Key Takeaways
- CIA report FIRK-311/01638-77, distributed on 20 December 1973 and republished in the Pentagon's PURSUE Release 2, records a UFO sighting at the Soviet Sary Shagan missile range
- The witness, a former Soviet worker at the range, saw a bright green circular object that grew several concentric green rings before fading away, with no sound at all
- The same report passes on a rumour of laser weapon experiments at Sary Shagan, years before Western analysts identified the Terra-3 laser test complex there
- The sighting hid in a heavily redacted 1978 release for decades; a records request in 2020 and the 2026 PURSUE release brought the full text into the open
- The report is stamped 'not finally evaluated intelligence': it records what a source said, not what the CIA concluded
📑 Table of Contents
- What Is CIA Report FIRK-311/01638-77?
- Sary Shagan: The Secret Soviet Missile Range in Kazakhstan
- The 1973 UFO Sighting at Site 7: What the Witness Saw
- Soviet Laser Weapons and Missile Warheads: The Rest of the File
- Soviet UFO Sightings and America's Green Fireballs
- How to Read the CIA's Sary Shagan UFO File Yourself
In December 1973, the CIA's Directorate of Operations circulated report FIRK-311/01638-77, a debrief of a former Soviet worker from the Sary Shagan weapons testing range in Kazakhstan. Most of it covers fences, warheads and site numbers. But paragraph 14 records a UFO sighting: a bright green circular object in the evening sky that grew rings around itself and faded without a sound. The report went out to the State Department, the DIA, the NSA and the FBI, then sat in the files for decades. The fullest declassified copy, catalogued CIA-UAP-D001, surfaced in the Pentagon's PURSUE Release 2 in May 2026.
This is the second post in our Document of the Week series: each week we take one file from our declassified UAP document archive and set out, in plain English, what it actually says.
What Is CIA Report FIRK-311/01638-77?
It's a three-page Intelligence Information Report, the CIA's standard format for passing on raw human intelligence. The header carries a warning notice about sensitive sources and methods, a struck-through CONFIDENTIAL stamp, and one line that matters more than any other: "THIS IS AN INFORMATION REPORT, NOT FINALLY EVALUATED INTELLIGENCE". In other words, this is what a source said, written down and sent round Washington. It is not the CIA's opinion about anything.
The source is described only as a "former Soviet citizen who served" at the range; the rest of the line is redacted. The information was acquired through Germany and covers November 1972 to November 1973, which suggests a defector or emigrant debriefed soon after leaving the USSR. The summary lists what the source could offer: facilities, work areas, security fencing, a regional headquarters (military unit V/Ch 03080), a warhead checkout unit (V/Ch 03142), details of two warhead types, "rumored laser research; and an unidentified aerial phenomenon".
That last phrase is worth pausing on. In 1973, a CIA reports officer chose to include a UFO sighting in a military intelligence summary, alongside the missiles and the fences, and nobody seems to have thought it strange.
Sary Shagan: The Secret Soviet Missile Range in Kazakhstan
Sary Shagan sits on the steppe beside Lake Balkhash in what is now Kazakhstan. The Soviet Union established it in the 1950s as its main proving ground for anti-ballistic missile systems: the radars, interceptors and warheads meant to shoot down incoming American missiles. It was one of the most sensitive military sites in the USSR, and Russia leases and uses it to this day.
The source knew the place from the inside. He describes warhead checkout work at Site 4 on two systems: the System-75, which he identified as the SA-2, the surface-to-air missile that shot down Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960, and a missile known as the System-300 or Aldan, which reference material identified as the ABM-1 GALOSH, Moscow's anti-ballistic missile interceptor. According to rumour on the range, the Aldan was for "protivo raketnaya oborona", anti-missile defence. Checked warheads went to Site 35 for launching.
So when this particular workplace produces a UFO report, it comes with a caveat every sceptic should keep in mind: Sary Shagan existed to fill the sky with strange experimental objects. And one more detail in the file cuts the other way entirely.
The 1973 UFO Sighting at Site 7: What the Witness Saw
Paragraph 14 is the reason this file is in a UAP release. One evening in late summer 1973, the source was watching a televised sports match between Canada and the USSR when he stepped outside for some air at Site 7. Looking up, he saw what the report calls an "unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass in the sky", to the west of the site, about 70 degrees above the horizon.
He couldn't judge its height. A field comment adds that there were no clouds that evening, but the source believed the green mass would have been higher than cloud level. He couldn't estimate its size either. What he could describe was its behaviour. Within 10 to 15 seconds of him spotting it, the green circle widened, and several green concentric circles formed around the central mass, like ripples spreading from a stone dropped in a pond. Within minutes the colour faded and it was gone.
