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On October 30th, 1938, a CBS Radio reporter named Carl Phillips was interviewing Professor Richard Pearson, an astronomer from Princeton, New Jersey, Dr Pearson was discussing the strange explosion of gas in the Martian surface when he was interrupted by breaking news.

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There had been a meteor strike in Grovers Mill just a few miles away.

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Phillips and Pierson took their broadcast on the road reporting live as they approached the impact site. Lying. There was an object unlike anything they'd ever seen. It was a metal cylinder about 30 yards in diameter with a yellowish white hue.

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Townspeople pressed against the police barricade, trying to get a better look at the object when suddenly a hissing sound came from inside the cylinder as it opened.

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Phillips gave a play by play to his listeners as a creature emerged from the craft. Two policemen approached waving a white flag when a blast of fire erupted, burning them alive. Phillips ran for his life as the creature laid waste to the surrounding field. According to reports, radio listeners all over New Jersey went berserk. People flooded phone lines with panicked calls. Some were said to have been treated for shock at nearby hospitals. They yelled at all who would listen.

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Earth was under attack.

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This broadcast wasn't real, it was a dramatic re-enactment of H.G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds, directed by Orson Welles.

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But the widespread reporting on the public's reaction to the show was real. Newspapers across the country published accounts of the mass hysteria the radio play had supposedly caused.

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On the other side of the world. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin read the news with a smile in his malevolent mind, an idea took hold. If Americans were so terrified of aliens, perhaps he could use that against them. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify original from past every Monday and Wednesday, we dig into the complicated stories behind the world's most controversial events and search for the truth. I'm Carter Roy. And I'm Molly Brandenberg.

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And neither of us are conspiracy theorists, but we are open minded, skeptical and curious. Don't get us wrong. Sometimes the official version is the truth, but sometimes it's not.

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You can find episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from Park asked for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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This is our second episode on UFOs behind the Iron Curtain. Last time we traced the history of extraterrestrial research in the former Soviet Union, we also examine some of the most notable phenomena, like the Tunguska event in the Dalmiya Gorske sphere.

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In this episode, we'll explore the most interesting conspiracy theories surrounding the USSR and UFOs. It's possible that the Roswell, New Mexico crash was actually a Soviet hoax meant to cause panic in America, or perhaps UFO sightings in the USSR were actually top secret aeronautical experiments. And maybe the Soviet military actually did capture and reverse engineer alien technologies after all.

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We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Faneuil's sportsbook, don't just watch college basketball, get in the action and shoot your shot with the fan to a sports book app. There's more ways to play the bracket all tournament long. New users get your first bat risk free, up to 1000 dollars. Sign up with code upsets on the Fanjul Sportsbook app and make your first deposit today. Twenty one plus and presence in Virginia.

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[00:05:42]

It helps keep an eye on their well-being when you can't be their terms and conditions apply. Learn more about Symfony at CVS Dotcom Symphony or find it at your nearest CVS health hub. Now back to our story, the Cold War was an error riddled with paranoia America and the Soviet Union were racing to create the biggest, most horrifying nuclear weapons imaginable.

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People woke each morning wondering if the two superpowers would finally destroy each other and take mankind down with them.

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But nukes weren't the only technology spurred on by the Cold War. It also opened the floodgates for computing, jet propulsion and rocketry. Yet one of the most powerful weapons in the Soviet arsenal wasn't a device at all. It was the power of fear.

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Joseph Stalin knew all about fear. He'd built a nation where political opposition and dissent were punishable by death.

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Stalin also believed that fear could destabilize his American enemies. So in 1947, he may have borrowed a page from director Orson Welles playbook. Which brings us to conspiracy theory number one, that the Roswell UFO crash was a Soviet attempt to create utter chaos.

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On June 14th, 1947, a rancher named Mac Brazel was driving on his property just north of Roswell, New Mexico. Looking out over his flat terrain, a glint of metal caught his eye.

