Beyond Area 51

by Mack Maloney

  As the story goes, word of what was happening was flashed directly to Josef Stalin, then dictator of the Soviet Union. Probably believing the object was a spy plane sent from the West, Stalin ordered the fighter plane to shoot it down.

  But it was not as simple as that. While the Russian pilot attacked as ordered, a prolonged dogfight ensued. The UFO and the Russian airplane began firing their respective weapons and reportedly both sides scored what turned out to be mortal blows. Both craft eventually crashed. While the fate of the Soviet pilot was never revealed, multiple sources say the UFO’s debris (possibly along with the bodies of its occupants) was recovered and brought to Kapustin Yar.

  Thus began what some claim would become Kapustin Yar’s long and secret war with UFOs.

  War of the Worlds

  Reports say this secret war persisted during the 1950s and 1960s, with UFOs regularly showing up over Kapustin Yar and Soviet fighters regularly scrambling to intercept them. Air battles were frequently the result, and in retaliation for these clashes the UFOs would sometimes prevent missiles on Kapustin Yar’s launchpads from taking off.

  One particularly detailed incident, reported on both Nicap.org and UFOCasebook.com, was said to have occurred in August of 1989, when Soviet MiG fighters intercepted and shot down a UFO near the city of Prokhladny in the North Caucasus region of the old Soviet Union, an area close to Kapustin Yar.

  The remains of the UFO were eventually located and a Soviet recovery team was dispatched to the scene. The mysterious object was said to be twenty feet long, ten feet high and shaped like a cigar. Some reports say three occupants, each about three feet tall, were found inside the object when the Soviets arrived. Two were dead and the third died shortly afterwards.

  Eventually the recovery team was able to retrieve the crashed object by using a heavy-lift helicopter. While the remains of the three occupants were taken to a secret location, the object itself was said to have been flown to Kapustin Yar.

  According to some reports, this was just one of at least a handful of crashed UFOs that have been brought to the secret missile base over the years to be examined and then locked away.

  An Outspoken Hero

  There’s no question these stories sound incredible. Dogfights? Crashed UFOs? A secret war with ETs?

  But here’s where the story of Kapustin Yar takes an even stranger twist.

  In just about all the instances mentioned above, among the people reporting them is a person held in very high esteem in aeronautical circles in both Russia and the West.

  Her name is Marina Popovich. A legendary Russian test pilot, Popovich, who was born in 1931, owns dozens of the world’s top aviation records. Very well known in Russia, she’s been awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor medal, the Order of Courage and has a star named after her in the constellation of Cancer.

  Popovich has written a number of books, including one titled UFO Glasnost. Published in 2003, the book claims that Russian pilots, both military and civilian, have made more than three thousand confirmed UFO sightings over the years. Popovich also says Russian intelligence services have in their possession fragments of at least five crashed UFOs, debris that Russian scientists have concluded is simply not of this Earth.

  More ominous, though, Popovich has also said she’s personally witnessed aerial combat between Russian fighter planes and UFOs.

  One such incident happened in 1964. Aloft during a routine training mission, a group of Soviet jets encountered a UFO. In the confusion that followed, the UFO fired some kind of weapon at them. The Soviet jets immediately took evasive action and prepared for combat, but the UFO suddenly disappeared and no further shots were fired.

  Another incident Popovich reported happened on August 7, 1967. A Russian pilot encountered a UFO that suddenly projected some kind of light beam in his direction. Despite the pilot’s best efforts to avoid it, one of his wings came into contact with this beam, causing the pilot to lose control of his aircraft. With the plane shaking wildly and his instruments going haywire, the pilot briefly glanced outside to see that the affected wing was glowing brightly. He somehow managed to land the plane, touching down even as the wing was still glowing. In fact, some sources say the wing continued to glow for weeks afterward.

  Popovich has also said her fighter squadron was regularly scrambled to do battle with UFOs specifically violating the restricted airspace above Kapustin Yar.

  This secret war went on for so long and was so intense, Popovich says eventually the two sides just settled on a sort of unspoken truce. The Russians stopped firing at the UFOs over Kapustin Yar and the UFOs stopped interfering with the Russian missile launches below.

  (None of this was lost on the KGB, of course. By the mid-sixties, it had opened up its own secret study into UFOs. Known as the Blue File, the study contained more than a hundred pages of UFO incidents over Soviet territory; Popovich has called it the largest study of UFOs ever commissioned by any government organization, anywhere in the world.)

  Just how highly is Popovich regarded in Russia? Her popularity has been compared to that of both U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Chuck Yeager, America’s most famous test pilot.

  And again, while her stories all sound too far-fetched to be true, why would someone in her high-ranking position lie about such things?

  Which leads to another question: Would people be more likely to believe another story about UFOs at Kapustin Yar if the person vouching for the story had a famous American name such as… Rockefeller?

  A Chilling Incursion

  Not all the UFO incursions around Kapustin Yar were confined to the air above the secret missile base.

