State Department UAP Cable 003, Tbilisi, Georgia, October 30, 2001

Despite its title, this cable was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, not Tbilisi, on 30 October 2001, under the subject line “UFOs over Georgia: strange encounters of an MFA kind.” It has nothing to do with unexplained objects. It is a diplomatic report on a dispute between Russia and Georgia, and the UFO in it is a figure of speech.

What the cable reports

Georgia had accused Russian aircraft of violating its airspace and bombing parts of the Kodori Gorge, in the breakaway region of Abkhazia, on 28 and 29 October. When the U.S. ambassador raised it, Russia’s deputy foreign minister quoted the defense ministry as flatly denying any Russian involvement, and agreed with the ambassador that such incidents would hurt an upcoming presidential summit. The Russian foreign ministry’s Georgia desk chief went further: there had been credible reports of Abkhaz helicopters bombing areas “where the terrorists were,” he said, but reports of planes might as well have been about “UFOs,” since Moscow could not tell whether foreign aircraft were in the area.

The rest of the cable covers Russia’s slow withdrawal of equipment from the Gudauta base in Abkhazia and Georgian-Russian political contacts.

The embassy’s view

The authors were openly skeptical. They found the Russian denials hard to accept, said that blaming UFOs would be funny if the violations were not so serious, and attributed the denials to a habit of covering an awkward admission with a “bold lie.” The cable is in the release because of the word UFO, not because of any sighting.