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Brazel pulled over to investigate, strewn across his field, where rubber strips, tin foil and a tough kind of paper he didn't recognize.

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He showed the debris to the local sheriff. But as soon as the commander of a nearby army base caught wind of the event, he sent intelligence officers to inspect the wreckage. Afterwards, the army issued a statement claiming they'd recovered a flying disc.

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On July 8th, the Roswell Daily Record published a headline reading RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on ranch in Roswell Region.

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But the next day, the army recanted their story. This time, they claimed that the debris was from a weather balloon.

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The issue was considered settled for nearly 30 years until 1978, when the National Enquirer alleged that the balloon story was a cover up, one that concealed an alien spacecraft.

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From there, the Roswell legend took off. People came forward with stories saying they, too, had seen the flying saucer.

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In addition, UFOlogists uncovered incriminating film from a follow up autopsy allegedly performed by the U.S. Army. The subjects were humanoid creatures that were believed to be recovered from a second crash site near Roswell.

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Only a few days after the first, the corpses were about four feet tall, with oversized heads and large eyes. Many who saw the video assumed they were from outer space.

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However, in 2011, journalist Annie Jacobsen presented a different theory. The bodies weren't aliens at all. They were actually human test subjects.

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During World War Two, a Nazi scientist named Dr. Josef Mengele performed gruesome experiments on Jewish and Roma people. His goal was to create what he called a superior race of beings.

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During Jacobsen's digging, she came to believe that children mutilated by Dr. Mengele looked eerily similar to the corpses allegedly discovered near Roswell.

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Jacobsen spoke with an engineer who claimed to be part of the Roswell research team. According to this anonymous source, Joseph Stalin asked Mengele to design a crew of small, misshapen aviators that would fool Westerner's into thinking they were alien.

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As for their mysterious craft, a top secret Army intelligence report said it was a round object with no tail and no wings. It had a dome on top similar to the flying saucer shape most people associate with UFOs today. But inside the craft were letters from the Russian alphabet because of this detail.

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Engineers assume the craft was man made, which made the plane's capabilities pretty remarkable. It was even said to be capable of hovering in place, something that no U.S. aircraft could do at the time.

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According to Jacobson's source, Army intelligence believed it was the work of two former Nazi engineers, brothers Walter and Rimer Horton. During World War Two, the duo was commissioned to design a long range jet powered bomber that had to be capable of flying six hundred and twenty miles per hour. The result was a talus plane called the Horten to twenty nine.

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But when the U.S. Army tracked the brothers down, they discovered that the schematics for the Hawtin twenty nine had likely fallen into Soviet hands back in 1946, a full year before Roswell.

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Although the blueprints weren't an exact match to the craft found at Roswell, the Horten to twenty nine shared many of its characteristics. It was tailless with a dome on top where the pilot sat.

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If Roswell was a Russian hoax, it was an elaborate one. The plane was not built for flying long distances, so Soviet agents would have had to smuggle the craft into North America before even putting it in the air. Then they had to refuel. It placed Mengel as victims inside and remotely piloted the ship over an air base. That seems like an awful lot of trouble just to cause a bit of panic.

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Maybe the Soviets had a long con, we know that the KGB and its predecessors engaged in a number of plots that spanned decades, things like disinformation, propaganda, espionage and assassinations. Their purpose was to slowly influence the behaviors of foreign governments all over the world.

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In some cases, these tools were intended to sway an election or convince enemy spies to defect. But other times the goal was much broader. We know now that the USSR wanted to destabilize America by turning its allies against the nation.

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For example, in the 1980s, the KGB told Soviet newspapers to print allegations that the U.S. government created the HIV virus in a lab using multiple sources and repeated messaging. They convinced various countries that American soldiers were deliberately spreading it.

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Sometimes these campaigns simply wanted to sow mistrust and confusion. The KGB also wanted American citizens to doubt their own government and media. They believed a country wary of its leaders would be much easier to influence in their favor.