  In 1989, there was a major incident at a weapons installation located within the launch center itself. A partial file of this event was declassified by the Russian intelligence service in 1991; it contained depositions from Soviet military personnel, both officers and enlisted men, who witnessed the incident firsthand. It also contained illustrations of the object drawn by some of the witnesses, plus a summary written by the KGB. While there is no official conclusion about the event, the file is fascinating in the detail it contains.

  Investigative reporter J. Antonio Huneeus wrote an intriguing account of this alarming incident in a document titled “Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence” (more on this below).

  It says that around midnight on July 28, 1989, a UFO appeared above the Kapustin Yar base and was seen by several members of the Soviet military. The KGB later questioned these men and their recollections were similar in content.

  One of those questioned, Ensign Valery Voloshin, described the UFO as a disc-shaped object some seventeen feet in diameter. He said its hull had a dull green glow and that a powerful light on its underside blinked like a camera flash. The UFO flew very low over various buildings on the Kapustin Yar base before heading toward the installation’s weapons depot.

  Once over the depot, a place where nuclear warheads were kept, the UFO went into a hover and the bright beam on its underside lit up the corner of one of the nuke storage buildings. This illumination lasted several seconds before the beam disappeared. Then the object moved on toward the base’s logistics yard, railway station and cement factory, but at some point, it returned to the weapons depot and hovered over it again, this time a little higher, before it suddenly accelerated and flew off.

  In all, the witnesses had the UFO in sight for nearly two hours.

  The Rockefeller Ending

  This incident, actually told in brief here, was so detailed and had so many witnesses that it attracted the attention of a very unusual UFO enthusiast: Laurance S. Rockefeller.

  The brother of onetime U.S. vice president Nelson Rockefeller and a member of one of the most powerful families in American history, Laurance Rockefeller paid for the aforementioned report: “Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence” in 1993. Authored by Don Berliner, Mary Galbraith and J. Ant
onio Huneeus, it looked into more than twenty cases that, in the opinion of the authors, contained the most reliable evidence for the paranormal nature of UFOs.

  Because of his political connections and undeniable influence, Rockefeller was able to present this study to President Bill Clinton in 1995, along with a request to have the government release any pertinent files it had regarding the existence of UFOs.

  But what Clinton did with the Rockefeller-funded document, if anything, remains unknown.

  16

  The Secret at Huangyangtan

  The Mysterious Photo

  One day in 2006, a German researcher was looking through Google Earth images of China when he came upon something very puzzling.

  It was a high overhead shot of a large piece of terrain located in Huangyangtan, a sparsely populated region of China about 550 miles west of Beijing. The image showed some odd shapes on the ground.

  These shapes looked like typical mountains, valleys and rivers—but something was not right. The proportions seemed off.

  It took a while before the researcher realized he was not looking at a natural landscape but rather a large, extremely elaborate, highly detailed scale model of a piece of rough mountainous terrain.

  China has always been a land of mystery, even more so today with its repressive yet enterprising government immersed in seemingly endless rounds of political secrecy and military intrigue.

  But what was this?

  * * *

  Subsequent photos showed vehicles and support buildings close to the sophisticated scale replica; only then was it clear the model had been built on the site of a previously unknown military complex located at Huangyangtan.

  Further study determined the model was an exact one-to-five-hundred-scale re-creation of the Aksai Chin region, a forbidding piece of mountainous territory along the Chinese-Indian border. The facsimile, which represented an area measuring about three hundred by two hundred miles (or roughly the size of Switzerland), featured precise duplicates of snowcapped Himalayan Mountains, cavernous valleys, icy tributaries and the many frozen lakes that make up the Aksai Chin region.

  But identifying what the mock-up depicted only deepened the mystery.

  Aksai Chin is a long way from Huangyangtan, more than 1,500 miles to the west to be exact. The region is virtually uninhabited. There are just a few villages and small settlements there and, because it’s squeezed between the Himalayas and the Karakoram Mountains, the weather is pretty much horrible all the time.

  In fact, up to this point Aksai Chin had been known for just two things: It’s one of the most treacherous and isolated places in the world, and back in 1962 China and India fought a war there.

  Battle Across the Mountaintops

  The Sino-Indian War started on October 20, 1962, but even after fifty years exactly what caused the conflict is hard to determine.

  There had been a few minor shooting incidents in the late 1950s between China and India along their common frozen border. Plus, India had recently granted asylum to Tibet’s religious leader, the Dalai Lama; this after the Chinese government had taken over Tibet.

  But these events don’t seem to be enough to start a war. Yet start a war they did.

  Chinese troops invaded India at several points along the border, including the Aksai Chin region. While the Red Army overran the defending Indian forces fairly easily, much of the fighting was done under almost unbelievably harsh conditions. Some of the combat took place at altitudes of more than fourteen thousand feet. No surprise, both the Chinese and the Indians had more troops die due to the freezing weather than due to each other’s bullets.

