CIA-Monitored Soviet UAP Wave — FBIS Declassified Report

In 1978, the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) — the agency's open-source intelligence arm responsible for monitoring and translating foreign media — compiled and distributed classified reports documenting multiple Soviet UAP sightings reported in Soviet state media. These FBIS documents, subsequently declassified and made available in the CIA's online reading room, provide contemporaneous US intelligence monitoring of Soviet civilian and military UAP reports during a period of intense Soviet UAP activity.

The FBIS reports translate and summarize Soviet newspaper and scientific journal accounts of UAP observations across the USSR in 1977 and 1978 — a period that included the major Petrozavodsk phenomenon of September 1977 and numerous follow-on reports. The Soviet media coverage monitored by the CIA ranged from Pravda and TASS to regional newspapers and was extensive enough to constitute a significant intelligence reporting category.

A parallel CIA document from the same period noted that Soviet and Chinese scientists had jointly initiated scientific study of UAP — suggesting that at the highest levels of Cold War scientific cooperation, both superpowers were treating UAP as a legitimate subject requiring coordinated investigation. The document referenced a joint USSR-PRC scientific working group on unidentified aerial phenomena — a remarkable detail given the state of Sino-Soviet relations in the late 1970s.

The significance of these documents is threefold. First, they confirm that US intelligence agencies were actively monitoring Soviet UAP reports as a matter of routine intelligence collection — meaning the subject was considered relevant to national security assessment. Second, they document the breadth of Soviet public UAP reporting in the 1977–1978 period, corroborating Soviet military sources who described the same wave. Third, the reference to joint Sino-Soviet scientific UAP study suggests the phenomenon was being treated as a shared geophysical or technological intelligence problem at the superpower level, not merely as a public relations matter.

All referenced documents are publicly available in the CIA Electronic Reading Room under CREST (CIA Records Search Tool).