A recent story on our website, “Russia using UFOs to boost tourism” by Jason McClellan, based on an article posted online by the Voice of Russia, discussed “a new tourist route of the Leningrad region” based on an intriguing incident on Lake Korbozero that took place back on the night of April 27-28, 1961.
UFO tourism of course is not a new concept in Russia, the US, or many other parts of the world. Various tours have been developed around high profile cases or facilities like Roswell and Area 51. But what is unusual about this new tour is that the Korbozero case is rather obscure and there is very little data about it online. When Jason first mentioned it to me, the name of Korb Lake didn’t ring a bell initially but once I read some of the details about the physical evidence that had been retrieved by divers on the lake, I did remember reading some reports of it in the papers of the late Professor Felix Zigel, who is universally acknowledged as the founding father of Russian ufology.
The huge contribution of Dr. Zigel
Professor Felix Zigel of the Moscow Aviation Institute, father of Russian ufology. (Credit: Huneeus Collection/S. Bulantsev)
I wrote a biographical article about Dr. Felix Yuerevich Zigel (1920-1988) for the “Researcher Profile” section of Open Minds magazine (Issue Nº 4, Oct./Nov. 2010). Zigel was an astronomer, author of dozens of popular scientific books, and associate professor at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, although he is now best known for his pioneering work of building Russian (then Soviet) ufology. His dealings with the Soviet communist state and scientific bureaucracy shifted back and forth over the years. There were times when his work was approved officially, like the publication of his milestone article “Unidentified Flying Objects” in Soviet Life in February 1968 (Soviet Life was an official, glossy magazine published in dozens of foreign languages with a positive spin on Communist society).
However, most of Zigel’s UFO work couldn’t pass the barriers of Soviet censorship, but that didn’t stop the professor and his close group of associates. Zigel’s UFO investigations instead were circulated in photocopies through the underground system known as samizdat that existed unofficially in the Soviet era. Some of these Zigel documents went not only around Russia and the other Soviet republics, but also abroad, where they were translated into various languages. One of the most precious Zigel manuscripts is the volume titled, UFO Landings in the USSR and Other Countries, which was translated to English by Dimitri Ossipov and published in a limited edition by Dr. Richard Haines of the Joint USA-CIS Aerial Anomaly Federation.
It is in this book that we find a short summary of the 1961 Korbozero case, which we reproduce below. The term “LO” stands for cases where “there are no witnesses to the [UFO] landing, but on the ground surface there are traces typical in landing sites.” Here is the complete summary by
UFO tourism of course is not a new concept in Russia, the US, or many other parts of the world. Various tours have been developed around high profile cases or facilities like Roswell and Area 51. But what is unusual about this new tour is that the Korbozero case is rather obscure and there is very little data about it online. When Jason first mentioned it to me, the name of Korb Lake didn’t ring a bell initially but once I read some of the details about the physical evidence that had been retrieved by divers on the lake, I did remember reading some reports of it in the papers of the late Professor Felix Zigel, who is universally acknowledged as the founding father of Russian ufology.
The huge contribution of Dr. Zigel
Professor Felix Zigel of the Moscow Aviation Institute, father of Russian ufology. (Credit: Huneeus Collection/S. Bulantsev)
I wrote a biographical article about Dr. Felix Yuerevich Zigel (1920-1988) for the “Researcher Profile” section of Open Minds magazine (Issue Nº 4, Oct./Nov. 2010). Zigel was an astronomer, author of dozens of popular scientific books, and associate professor at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, although he is now best known for his pioneering work of building Russian (then Soviet) ufology. His dealings with the Soviet communist state and scientific bureaucracy shifted back and forth over the years. There were times when his work was approved officially, like the publication of his milestone article “Unidentified Flying Objects” in Soviet Life in February 1968 (Soviet Life was an official, glossy magazine published in dozens of foreign languages with a positive spin on Communist society).
However, most of Zigel’s UFO work couldn’t pass the barriers of Soviet censorship, but that didn’t stop the professor and his close group of associates. Zigel’s UFO investigations instead were circulated in photocopies through the underground system known as samizdat that existed unofficially in the Soviet era. Some of these Zigel documents went not only around Russia and the other Soviet republics, but also abroad, where they were translated into various languages. One of the most precious Zigel manuscripts is the volume titled, UFO Landings in the USSR and Other Countries, which was translated to English by Dimitri Ossipov and published in a limited edition by Dr. Richard Haines of the Joint USA-CIS Aerial Anomaly Federation.
It is in this book that we find a short summary of the 1961 Korbozero case, which we reproduce below. The term “LO” stands for cases where “there are no witnesses to the [UFO] landing, but on the ground surface there are traces typical in landing sites.” Here is the complete summary by
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