Thank you for taking my call. I served in Soviet military intelligence for twenty three years. Retired now. There are things I can finally discuss. I need to tell you about SETKA. The program ran from 1978 to 1991, thirteen years of operations across the entire Soviet Union. What we were really investigating, what we actually found, it's all documented. The archives exist. Some of it's been sold off to American researchers, scattered across private collections. But the core findings, those tell a different story than what the public heard. I was there from the beginning. I saw the directive that started it all.
September 20, 1977. Petrozavodsk. That's what forced their hand. A massive object appeared over the city around four in the morning. Jellyfish shaped, they said. Emitting bright rays downward like it was showering the city with light. Hundreds of witnesses. Airport personnel, police, military staff, civilians. The thing hovered for ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Then it moved toward Lake Onega and disappeared. In the morning, residents found something strange. Small holes in their window glass. Perfectly round holes with melted edges. Not cracked. Melted. Glass doesn't melt from meteors or weather balloons. You can still find photographs if you know where to look. The official explanation came fast. Too fast, if that makes sense. Launch of Kosmos 955 satellite from Plesetsk, they said. Atmospheric conditions, they said. But Kosmos 955 launched northeast. The Petrozavodsk object moved southwest. The Academy of Sciences preliminary report in 1977 concluded, and I'm quoting here, that based on available data it was unfeasible to satisfactorily understand the observed phenomenon. Finland reported it. Denmark reported it. This wasn't some local confusion about a rocket launch. This was something that crossed international airspace and left physical evidence.
By late 1977, the Department of General Physics and Astronomy at the USSR Academy of Sciences had accumulated thousands of reports. UFO sightings from across the Soviet Union, filed away with no systematic analysis. The Petrozavodsk incident changed that. The Military Industrial Commission ordered a comprehensive research program. They created two parallel centers in 1978. SETKA AN, Academy of Sciences Net, focused on the scientific analysis. SETKA MO, Ministry of Defense, handled operational intelligence. Both programs exchanged information but served different masters. The Academy wanted to debunk. The Ministry needed answers. On October 18, 1978, the first official SETKA AN meeting took place at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I wasn't in that room, but I've read the minutes. Fifteen researchers, including Vladimir Migulin as program director and Yury Platov as chief executive at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism. Colonel Zaytsev represented the air defense forces. They discussed organization, funding, data collection protocols. One detail from those minutes stuck with me. They mentioned receiving three thousand reports per year from the general population alone. Three thousand. That's not counting military observations. The scale of what we were tracking, most people had no idea.
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