Then the detail that makes the account easy to believe: "There was no sound, such as an explosion, associated with the phenomenon." Nothing at all. The closing field comment says the source had no opinion on what it was, that it produced no rumours at the facility, and that he could offer nothing more.
It's a strikingly honest report. No landing, no occupants, no chase. A man steps away from the television, sees something he can't explain, and tells a CIA debriefer about it in the same flat tone he used for warhead dimensions.
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Soviet Laser Weapons and Missile Warheads: The Rest of the File
The sighting takes up one paragraph of three pages. The rest is a reminder of why the CIA was debriefing Sary Shagan workers at all.
Paragraph 11 describes the hardware in close detail. The Aldan warhead was about two metres long, 80 to 100 centimetres across and roughly 400 kilograms, containing black cassettes housing metal balls, "shariki" in the source's Russian. SA-2 warheads held around a hundred grey cassettes, each with 200 to 300 metal balls no more than 1.5 centimetres across. The source knew nothing about nuclear warheads, though he thought all the systems could carry them, and stressed that his department's work was experimental.
Paragraph 13 is a single rumour, and with fifty years of hindsight it's the report's best credential. "According to hearsay, experiments involving laser weapons were being conducted at an unknown location at the range," supposedly involving powerful antennas. That was gossip in 1973. Years later, Western intelligence identified exactly that: the Terra-3 complex at Sary Shagan, the Soviet Union's laser weapons test site, which became a Cold War talking point in its own right during the 1980s. The source's hearsay was true. It doesn't validate the green object, but it does tell you his information about the range was good.
Soviet UFO Sightings and America's Green Fireballs
If a silent green light doing geometric things over a nuclear weapons site sounds familiar, it should. Last week's document in this series was the James Tuck file from Los Alamos, where staff reported green fireballs over America's atomic laboratory between 1948 and 1951, and a 116-page file from the same PURSUE release logs 209 sightings of green orbs and fireballs around Sandia. The US Air Force ran a classified study, Project Twinkle, and never settled what they were.
Paragraph 14 shows the same puzzle on the other side of the Iron Curtain: a green luminous phenomenon over the Soviets' most sensitive missile range, reported by a worker with no obvious reason to invent it, to an agency with no obvious reason to record it. The parallel doesn't prove anything exotic. Green is what you'd expect from certain meteor chemistry, and expanding luminous rings have prosaic explanations, from high-altitude rocket launches to upper-atmosphere fuel dumps. A missile test range is precisely where you'd expect to see strange things in the sky.
But it does show why researchers keep pulling on this thread. The pattern, unexplained lights over nuclear and missile facilities, repeats across countries, decades and classification systems that couldn't talk to each other. Whatever the explanation, Washington and Moscow were quietly filing the same reports.
How to Read the CIA's Sary Shagan UFO File Yourself
This report took its time reaching the public. A heavily redacted version, with the sighting reduced to a stray paragraph, was released back in 1978. In 2020 a mandatory declassification review request by The Black Vault prised out more of the text, which is when the "green circular object" first made headlines. The copy we've been quoting, catalogued CIA-UAP-D001, arrived in the second batch of the US government's PURSUE releases on 22 May 2026, alongside the senior intelligence officer's orb account and the other Release 2 files we've covered before. It's free to download from the official release site and takes about ten minutes to read.
Read it with the header in mind. "Not finally evaluated intelligence" means nobody at Langley concluded anything about the green object; they recorded a source's words and moved on. That's also what makes it valuable. There's no theory to sell here, just a dated, first-hand observation from a place almost no Westerner ever saw, preserved because the man's memory for warhead dimensions made him worth listening to.
Our UAP document archive hub indexes every collection we hold, from the UK Ministry of Defence files to Brazil's Operação Prato. Next week: another file, in plain English.
Sources:
- Report FIRK-311/01638-77 (file CIA-UAP-D001), CIA Directorate of Operations, 20 December 1973; republished in US Department of War PURSUE Release 2, 22 May 2026 — primary source
- Declassified UFO Report Documents 'Green Circular Object' Over Soviet Experimental Missile Range — Newsweek
- CIA UFO Document Declassified Further Solidifies Threat Potential from Unknown Objects — The Black Vault
- Pentagon UFO Files Add CIA Report on Kazakhstan's Sary Shagan Range — The Times of Central Asia
- Sary Shagan — Wikipedia
- Terra-3 — Wikipedia
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