Somewhere in the Skies - Bite-Sized UFOs | Soviet Encounters of the 1940s

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Starting point is 00:00:42 Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Welcome to bite-sized UFOs, a show where we break down lesser-known UFO cases in 20 minutes or less. And now here's your host, Graham Rendell. Details of the case that we are about to examine here only came to light following a chance encounter between two people on a train travelling across Russia in 1951, one man was a lecturer from Voronesh University, the other, a test pilot with a Soviet Air Force. The pilot was called Akadi Ivanovich Apraxen, and the lecturer Y.I. Thurman. The pilot told the lecturer about a strange incident, one that he experienced whilst at the controls of a Soviet Air Force fighter, on the 16th of June 1948. An account of the

Starting point is 00:01:40 conversation between the two men finally reached Felix Siegel. Ziegle started studying at the USSR Academy of Science in 1945. Three years later he received his degree in astronomy and started lecturing on the subject at various institutions in the Moscow area. Ziegle was the first to suggest that the Tunguska blast of 1908 was caused by an alien spacecraft blowing up in the Earth's atmosphere. The following is Ziegle's account of the conversation between the lecturer and the pilot. Apraxin was flying at 15,000 feet when he caught sight of an incomprehensible type of flying object, which he described as resembling a cucumber with trailing light beams. The thing crossed the sky, ignoring Soviet ground station radio warnings to declare its intentions.

Starting point is 00:02:32 A praxin was ordered to attack the intruder. After closing to within a few miles, the light beams emanating. from the rear portion of the cucumber, flashed over his plane. At the same time his plane was bathed with the light, all electrical circuits in a Praxan's jet went dead, disabling his craft. While the Russian pilot glided to a landing, the UFO was seen arcing upward into a cloud, but things weren't over for Apraxin. He was questioned extensively by experts from the Soviet Air Force Directorate, part of the Ministry of Defense, in regards to that incident. as the encounter was referred to. During these interrogations,

Starting point is 00:03:14 A Praxin said he was shown a report about an identical aerial encounter by another Soviet pilot with an elongated or airship-shaped craft. According to Felix Siegel, controllers at a Soviet Air Force ground station had ordered Apraxan to close with the object. The pilot was ordered to intercept the object.

Starting point is 00:03:33 Issue a challenge and if it didn't land then he was to shoot it down. A praxon closed. to within 10 kilometres of the strange object. According to Aparxan, at this point, the light beams emanating from the object opened up like a fan, striking his aircraft and temporarily blinding him. All of the aircraft's electrical systems suddenly failed, as did the engine, and he was forced to glide to a landing. Apraxan was then exiled to a Soviet Arctic airfield, where he stayed for three months before being allowed to return to Kapustin Yarr,

Starting point is 00:04:09 the airfield where he'd flew from on the day he had his encounter. On 6th May, 1949, Apraxen was at the controls of another jet. This was a new aircraft. He was at its operational ceiling of about 49,000 feet, or 15,000 meters. It is unclear which type of aircraft Epraxon was flying in that day, although a yak-23 flora fits the bill, as its operational ceiling was at about that height. The pilot then encountered an object similar to the one he'd seen the previous year.

Starting point is 00:04:44 Once again it emitted strange beams of light which rendered his aircraft inoperable. However, this time his cockpit canopy was damaged, resulting in a loss of air pressure in the cabin. He was forced to glide to a safe landing on the banks of the River Volga, about 50 kilometres away from the city of Saratov, and then promptly blacked out. When he came round, Opraskan found himself in a hospital in Sarathe. Rhetov receiving treatment. More detailed questioning followed, and after two and a half months,

Starting point is 00:05:16 A Praskan was ordered to appear before a special medical board in Moscow. The board sent him to a psychoneurological institute. Here, the pilot apparently received electroshock therapy. Soviet officials apparently spent hours pouring over tapes of his statements, looking for inconsistencies in his story. In January 1950, a Praskin appeared in front of a different medical board who judged him unfit to fly.

Starting point is 00:05:45 The lecturer, Thurman, wrote the following about Apraxin in 1951. He assures me that he is in perfect health and that everything which he saw in fact occurred. They do not want to consider him normal for reasons he cannot understand, and that the failure to believe his story will bring harm to the motherland. Timothy Goode's 1987 book above top secret, the worldwide UFO cover-up, was possibly the first English-language publication to examine the Apraxan case at some length. Good claimed that he had made extensive inquiries to find out whether Apraxen actually existed. Bill Gunston, a prolific author whose books include titles on Soviet aviation,

Starting point is 00:06:28 said that he had no knowledge of a test pilot called Apraxan. Checks with the Central House of Aviation and Space at Fruns in Moscow also proved negative. So did Akkadi Ivanovich Aparxen actually exist or not? Had the entire story simply been concocted? Confirmation of a sort appeared when Timothy Good received a reply from a Dr. Gindalus, the co-author of a report into UFO sightings in the Soviet Union. Lev Gindelis confirmed that the information about Apraxin's sightings had been taken from Felix Siegel's card index.

Starting point is 00:07:05 The co-author of the UFO report managed to track down the lecturer's address and wrote to him. This elicited the following reply from Y.I. Furman. My one-time acquaintance with Arkady Ivanovich Hapraxin still excites me. Although during all those long years I was never imbued by a conviction that we have evidence for existence in reality of the Space Brothers. By the way, at present I have no information about Arkady Ivanovich Apraxin, though until the early 1970s I did make some attempts to find him. This is all I can communicate to you on this subject. These cases only exist because of an alleged conversation in a railway carriage back in 1951. Apraxon had apparently told Furman that he was a decorated wartime pilot.

Starting point is 00:07:56 He claimed to have been awarded the Red Star, the Red Banner. the Patriotic War First Class Medal, plus medals for the Defence of Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin. One might think that a highly decorated wartime flyer, one who went on to have a post-war test pilot role, might have featured some way in Soviet magazines, newspapers or books. The Communist Party certainly made sure that the Russian people knew who the heroes of the Soviet Union were. So why was a Praxon not afforded these same laurels? Had he been airbrushed out of history? In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s,

Starting point is 00:08:36 UFOs were effectively a forbidden subject in the Soviet Union. It was suggested that the UFO phenomenon was nothing more than a psychological warfare experiment, something concocted by the Americans to throw the Russians off guard. It is easy to suggest, therefore, that if one of their fighter pilots saw and reported UFOs, then he might be considered to be unreliable. and therefore it's not beyond the bounds of possibility to suggest that an unreliable citizen of the Soviet Union, whether an ordinary person or a decorated fighter pilot, might simply be airbrushed from history and disappear. Did Akkadia praxis end up in a Soviet gulag somewhere out in Siberia,

Starting point is 00:09:19 simply for reporting an inconvenient truth? We may never know the answer to that question. What we do know, however, is that nobody can find. any official record of him. This has been bite-sized UFOs with your host, Graham Rendell. Be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.

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Somewhere in the Skies - Bite-Sized UFOs | Soviet Encounters of the 1940s

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