UFO hype reached a fever pitch in 2025, as President Donald Trump’s order to declassify and release military and intelligence documents related to UFOs began to flood the internet. One document in particular received some extraordinary attention, relaying the story of a Soviet Red Army infantry unit that was attacked not only by a UFO, but by its alien crew.
A story reprinted in the Ukrainian newspaper Ternopil Vechirny (meaning “Ternopil Evening”) alleged that the American intelligence community received a 250-page file from the KGB’s archive after the fall of the Soviet Union. That file was said to contain documentary evidence (including photos) of an attack on a Soviet infantry unit in Siberia.
The KGB documents supposedly report that the unit was conducting a regular training exercise, when a “quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above” them. For reasons that no one really knows, one of the soldiers suddenly fired a surface-to-air missile at the craft. The UFO crash landed “not far away” and “five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes” emerged from the downed vessel.
The file says that two surviving Red Army soldiers reported that the aliens “merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.” The shape began to buzz and hiss, then turned a brilliant white, growing bigger and bigger before it exploded in a bright white light. Instantly, 23 soldiers had been turned into “stone poles.” The two soldiers had been standing behind trees, which they believed helped them survive.
Hellbound and Down 