State Department UAP Cable 002, Kazakhstan, January 31, 1994

This unclassified cable, sent by the American embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and dated 31 January 1994, passes on a sighting by an American airline crew. Tajik Air’s American chief pilot and two American colleagues, all long-time Pan Am pilots, came to the embassy on 29 January to report what they had seen two days earlier.

What the crew described

They were flying a Boeing 747SP at 41,000 feet over Kazakhstan when a light of enormous intensity came over the eastern horizon at great speed, far above them. For about forty minutes, they said, it flew circles and corkscrews and made 90-degree turns at high speed. Because it was dark they could not see a shape; the light had a “bow wave,” like a high-speed photo of a bullet whose trailing heat is much bigger than the bullet. It finally left on a fast horizontal course.

Later, as the sun rose, the airliner passed beneath contrails the object had left, tracing the same circles and corkscrews. The chief pilot put them at about 100,000 feet, too high, he said, for ordinary aircraft to form contrails. He took photos with a pocket camera and promised copies “if they come out.”

The ordinary explanation offered

Embassy staff suggested a meteor skipping off the atmosphere. The crew rejected this, saying they had seen thousands of meteors and this was nothing like one, and the chief pilot said he believed it was extraterrestrial and under intelligent control. The embassy’s comment is brief: it had no opinion and passed the report on “for what it may be worth.” Note that the official description’s crew details differ slightly from the cable’s.