  The war lasted just a month. Then the Chinese simply declared victory and immediately withdrew to their side of the border. Soon afterward, U.S. President John F. Kennedy proclaimed that the United States would defend India if the Chinese attacked again. And about a year later, the new U.S. president, Lyndon Johnson, talked about giving nuclear weapons technology to the Indians to help them thwart any repeat attack by the Chinese. But that was about the end of it.

  These days, the odd little war around Aksai Chin seems long forgotten. No shots have been fired there in a long time and both countries have only the barest military presence in the area.

  Empty Theories

  So why would the Chinese create such a scrupulously accurate facsimile of this godforsaken place?

  One theory was that the Chinese military built the mock-up to train its tank drivers. But the scale of the model is too diminutive for tanks to drive through. Plus, again, the Aksai Chin region features some of the most frightening terrain on Earth. High mountains, deep gorges, few roads, lots of snow and ice. Not exactly tank country.

  Another theory said the model was intended to train Chinese guerrillas who would someday be dispatched to the border to destabilize it. But knowing the area is frequently under assault from terrible blizzard-like weather, it’s not ideal guerrilla country either. Plus, who would be sent there to attack?

  The third theory is that the Chinese military constructed the model as a training aid for its helicopter and fighter pilots. But no aircraft were used during the 1962 war, mostly because of those inhospitable conditions, so what would change now? Besides, why would China choose to fight another war in this extremely remote place? Both China and India have nuclear weapons these days; both have nuclear missiles capable of reaching the other’s capital.

  If they were to go to war again, chances of it being a conventional war, fought among the Himalayan mountaintops, are all but nil.

  The $100 Solution

  In a previously published interview that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in July of 2006, Michael Barlow, deputy director of the Defense and Security Applications Research Center, said that although models of treacherous terrain were used for military training a long time ago, he’d never heard of anyone building one in modern times.

  “The only large-scale models built these days are of urban environments,” he observed. “Plus, you can literally buy a computer game for a hundred dollars and load in any existing terrain for the purposes of military simulations. Any good computer program could re-create the same thing that exists at Huangyangtan.”

  So if this model was not built to train tank crews, guerrillas or pilots, why was it built?

  No one seems to know—except the Chinese themselves. And so far, they’re not talking.

  But maybe the real question is, why is the Aksai Chin region suddenly so important to the Chinese, again, if not for standard military purposes?

  The answer might not be easily found in Beijing, but that’s not the case in those remote villages up in the Aksai Chin’s mountains, the place the Huangyangtan model was built to re-create.

  In fact, the locals are very forthcoming when asked why their remote piece of the world is so special.

  They have an interesting story to tell.

  The India Daily Article

  There is an article that can be found on many UFO-themed websites that is said to be from the newspaper India Daily. While a few have questioned its accuracy, it nevertheless gives a fascinating account about what might be going on around Aksai Chin.

  In fact, its headline says it all: China and India both know about underground UFO base.

  The article talks about a place called Kongka La, a low-ridge pass within the disputed area of the India-China border. While the northeastern part, Aksai Chin, is under Chinese control, and India controls the southwestern part, known as Ladakh, neither country has a lot of troops watching the border region.

  But the article also says this area is well known to the locals for lots of UFO activity. Specifically, people frequently see UFOs around Kongka La, and local guides regularly tell tourists that strange well-lit triangular craft are seen flying out from underground locations near there all the time.

  The article goes on to claim that the local people are amused when asked about this UFO activity and are surprised that both India and China try to hide the ob
vious. The locals say the extraterrestrial presence is well known, is deep underground but that both the Indian and Chinese governments want to keep it secret. Whenever the locals bring up the subject to government officials, they are told to keep quiet.

  As fantastic as the article may seem, it’s not the only media that has reported strange activity in the area over the years. For instance, in 2002, the Associated Press reported from the nearby Indian state of Uttar Pradesh that a flying sphere emitting red and blue lights repeatedly buzzed villages in that poor region, even attacking residents on occasion.

  Centuries of Sightings

  Good or bad, malevolent or benign, strange events happening in this Himalayan region are nothing new.

  The nearby Nepalese have paintings going back a thousand years depicting demons living inside the local mountains. The mysterious discs of Baian-Kra-Ula were found fairly close by on the Chinese-Tibet border.

  And in the year 1661 a Jesuit missionary from Belgium named Father Albert d’Orville was visiting a Buddhist monastery in the area when he witnessed an astonishing event.

  “My attention was drawn to something moving in the heavens,” he wrote in a letter to a friend more than 350 years ago. “At first I thought it might be a species of bird unknown to me that lived in these regions. Then the object came near, taking on the form of a Chinese double hat and all the while rotating silently as it was being conveyed through the air on invisible wings. This visitation was definitely a thing of wonder or a trick. The object winged its way above the city exactly as if it wished to be admired. It circled twice and then was suddenly shrouded in fog and as much as I strained my eyes I could no longer see it.”

  The priest then asked his guide about what he’d just seen.

  The guide replied, “My son, what you witnessed just now was not magic, because beings from other worlds travel across the oceans of space… and often come to earth near our monasteries.”