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So it didn't matter if people believe the Roswell crash was alien or not. It was effective. Either way, if they did believe that Americans would panic over whether their government could keep them safe from a hostile invasion, and if they didn't, well, that could have been worse.

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If the public thought the plane was Russian, it would be seen as an act of war. It would send a message that the Soviets could reach America's most secret military bases with dangerous new technologies.

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The smartest thing the US government could do was cover it up. And it appears that's exactly what they did.

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At least that's what some people believe. Personally, I think there's a lot about this story that doesn't add up, especially since the wreckage was fairly easy to identify. A 1994 report by two Air Force intelligence officers cited the debris had come from a top secret research project called MOGEL.

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These mobile devices were high altitude balloons meant to detect a Soviet atomic tests. They were notoriously hard to control and had been mistaken for UFOs in the past. The wreckage Mac Brazel found on his ranch happened to be consistent, where they destroyed Mogel Balloon.

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And as for the passengers, the link between Stalin and Mengele is tenuous at best. After the war, Mengele fled to South America. There's no evidence that he was ever in contact with the USSR. In fact, there's no evidence that those cadavers existed at all. None of the initial Roswell accounts mentioned bodies. That claim actually arose after the National Enquirer article in the late 70s. As for the autopsy video, it was later proven to be a fake.

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It does seem a little too good to be true. If the Soviets wanted to make a statement. You'd think they'd crashed the UFO somewhere more obvious.

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I agree Roswell was located near top secret military testing grounds, it makes more sense that the debris came from an army project. So on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the most believable, I give this conspiracy theory a three.

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I give it a five. Yes, most of the evidence is circumstantial, but there are a lot of similarities between the Roswell craft and alleged Soviet technologies. And I wouldn't put anything past Joseph Stalin or the KGB, especially when it comes to cover ups.

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Even if they didn't play a hand in the Roswell crash, it's possible they were behind other UFO sightings, especially ones on their own soil. Coming up, top secret Soviet projects may have been confused for UFOs.

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No purchase necessary for one million dollar promotion. First online real money wager only for one thousand dollars. Free bet refund issue. Does non withdrawal set credit that expires in fourteen days terms apply sportsbook fan dual dotcom four terms and restrictions. Gambling problem call one 800 gambler. And now back to the story. The nineteen forty seven Roswell incident spawned dozens of conspiracy theories, some claimed it was a Soviet ordered hoax. Others believe it was a genuine extraterrestrial encounter.

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However, a 1994 report by the U.S. Air Force said that the wreckage was actually a classified experimental balloon.

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Which leads us to our second conspiracy theory may be secret.

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Military projects involving weapons, aircraft and rockets have been confused for UFOs before and not just in the U.S., but in the Soviet Union as well, although the USSR lacked the same resources and expertise as America.

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They repeatedly distinguished themselves with feats of technological innovation. In World War Two, some Soviet planes surpassed those of Nazi Germany. For example, the Yak nine fighter plane was faster and easier to maneuver than most of its German counterparts.

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After the war, the Soviet Air Force experimented with aircraft that rivaled American fighter jets. In 1956, they tested a jet powered airplane called the Yak 36. It was capable of launching vertically and hovering above the ground.

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At the time, the public didn't know hovering was even possible for fixed wing aircraft. Without rotors like a helicopter, conventional planes would simply fall out of the sky if they stopped moving. Even experienced pilots may have mistaken a yak 36 for UFO rocket prototypes may have also been confused for alien spacecraft.

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Under the leadership of engineer Sergei Korolyov, the Soviets had been testing rudimentary rocket launches since 1933.

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Rove was considered the father of the Soviet space program after World War Two, most Nazi rocket engineers were recruited by the United States, leaving the USSR at a disadvantage. But even without these experts, Khalikov and his team succeeded in launching Sputnik, the first satellite in 1957. Four years later, he beat America by putting Yuri Gagarin into orbit.

