➡ In 1987, a tabloid called Weekly World News reported a story about Soviet soldiers shooting down a UFO, which retaliated by turning 23 soldiers into stone. This story was allegedly backed by a CIA source and even mentioned in a CIA document. However, the credibility of the story is questionable as the Weekly World News was known for its sensational and often fictitious stories. The CIA document turned out to be a translation of a Ukrainian newspaper report that was referencing the original tabloid article, creating a circular reference with no clear original source.
➡ The CIA translated a Ukrainian newspaper article that reported on a Weekly World News story, which claimed to have information from CIA leakers. This has led to speculation about the CIA’s involvement and the truth behind the story. The article explores four possibilities: the story is entirely true, the event was a cover-up for a Soviet nuclear accident, the CIA used the story for propaganda, or the CIA was investigating a potential leak. However, the truth remains unclear.
➡ Paul Benowitz, a UFO enthusiast, claimed to have found alien devices at Kirtland Air Force Base, but a CIA document suggests this was part of a disinformation campaign by the government. This led to Benowitz’s mental breakdown. The Weekly World News, known for its sensational stories, may have made up claims about a Soviet alien encounter, possibly inspired by a CIA investigation into foreign papers mentioning the CIA. However, there’s no solid evidence that the CIA informed the Weekly World News about this encounter.

What if I told you that a paper reported that, in 1987, Soviet soldiers had shot down a UFO? Not only that, but the UFO got revenged by turning 23 of the soldiers into stone. Sounds unbelievable, right? Well, the paper claimed to have a CIA source for it, and there’s actually a CIA document about it. This conspiracy even got some attention on the Joe Rogan experience. And he certainly said some things about the CIA document. But is there any truth to this story? Well, we’re gonna get it sorted out. And, along the way, we’re gonna see why the CIA is a bad person that hates cats.

Don’t mess with cats. Let’s make conspiracies great again. My name is Face, and welcome to Project Conspiracy. Okay, so the first source I was able to find for this story was Weekly World News. Yes, the tabloid. You know, one of the papers at the grocery store by the checkout line next to the candy. The one you always wanted to pick up and read, but you knew that Karen behind you in line would be sitting there watching you, judging you, telling everyone at Garden Club what you were doing. This was the paper that reported that an alien was in the slammer after it got into a fistfight with Bill Clinton, aka Slick Willy, over Hillary.

Look, on this show, we’re about sorting through the noise and getting down to what we can prove or what we can disprove. The way I see it, if we can rule some stuff out, then we can focus our energies on theories that may be more viable, right? Quite frankly, I doubt the veracity of some of Weekly World News’ claims, including, but not necessarily limited to, this Bill Clinton story. The Weekly World News was mostly for entertainment, and I can appreciate that. But in 1992, the Weekly World News claimed to have a CIA source for what is an incredible, some would say unbelievable, story.

Here’s the front page and headline. A secret KGB photo from 1987 shows that Russians shoot down UFO and angry aliens turn soldiers into stone. Not the best start for believability. That said, check out that Photoshop job. Remember, this is 1992. Pretty impressive. It is Photoshop, right? Well, we’ll get to that. But this was more than just a headline. It was a full story, and they had sources, allegedly. They claimed that their CIA sources had access to Soviet spy files after Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the KGB when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. At least part of that is not fake news.

The Soviet Union really did fall in 1991, and this article was written in 1992. It feels weird to say it, but this background is almost logical. Weird and wild stuff. They say that the KGB file was 250 pages of testimony from two soldiers who survived the attacks. Here’s what they say happened. At 835 a.m. on October 13, 1987, Soviet soldiers on routine maneuvers saw a saucer-shaped Starship at low altitude. For reasons that remain unclear, they shot a surface-to-air missile with a spacecraft and a bullseye. It crashed in five tiny humanoids with large heads, large black eyes, and segmented snouse emerged.

Then the creatures huddled and came together in a single ball-shaped entity. It burned bright, doubled in size, and exploded. The paper said that it’s not clear what happened next, but 23 of the Soviet soldiers had turned a stone with only the two survivors who didn’t know why they were spared. One of the CIA insiders who purportedly leaked the KGB file said this. This single file has done more to open our eyes to alien intentions and alien might than anything else in the history of UFOs. They claim it’s the first instance of ETs attacking and killing humans that they’ve seen.

