CIA file about aliens attacking Soviet forces goes viral

A declassified CIA report about an alleged UFO attack on Soviet soldiers in the dying days of the USSR has gone viral after being posted to the agency’s website.

The document is a single-page summary of newspaper articles from Canadian Weekly World News and the Ukrainian paper Holos Ukrayiny dating back to March 1993, which describe a hostile encounter between the Russian Army and a flying saucer that is said to have taken place in 1989 or 1990.

The story – headlined “Cosmic Revenge” in the Ukrainian source and said to derive from an extensive 250-page KGB file, complete with witness testimony and documentary photographs – recounts how 25 Soviet troops were participating in training drills when a “low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer” passed over their base in Siberia.

The sighting prompted the men to react “for unknown reasons” by launching a surface-to-air missile at the craft, which they successfully brought down.

“Five short humanoids with ‘large heads and large black eyes’” emerged from the wreckage, the file reports, before fusing together into a “single object”: a spherical shape that emitted a sinister buzzing sound.

The sphere then burst in an explosion of brilliant white light, leaving 23 of the men “turned into stone poles” while the remaining two, shielded from the blast by virtue of being stood in the shade, escaped unharmed.