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In those days, most people had never seen a rocket launch in person. And when Sputnik and Gagarin's flights were highly publicized, other launches weren't someone ignorant of what a rocket looked like and unprepared to see. One could have easily believed it was from another planet.

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James Oberg, a journalist, space engineer and self-appointed UFO debunker, investigated this theory. He compared the dates of mass UFO sightings alongside Soviet rocket launches, specifically in 1967. This year saw an unprecedented wave of UFO reports in the southwestern USSR.

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Aubut discovered that each mass sighting did correspond with the launch of what the Pentagon called a fractional orbital bombardment system, or FOBs. These were nuclear missiles that, when put into orbit, were invisible to American radar.

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If the Kremlin wanted, they could drop one on Washington without warning.

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And while America had considered creating their own version, it's no surprise that the Soviets wanted to keep theirs a secret. In fact, the Soviets put over a dozen of these objects into space, which meant some of them could have crashed in a spectacular fashion, leading the public to believe they saw a UFO.

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Last episode, we discussed the glowing jellyfish and bright lights seen above the city of Petrozavodsk. In September 1977, the Soviet Academy of Sciences picked Dr. Vladimir V. Missoulian to be their spokesperson on the matter, but his role did little to debunk the incident. He claimed the government had no explanation for the lights over Petrozavodsk.

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However, in January 1979, Missoulian said the event was caused by geomagnetic changes in the upper atmosphere.

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Then, according to Ufologist, Philip Mantlo and Paul Stonehill, on April 19th, 1980, Mikoyan changed his tune again. Now, he said, it was caused by an atmospheric experiment. He seemed to be suggesting, like the Americans did after Roswell, that some kind of weather balloon was to blame.

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But in 1985, Missoulian changed his story a fourth time conflating his earlier sentiments. He said that a solar flare created an event in the atmosphere while the Academy of Sciences was testing new equipment on Earth's magnetic field. The flare collided with an unrelated rocket explosion, creating this animalistic event if the whole excuse sounds absurd. That's because it is.

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Journalist James Oberg had a simpler theory. He believed people saw a top secret spy satellite known as Cosmos 955.

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According to NASA's archive, Cosmos carried surveillance equipment designed to eavesdrop on communication waves, Oberg used data from Finnish astronomers and traced the satellite launch to the Playsets Space Center, located in northwestern Russia.

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Since the existence of playsets was classified, it's understandable why the Soviets may have covered up this event.

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But that doesn't explain why their official story kept changing. If Russians knew the phenomenon was caused by a secret spy satellite. You'd think they'd have a really good cover story ready to go with it. All this waffling back and forth almost makes me think they wanted to stir up conspiracy theories.

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There could be a simple explanation for this. It's possible that McGilligan, the government spokesman, didn't actually know about the satellite launch. One thing we touched on last episode was that various Soviet agencies didn't get along, let alone communicate well.

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The Cosmo's nine fifty five launch was a military operation, but the official explanation for the Petrozavodsk event came from Dr. Maglan and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which was secretly controlled by the KGB. And the military hated the KGB.

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The organizations had a rivalry that spanned decades. They mistrusted each other and routinely refused to share information or assets. So it's possible that when the KGB went looking for answers about Petrozavodsk, the military stayed silent. McGowan didn't have a good cover story because he never knew what the truth was to begin with.

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Sure, we could blame his varying explanations on government miscommunication, but it doesn't fully add up because a year after the Petrozavodsk, citing the academy and the military allegedly joined forces to create Setka, they had to work together at that point. But maybe the government's tactic was to make it seem like they were covering up a UFO. This could ultimately distract the public from the launch of a secret satellite.

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This feels like a stretch because as we learned in part one, the Soviet government is said to have worked tirelessly to keep references of UFOs out of the newspapers. Then again, it wasn't always easy to hide these stories from the public, as was the case with the Dounia Gorske events. First, there was that crash sphere in January, which left behind metallic balls and netting on a charred hilltop, then the UFO returned in November of the following year, though the state media attributed it to weather conditions.

