The Petrozavodsk Jellyfish
The account
A glowing, jellyfish-shaped object hovered over the city and cast beams of light down onto the houses.
What investigators found
The most widely accepted explanation is the launch of a Soviet satellite from the Plesetsk base in the early hours of that morning.
The story
In the early hours of September 20, 1977, residents of Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, saw an enormous light appear in the sky. Many described a glowing body resembling a jellyfish, with rays falling like a shower of light over the city. Similar reports came from other parts of northern Russia and from Finland, and the Soviet press even published stories about the phenomenon.
The case put pressure on the authorities, and in the following years the Soviet Union began officially studying anomalous aerial phenomena. Researchers later determined that, that same morning, a rocket had carried the Kosmos 955 satellite into space from Plesetsk, a secret base not far away. The cloud of exhaust gases lit by the sun high in the atmosphere would explain the jellyfish shape. For some ufologists, details of the account still do not fit.