(NewsNation) — A declassified document from the CIA’s website has gone viral for claims it holds information about a UFO attack on troops in the then-Soviet Union.
NewsNation national security contributor and former CIA agent Tracy Walder said that though it may have been part of a CIA file, it wasn’t written by the agency.
“This is not a document that the CIA originated,” she said.
It appears to have come from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which Walder said is a service that takes open-source information, such as newspaper articles, and distributes them to intelligence agencies where they may be of interest.
The document recounts a story reported in the Canadian Weekly World News magazine as well as the Ukrainian paper Holos Ukrayiny.
The article talks of an alleged KGB file about an incident with a group of Soviet Union troops in Siberia who encountered a UFO on a training mission, which they shot down with a surface-to-air missile.
The encounter was said to take place somewhere between 1989 and 1990, just before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Two soldiers who survived the incident allegedly reported that five aliens, described as gray humanoids with large black eyes, emerged from the craft and then merged into a spherical object that emitted a light that turned 23 agents into a limestone-like substance.
The two surviving soldiers allegedly survived because they were standing in a shaded area.
The reporting cited an unnamed CIA source, which Walder said may have been why FBIS collected it and distributed it to the CIA.
The story was also published in 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the CIA would have been very interested in information coming from the region.
The existence of the document doesn’t prove that the alleged UFO encounter happened or indicate that the CIA found the newspaper story believable.
But, Walder noted, it doesn’t disprove it either.