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This was despite the fact that hundreds of people saw a building sized object floating overhead. Honestly, that doesn't sound like any military technology I'm accustomed to.

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Good point. Plus, it's hard to prove that the debris Valory division only collected after that crash was of this earth. As far as we know, metallic alloy meshes don't exist in nature.

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The chemist who analyzed it also believed it was extraterrestrial. He discovered that each strand was only 17 microns thick. That's one quarter of the width of a human hair and composed of even thinner threads. In 1986, it would have seemed impossible for any machine to create metal threads that small.

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But in 1990, that wasn't far off. We know that scientists were experimenting with rearranging atoms. Today, there are labs that can make an alloy mesh even smaller than the one Valory found. This makes the extraterrestrial origin theory harder to believe.

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That's fair. But if the mesh wasn't alien, what else could it be?

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Something expensive and hard to come by. These materials might have been around in the 1980s, but they certainly weren't available through public technologies.

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So it had to be some kind of secret project. The people of Dounia Gore said the thing that crashed was a glowing sphere. To me that sounds like a balloon of some kind. Plus, Valerie didn't find any remnants that you might expect from an airplane or satellite.

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This makes sense because some military balloons used for secret reconnaissance were reportedly rigged with TNT. They were specifically designed to explode upon crash landing to prevent them from being captured and studied by the enemy. In their book, Russia's Roswell Incident, Ufologist, Philip Mantlo and Paul Stonehill interviewed a journalist named V Siloam Zuckoff on the subject, the exact date is unclear.

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But according to kick off a reconnaissance balloon belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization crashed into a house somewhere in the USSR. Upon landing, an explosive inside the craft detonated, destroying the home entirely. Over the years, a lot of these projects were mistaken for UFOs, knowing how many UFO sightings stemmed from secret balloons, rockets and airplanes.

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I read this theory a seven maybe, but there are a lot of unanswered questions. James Oberg did a good job of connecting mass UFO sightings to missile launches, but not all encounters are so easily explained. Plus, there are a number of UFO reports from high ranking military officials who would have had clearance to these secret tests, yet they still couldn't explain what they saw. So I give it a five.

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Some events like Dounia Gorske probably had a natural or manmade origin, but others, like the massive crater into Gasca, definitely remain a mystery.

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So perhaps some of these encounters were visitors from another world. And if so, what intel might they have offered?

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Coming up, it's possible the Kremlin did reverse engineer alien technology after all. This episode is brought to you by CVS Health, are you worried about mom or dad falling? The Symphony Medical Alert System by CVS Health is designed to help make them safer at home. Symphony works with both voice activation or a care about users can opt to wear along with smart sensors for coverage around the home. With 24/7 emergency response and a streamlined app, you can monitor your loved ones well-being for enhanced peace of mind.

[00:31:04]

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[00:31:20]

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Drink responsibly. Wild Turkey Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey fifty point five percent alcohol volume one on one roof. Copyright twenty twenty one. Campari America. New York. New York. Now back to the story. Spy satellites, orbital nukes, exploding balloons, these secret technologies may explain some of the UFO sightings in the Soviet Union, but not every circumstance.

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Officially, the USSR, as top scientists proclaimed, there was no such thing as UFOs, but the government needed to be prepared in case they were wrong.

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Last time we talked about the mysterious cylinder over Siberia in 1953, Soviet dissident Veniamin Dogen said he took pictures of the craft before the KGB confiscated his camera.

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And Dogen claimed that when two fighter planes attacked it, they went down in flames. This proved to the Soviets that the intruders technology was far superior to their own, and they may have searched for a way to steal it.

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Which brings us to our final conspiracy theory that the Soviet Union really was visited by aliens and the military reverse engineered a downed alien craft. One of the most concerning things about UFOs was how frequently they appeared over secret military installations like nuclear missile silos, according to Mantlo and Stonehill in the 1980s, Colonel Boris Sokoloff researched one of these events himself.

