GLASNOST SPELLS FREEDOM FOR SOVIET UFO ENTHUSIASTS
Las Vegas Review-Journal Friday, November 29, 1991
GLASNOST SPELLS FREEDOM FOR SOVIET UFO ENTHUSIASTS
LOS ANGELES - Winds of glasnost that have scattered Soviet
secrets from KGB management skills to the final blame for the
Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster are airing another classified
operation: UFO research and sightings.
"For 25 years now there have been secret studies by the
Ministry Of Defense," says Marina Lavrentevna Popovich, a former
test pilot with a doctorate in flight technology from the
University of Lenningrad who, almost overnight, has become lead
spokesperson for extraterrestrial happenings over Eastern Europe.
"They (officials) are beginning to open the archives, but very
slowly."
Full and final release, she believes, will be a long time
coming in a nation addressing the more pressing priorities of
bread lines and civil strife.
"We think the reports will confirm about 14,000 contacts
(UFO sightings) in the past 25 years," says Popovich, 54. She was
in Los Angeles at a recent Whole Life Expo that heard holists,
gurus, channelers, metaphysicists and a speech by presidential
candidate Jerry Brown. "But I don't think we will find anything
in the secret files to change the direction of our work."
Before glasnost, she says, UFO watching was neither safe nor
easy in the Soviet Union.
"We have been researching UFOs for 25 years and talking
about it in small groups, but underground. People who tried to
talk in public about UFOs were either fired or put in psychiatric
hospitals."
But now, in just 2 years, a Moscow magazine titled "Inward
Path" has become a 50,000-reader forum for yogis, psychics, faith
healers, ufologists and other bearers of formerly taboo news.
More important, the monthly is printed on the presses of Pravda,
the official government newspaper.
Such outing has brought absolute freedom of speech for
Popovich and her army of "tens of thousands of scientists,
academics and lay volunteers" devoted to close encounters of any
kind.
They, like her, believe there are too many sightings, too
many unexplained visitations to not believe in extraterrestrial
intelligence struggling to communicate with our planet. The
argument that such highly sophisticated ETs should have little
difficulty making direct and unmistakable communication with
primitive earthlings does not wash with Popovich.
"The bottom line of these multiple contacts is: "We are not
going to give you our technological information until you raise
your spiritual and moral levels on Earth," she says. "And the
only way to raise them is with unity, as one Earth together to
reducing negative feelings, pollution and other detrimental-based
energies."
She is equally firm in other beliefs:
- The inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci, the writings of Jules
Verne and now the science fiction of Ray Bradbury were and are
technology transmissions from outer space using the three men as
mediums. Or maybe they were messengers from outer space and such
messengers still exist.
- Only 10% of all UFO sightings have significance. The rest
can be explained as hallucinations, space debris, marsh gas,
weather balloons, first ascendancy stars and Friday-night vodka
parties.
- Skeptics pose no threat to serious students of ufology
because "in Russia they once criticized cybernetics as a rotten
bourgeois pseudoscience, as they once criticized genetics."
- And Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev could be an
extraterrestrial front man because "he's an epoch-making
phenomenon." She makes no such claim for President Bush.
Interviewed through three interpreters - one for technical
terms, another for conversational nuances and jokes, and a third
who said he used to be a major in the KGB - Popovich says her own
experiences in space have been rather down to Earth.
As an Air Force colonel, she came within two finals of
graduating from cosmonaut school. She was dropped, she said,
after cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, the general she married,
convinced officials that his womans place was anywhere but in a
space capsule.
Previously, Marina was a test pilot, living in Star City and
flying the full Soviet aircraft inventory from AN-22 transports
to supersonic MIG-21s. She holds 90 flight records and has been
billed as "the Chuck Yeager of the Soviet Union," a reference to
the U.S. test pilot.
It was during these test flights that Popovich's attention
went from the skies around her to the Earth below.
"I saw rivers drying up, lakes dying, the whole ecological
disaster," she remembers. "We were ruining soil for it's natural
resources, building ozone holes, creating dams that spoiled the
dynamics of the Earth's rotation."
Economic activities intended to benefit a nation and
continent, she realized, were actually ravaging the ecology.
"I knew we would have to call a higher intelligence to
enlighten us, to guide us through this mess," she explains. "So I
started on a long, personal journey of discovery."
