The UFO over the Ukrainian Missile Base
The account
An object hovered over a Soviet nuclear missile base and, for a few seconds, the launch panels lit up on their own.
What investigators found
The reports came to light years later, with no open technical documentation; equipment malfunction is a possible explanation.
The story
According to accounts that came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union, in October 1982 personnel at a nuclear missile base near Byelokoroviche, in what was then Soviet Ukraine, saw an object hover over the facility for hours. During the episode, the control center panels reportedly indicated for a few seconds that the missiles were ready for launch, without any order from the operators.
The case was publicized in the 1990s by journalists and researchers based on testimonies and papers attributed to Soviet archives, and it came to be cited alongside American cases of UFOs near nuclear weapons. No complete technical documentation is available to the public. Skeptics note that equipment failures and false alarms were not rare and that the testimonies were gathered long after the fact.