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At the time, he was reportedly assigned to investigate paranormal phenomena for the Soviet Ministry of Defense on October 5th, 1982. His team was allegedly sent to an ICBM base in Ukraine, which was then part of the USSR.

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ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles were long range rockets armed with nuclear warheads like the Fobbs missiles. They could drop a bomb anywhere in the world in approximately 30 minutes.

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This particular ICBM was said to be aimed directly at the United States.

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According to Sokoloff, on October 4th, multiple witnesses saw a geometric disc the width of three football fields hovering over the silo.

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Colonel Vladimir Plan Tonev was on duty that day. He recounted how the instrument panels inside the control center suddenly came alive without warning. The computers prepared to launch it was a doomsday scenario. For 15 long seconds, the Soviets lost all control.

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Then everything powered down. The crisis was averted. But once the shock and terror wore off, Soviet generals likely wondered how they could get power like that.

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If intelligent beings really did travel billions of light years to reach Earth, their technology would probably appear godlike to us.

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This explains why many Soviet commanders were so interested in capturing a UFO, but it's unclear if they ever did.

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Last episode, we mentioned a top secret Soviet UFO laboratory near the Kazakhstan Russia border. Its existence was allegedly confirmed in 1995 by former Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Võ Poop gof. According to Pukhov, the lab was located near a legendary testing ground known as Couston Ja. This was where the Soviet Air Force tried out its most cutting edge fighter jets and stealth technology. Some called it the Russian Area 51.

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Further confirmation is said to have come from Eugène Lutsenko, an alleged member of the Soviet Air Force, from 1979 to 1981. He personally attested to a special military unit at the base that conducted nightly patrols searching for UFOs. Eugène said the secret base was established in the 1960s with the aim of reverse engineering alien tech should it be captured. And in 1970, they certainly came close. Servicemen reported a cigar shaped UFO flying low over the Houston Yaaa air field.

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It had no wings or engines and emitted a thin green beam.

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It could have been an alien vehicle or a Russian imitation of one. If the latter were true, it would mean the lab was successful in their mission. Whatever it was, though, it didn't seem groundbreaking enough to help the Soviet Army win the Cold War or the war in Afghanistan that began in 1979.

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Eugenie apparently also mentioned a second laboratory outside of Moscow dedicated to studying UFOs. It was staffed with scientists from all backgrounds, including biology, physics and chemistry. Their expertise was supposedly tested on a few occasions in 1980 for Soviet cosmonauts aboard a space station reportedly claimed to see humanoid forms. They were floating inside a mysterious orange cloud for 10 minutes. They lost contact with ground control. Afterwards, the government covered up the incident and sent all relevant data back to this Moscow lab.

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One anonymous Soviet engineer expressed amazement at how quickly his country developed new inventions. His work led to the creation of a heat shield which protected Soviet spacecraft returning to Earth. It was so effective that it remained in operation for decades.

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But it remains unclear if this rapid progress was the result of hard work or something else, like an influx of alien technology.

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This is difficult. If they did have this technology, it would undoubtedly be the USSR is best kept secret. We should assume that even the engineers wouldn't know where the original tech came from.

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But we do know that the Soviets pursued some pretty wild ideas when it came to outer space. For example, they were very interested in creating laser weapons, weapons they might have stolen from an alien ship.

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In the 1970s, the Soviets designed a satellite mounted laser capable of shooting down American satellites and ICBMs. By 1986, they had a working prototype called Polus Skiff. The idea of a space based laser weapon seems like something out of a sci fi novel. But in reality, the program was riddled with problems. The policy.

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If satellite was beset by technical issues, the endeavor was so complicated that even American engineers gave up on their own space based laser cannons. Still, the Soviets persisted, and on May 15th, 1987, they finally launched Polu Skiff into orbit.

