Russian Space General Told TV Audience He Saw an Unexplained Light — But Not a UFO

Networks heard a senior military space commander draw a line between two kinds of unexplained things. Major General Yuriy Grigoriyevich Gusev, deputy commander of the Russian Ministry of Defense Space Units, sat for a live studio interview on the 'Utro' program with journalist Mikhail Solntsev. The exchange, preserved in a translated transcript released through the CIA's declassification archive and hosted by The Black Vault, records Gusev's answer when Solntsev asked whether he believed in UFOs.

That dismissal, however, was not his final word on the subject. He located the experience during a flight in an aircraft. He was careful about its shape: not an object, he said, but a ray of light that performed definite movements in the air.

The origin of that light, he told the studio audience, remained a mystery to him. The paradox is the point. A man whose professional responsibilities centered on the ground infrastructure that…