Popovich joined a safari in the mountain ranges of South
Asia, tracking the Yeti, the infamous and Abominable Snowman that
is fact to a scant few and myth to millions. She didn't get her
Yeti.
"But one dark night, says Popovich, "two giant hands grabbed
hold of my daughter and tried to pull her out of her sleeping
bag." The daughter saw nothing.
The next night, she claims, "a ball of light appeared ...
and three beams of light fell on my camp. It hovered for a while
before zigzagging away at high speed over our valley."
"It wasn't an aircraft. It wasn't a helicopter. It was a
UFO."
It was also a sign, Popovich says, to devote her post-
military career to studying airborne phenomena.
In her work she writes, lectures, heads organizations
researching anomalous phenomena and is proposing a series of
television programs to contradict what she considers the UFO-
busting propaganda of the PBS series "Nova."
Popovich does not believe that Twilight Zone experiences in
the Soviet Union have been any more startling or detailed than
events reported in the United States.
U.S. grocery store tabloids accuse the Air Force of holding
mummified remains of a space beings found in New Mexico. The main
Soviet rumor, says Popovich, is of extraterrestrial metals found
at a saucer crash site near Minsk.
The United States has a UFO Information Retrieval Center in
Phoenix and Citizens Against UFO Secrecy in Alexandria, VA. The
Soviets have the National Association of Ufology in Moscow and
the Soyuz UFO Center in St. Petersburg.
Both nations, agrees Popovich, have stacks of photographs of
glowing blobs said to be flying saucers. Crackpots who believe
Elvis was kidnapped by aliens are not exclusive to America. And
both sides have crops of the untalented who enter apparent
trances and produce abstract paintings and oddball music.
Popovich believes these people are mediums - or telepathic
cordless phones - who bring painted, printed or musical messages
from space. She travels with samples.
"This is the structure of the human soul," Popovich says of
a painting by one Soviet medium. It shows two clusters of
eyeballs hovering in space like celestial frog spawn.
From her work, from her absolute faith, Popovich believes
the Force is with her. Unfortunetly, it hasn't carried through to
her terrestrial life.
She is divorced from her cosmonaut general and says their
differences were out of this world.
"I had the guidance," she reasons. "he didn't."
GLASNOST SPELLS FREEDOM FOR SOVIET UFO ENTHUSIASTS
LOS ANGELES - Winds of glasnost that have scattered Soviet
secrets from KGB management skills to the final blame for the
Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster are airing another classified
operation: UFO research and sightings.
"For 25 years now there have been secret studies by the
Ministry Of Defense," says Marina Lavrentevna Popovich, a former
test pilot with a doctorate in flight technology from the
University of Lenningrad who, almost overnight, has become lead
spokesperson for extraterrestrial happenings over Eastern Europe.
"They (officials) are beginning to open the archives, but very
slowly."
Full and final release, she believes, will be a long time
coming in a nation addressing the more pressing priorities of
bread lines and civil strife.
"We think the reports will confirm about 14,000 contacts
(UFO sightings) in the past 25 years," says Popovich, 54. She was
in Los Angeles at a recent Whole Life Expo that heard holists,
gurus, channelers, metaphysicists and a speech by presidential
candidate Jerry Brown. "But I don't think we will find anything
in the secret files to change the direction of our work."
Before glasnost, she says, UFO watching was neither safe nor
easy in the Soviet Union.
"We have been researching UFOs for 25 years and talking
about it in small groups, but underground. People who tried to
talk in public about UFOs were either fired or put in psychiatric
hospitals."
But now, in just 2 years, a Moscow magazine titled "Inward
Path" has become a 50,000-reader forum for yogis, psychics, faith
healers, ufologists and other bearers of formerly taboo news.
More important, the monthly is printed on the presses of Pravda,
the official government newspaper.
Such outing has brought absolute freedom of speech for
Popovich and her army of "tens of thousands of scientists,
academics and lay volunteers" devoted to close encounters of any
kind.
They, like her, believe there are too many sightings, too
many unexplained visitations to not believe in extraterrestrial
intelligence struggling to communicate with our planet. The
argument that such highly sophisticated ETs should have little
difficulty making direct and unmistakable communication with
primitive earthlings does not wash with Popovich.
