UFO swarm on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in the US in 1967, where the appearance of a saucer-shaped craft emitting a red glow coincided with the inexplicable failure of nearly a dozen nuclear-armed Minuteman ICBMs.
Robert Salas, the base’s deputy missile combat crew commander on that night, testified on Capitol Hill about the incident in 2023.
For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletter by clicking here.