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Actually, all they did was launch it, period, because as soon as the booster engine separated, the 12 story spaceship spun out of control and crashed back to Earth. Given what happened, that colossal failure makes it seem like extraterrestrial technology wasn't at play. If the Russians had actually managed to put an alien laser in space, it would have been a game changer for the Cold War.

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Maybe they just hadn't gotten their hands on that alien tech yet. One anecdote suggests the Soviets may have acquired something of value only a few months later.

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This account comes from Russian ufologist Yuri Stroganoff.

[00:40:10]

He interviewed an anonymous serviceman he called B B claimed that in August 1987 he picked up an unknown object recovered near the Finnish border. B and his unit then transported the mass to a nearby military base in Monsur Gorske, Russia.

[00:40:27]

The object looked like a space shuttle, but with some unusual differences. It had no doors or windows and was completely smooth, as if made of a ceramic shell, and when B approached it in inexplicable pain, coursed through his body.

[00:40:45]

The event was such a big deal that Mikhail Gorbachev, who would later be the Soviet president, supposedly made an unexpected stop in ask to visit the object.

[00:40:56]

A team from Setka allegedly tried to get inside the craft, but it took them over a month to penetrate its exterior.

[00:41:04]

Once inside, they found a cockpit too small for humans and a control panel without any buttons or switches be told stroganoff that one of the scientists removed a few metal rods from inside the craft.

[00:41:19]

But when the researcher took his gloves off, his hands were covered with thermal burns.

[00:41:24]

We don't know exactly what happened next, but sometime at the end of September 1987, the object disappeared. Perhaps the Setka team carted it off in the night, or maybe its owners came back for it.

[00:41:41]

This story is fascinating, but I think we need to be careful before accepting it on faith. We still don't know who she was or if he existed at all. By his own admission, he wasn't part of the Setka team. So he can't verify what was inside that craft.

[00:42:00]

True. But B wasn't the only one who claim to know about the Monsur Gorske object. A former military pilot named Captain N.V. Fedotov reportedly told UFOlogists that he'd also heard from several officers who knew of the incident.

[00:42:15]

That doesn't mean the Soviets gained anything of value from it. The truth is, we can trace the history of most technologies back to their manmade origins.

[00:42:26]

Even things like space based lasers drew upon earlier research using smaller models.

[00:42:32]

I'm not sure I agree these machines were developed in secret, which means there are huge gaps in our knowledge. Our only sources are documents the government chose to declassify and interviews about events long ago. For all we know, there could be dozens of devices out there inspired by alien tech.

[00:42:52]

I'm reluctant to believe that an intelligent civilization could travel across the galaxy only to let humans tear apart their spaceship when they arrive. But I'll concede that not every UFO sighting can be easily explained.

[00:43:07]

It seems like you're pretty doubtful that the Soviets successfully reverse engineered alien technology, correct?

[00:43:13]

I'd write this last theory, Attu. I'll give it a four. It's not impossible. But you're right. If the Soviets had such advanced technology, they probably would have made use of it during the Cold War. So perhaps we can only imagine what weapons they might have yielded. If this theory were true, extraterrestrial technology could have given the Soviets incredible power. If aliens could traverse light years in an instant, and if the USSR harnessed that tech, who's to say they couldn't travel through time as well?

[00:43:48]

It doesn't look like the Soviets had that ability, but maybe the most Gorske object is still being researched. We really have no idea if in some remote part of Siberia, there's still a secret lab working to unlock the mysteries of interstellar travel.

[00:44:16]

Thanks for tuning in to conspiracy theories. We'll be back next time with an all new episode. You can find all episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from podcast for free on Spotify.

[00:44:29]

Until then, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.

[00:44:34]

And the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify original from podcast. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cuddler Sound Design by Dick Schroder with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Freddie Buckley. This episode of Conspiracy Theories was written by Zander Bernstein with writing assistants by Lori Gottlieb and McKenzie. More fact checking by Onea barely and research by Bradley Klein. Conspiracy Theories Stars Molly Brandenberg and Carter Roy.