"The bottom line of these multiple contacts is: "We are not
going to give you our technological information until you raise
your spiritual and moral levels on Earth," she says. "And the
only way to raise them is with unity, as one Earth together to
reducing negative feelings, pollution and other detrimental-based
energies."
She is equally firm in other beliefs:
- The inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci, the writings of Jules
Verne and now the science fiction of Ray Bradbury were and are
technology transmissions from outer space using the three men as
mediums. Or maybe they were messengers from outer space and such
messengers still exist.
- Only 10% of all UFO sightings have significance. The rest
can be explained as hallucinations, space debris, marsh gas,
weather balloons, first ascendancy stars and Friday-night vodka
parties.
- Skeptics pose no threat to serious students of ufology
because "in Russia they once criticized cybernetics as a rotten
bourgeois pseudoscience, as they once criticized genetics."
- And Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev could be an
extraterrestrial front man because "he's an epoch-making
phenomenon." She makes no such claim for President Bush.
Interviewed through three interpreters - one for technical
terms, another for conversational nuances and jokes, and a third
who said he used to be a major in the KGB - Popovich says her own
experiences in space have been rather down to Earth.
As an Air Force colonel, she came within two finals of
graduating from cosmonaut school. She was dropped, she said,
after cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, the general she married,
convinced officials that his womans place was anywhere but in a
space capsule.
Previously, Marina was a test pilot, living in Star City and
flying the full Soviet aircraft inventory from AN-22 transports
to supersonic MIG-21s. She holds 90 flight records and has been
billed as "the Chuck Yeager of the Soviet Union," a reference to
the U.S. test pilot.
It was during these test flights that Popovich's attention
went from the skies around her to the Earth below.
"I saw rivers drying up, lakes dying, the whole ecological
disaster," she remembers. "We were ruining soil for it's natural
resources, building ozone holes, creating dams that spoiled the
dynamics of the Earth's rotation."
Economic activities intended to benefit a nation and
continent, she realized, were actually ravaging the ecology.
"I knew we would have to call a higher intelligence to
enlighten us, to guide us through this mess," she explains. "So I
started on a long, personal journey of discovery."
Popovich joined a safari in the mountain ranges of South
Asia, tracking the Yeti, the infamous and Abominable Snowman that
is fact to a scant few and myth to millions. She didn't get her
Yeti.
"But one dark night, says Popovich, "two giant hands grabbed
hold of my daughter and tried to pull her out of her sleeping
bag." The daughter saw nothing.
The next night, she claims, "a ball of light appeared ...
and three beams of light fell on my camp. It hovered for a while
before zigzagging away at high speed over our valley."
"It wasn't an aircraft. It wasn't a helicopter. It was a
UFO."
It was also a sign, Popovich says, to devote her post-
military career to studying airborne phenomena.
In her work she writes, lectures, heads organizations
researching anomalous phenomena and is proposing a series of
television programs to contradict what she considers the UFO-
busting propaganda of the PBS series "Nova."
Popovich does not believe that Twilight Zone experiences in
the Soviet Union have been any more startling or detailed than
events reported in the United States.
U.S. grocery store tabloids accuse the Air Force of holding
mummified remains of a space beings found in New Mexico. The main
Soviet rumor, says Popovich, is of extraterrestrial metals found
at a saucer crash site near Minsk.
The United States has a UFO Information Retrieval Center in
Phoenix and Citizens Against UFO Secrecy in Alexandria, VA. The
Soviets have the National Association of Ufology in Moscow and
the Soyuz UFO Center in St. Petersburg.
Both nations, agrees Popovich, have stacks of photographs of
glowing blobs said to be flying saucers. Crackpots who believe
Elvis was kidnapped by aliens are not exclusive to America. And
both sides have crops of the untalented who enter apparent
trances and produce abstract paintings and oddball music.
Popovich believes these people are mediums - or telepathic
cordless phones - who bring painted, printed or musical messages
from space. She travels with samples.
"This is the structure of the human soul," Popovich says of
a painting by one Soviet medium. It shows two clusters of
eyeballs hovering in space like celestial frog spawn.
From her work, from her absolute faith, Popovich believes
the Force is with her. Unfortunetly, it hasn't carried through to
her terrestrial life.
She is divorced from her cosmonaut general and says their
differences were out of this world.
"I had the guidance," she reasons. "he didn't."
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