CIA-UAP-D001: Intelligence Information Report — USSR UAP Activity (1973)
Date
Summer 1973 (incident); December 20, 1973 (report date)
Document Type
Intelligence Report
Authentication
Official PublicationRedaction Status
▐ Partially RedactedIssuing Authority
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Summary
A December 1973 CIA Intelligence Information Report (IIR) based on human intelligence collected at the Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range in Kazakhstan, USSR. In section 14, the source — a former Soviet citizen who served at Sary Shagan — describes observing an airborne, luminous, bright green, unidentified object in summer 1973. The source observed concentric circles forming around the phenomenon over several minutes before it dissipated; no sound accompanied the observation. This is the first CIA document released in the PURSUE numbering system.
Significance
CIA-UAP-D001 establishes that the Central Intelligence Agency formally collected HUMINT reporting on UAP at Soviet nuclear and weapons test facilities by 1973. The source location — Sary Shagan, the Soviet ballistic missile defense test range in Kazakhstan — is the direct Soviet analogue of U.S. nuclear weapons test ranges where UAP were documented in the same era. The bright green luminous object described is consistent in color and behavior with the New Mexico Green Fireball Phenomenon (1948-1952) at U.S. nuclear facilities, suggesting the phenomenon may have had a geographically distributed pattern across Cold War weapons test sites on both sides.