NARRATOR: Salyut 7 Space
Station, July 12th, 1984.
Cosmonauts Oleg Atkov, Leonid
Kazim, and Vladimir Solovyov
enter the 156 day
of their 237 day
stay aboard Russia's scientific
research space station.
To date, everything has
gone according to plan.
But on this day, all
three crew members
witness an extraordinary event.
In 1984, Soviet
cosmonauts on board Salyut 7
saw a strange orange glow
around the spacecraft.
And they saw what they thought,
at first, was maybe a gas leak.
But it seemed that the
whole station was surrounded
by this orange cloud.
And as they looked at it, the
cloud coalesced into a shape.
NARRATOR: Suddenly they are all
blinded by this orange light.
When they regain their
vision, they look out
the portals of the
spacecraft, and they are
astonished by what they see.
They describe seeing
seven angelic beings that
are traveling alongside
their spacecraft,
and did so for 10 minutes.
The men described huge,
winged creatures--
as much as 80 feet tall, that
appeared to have glowing halos.
Officials dismissed
the incident as a group
hallucination resulting
from oxygen deprivation
and pressure fluctuations.
Later that summer,
three more cosmonauts
joined the Salyut 7 crew.
All six of them, once again,
saw these winged beings.
But how could all
of these cosmonauts
share one hallucination?
It seems to me that this
was not hallucination.
That whatever it was they
were witnessing, it was real.
It was out there.
Now, angels, aliens?
I don't know.
But when one looks at the
recurrence of winged figures
in human history, in terms of
religion, in terms of culture,
mythology, are we looking
at something real?
Are these angels that
we see-- actually,
extraterrestrial entities?
NARRATOR: Might
the winged figures
seen by the Salyut 7 crew really
have been extraterrestrials?
Ancient astronaut
theorists say yes,
and suggest that
similar sightings
were secretly recorded by
many Russian cosmonauts.
Soviet cosmonauts had a really
interesting and challenging
dilemma when it came
to truth telling.
Because at the same time that
they were the public face
of the Soviet space program,
there was the always hidden
goal of the Soviet
space program,
which was to prove
intercontinental
ballistic missile capability.
So the cosmonauts were publicly
to disguise those parts
of the mission that were
secret, and involved in national
security, making it all that
much more interesting when we
tried to assess what
they saw when they talk
about anomalous things
that they supposedly
encountered in space.
You have to understand that
many cosmonauts, even if they
witnessed something
strange in space,
were highly reluctant to
openly talk about it, because
of the concern of
being decommissioned
for the reason of insanity.
Indeed, some of the Soviet,
and the Russian cosmonauts
did have very strange
experiences in space.
