The Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range

This Intelligence Information Report, distributed in December 1973, is mostly about weapons. Its source was a former Soviet citizen, interviewed in Germany, who had worked at the Sary Shagan testing range in Kazakhstan, the USSR’s main site for air-defense and anti-ballistic-missile trials. Only one paragraph concerns an unidentified phenomenon. A fuller release of the same report is CIA-UAP-D001.

What the source described

Most of the report covers the range’s layout, security fencing, a regional headquarters and a warhead checkout unit. The source said his site checked warheads for System-75 (the SA-2 surface-to-air missile) and for System-300, or Aldan, which he identified as the ABM-1 Galosh anti-ballistic missile; he described the warheads as holding cassettes of small metal balls. He had heard rumors of laser weapon experiments using powerful antennas somewhere on the range.

His sighting was one evening in late summer 1973. Stepping outside during a televised Canada–USSR sports match, he saw a sharp, bright green circular mass in a cloudless sky to the west. Within seconds it widened, several green concentric rings formed around it, and within minutes the color faded. He heard no sound, had no opinion on what it was, and said it caused no rumors.

Ordinary possibilities

The report offers no explanation. It is worth bearing in mind only that the sighting took place on a missile test range, where launches were routine; the source himself offered no opinion.