And they also said this. It proves that space aliens aren’t the benign and benevolent beings that so many of us like to think they are. They possess weapons and technologies that are superior to anything we have here on Earth. Kinda creepy. Also probably realistic. This article closes by noting that the CIA was trying to get a look at the spacecraft, but there was no guarantee that the Russians would even admit this incident happened, let alone let them have a look. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, consider this. In this same weekly World News edition, they report on a wacko that breaks into house just to tick a woman’s feet.

As dumb and ridiculous as that sounds, about 20 years later it became a real headline when Boston.com reported a serial tickler breaking into Boston College students’ homes when fiction has become the truth. Just keep an open mind is all I’m saying. And that’s easier to do when there’s a CIA document about the incident, right? So there is actually a CIA document about the same incident that the weekly World News reported on. The internet says that this document was declassified as part of the CREST 25-year program archive. What’s CREST? It stands for the CIA records search tool that became usable in 2000.

Leading up to CREST, a 1995 executive order required the declassification of non-exempt, historically valuable records 25 years or older. I guess Slick Willy wanted to declassify things after that alien fistfight he got into that was reported in the weekly World News. But this program has revealed some pretty cool stuff. For example, in January 2017, the CIA published records online of the Stargate project as part of the CREST archive. What we now call in the conspiracy world is the CIA’s remote viewing program. Normally, this would be a rabbit hole, but I feel like this one deserves its own episode.

It’s on the list. But this CIA document about the Soviets being turned into stone by aliens has been making its way around the internet, including one of the biggest spots on the internet, the Joe Rogan experience. So there’s literally like a CIA document about it that these guys supposedly shot at a low-flying spaceship. Was he right about that? Well, let’s take a look at the document. The CIA document says that, after Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved in 1991, the KGB top secret intelligence administration, a lot of material from that department found their way abroad, in particular to the CIA.

Sounds like the CIA needs to work on its grammar. Weird start, but let’s keep going, I guess. As reported by Canadian Weekly World News, U.S. intelligence obtained a 250-page file on the attack by a UFO on a military unit in Siberia. Then it basically tells the same story that Weekly World News did. Some Soviet soldiers shot down a low-flying spaceship, five humanoids got out and merged together in a spherical shape, then exploded, turning 23 Soviet soldiers into stone. Then it says that a CIA representative said this. If the KGB file corresponds to reality, this is an extremely menacing case.

The aliens possess such weapons and technology that go beyond all our assumptions. They can stand up for themselves if attacked. Am I taking crazy pills or does this sound awfully familiar? Here’s what Joe Rogan said about it. You know, they’re reading from a KGB file, right? Rogan might have been wrong about that. And what the internet said about this document being declassified might have been wrong too. Let’s find out why. So let’s get to know this CIA document a little better. When Reddit got its hands on the document, it tried to debunk it.

They ended up arguing about what the word debunk means, and it quickly devolved into ad hominem attacks after that, just as nature intended. But the CIA’s reading room gives us quite a bit of information about this CIA document. So the publication date was March 27, 1993. That’s after the Weekly World News article that came out in September of 1992. And remember how the internet said that this was a declassified document? Well, the CIA reading room actually posts the document’s original classification. Here’s a general overview on how the classification system works. You’ve got U for unclassified, C for confidential, S for secret, and TS for top secret.

It’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the general idea. That Stargate document that we looked at a moment ago was originally classified S for secret. Now S could be for subscribe. So if you’re enjoying the episode, make sure to hit the subscribe button. Anyways, that 1993 CIA document about the Soviets in the UFO was originally classified as U for unclassified. Now unclassified is technically not a classification. It’s the default and refers to information that can be released to individuals without a clearance. And the CIA document was part of the FOIA collection, not the Crest collection.

But let’s also look at the substance of the CIA document. Notice that when it cites the Weekly World News report on this issue, it describes it as the authoritative magazine Canadian Weekly World News. Authoritative? Who in their right mind would say that about Weekly World News? Seems a little sus. I’ll cut to the chase. The subject of this CIA document is paper reports alleged evidence on mishap involving UFO. The CIA document is actually a translation of a Ukrainian newspaper report called Cosmic Revenge. And that Ukrainian newspaper appears to be reporting on the Weekly World News article.

So it’s basically a circle of documents referencing each other. First, we’ve got the CIA, who was allegedly the source for the Weekly World News article. The Ukrainian newspaper reported on the Weekly World News article. Then the CIA document translated the Ukrainian paper. So Rogan was wrong. They weren’t reading from a KGB file. And it’s not CIA confirmation of the story. But this CIA document does exist. And that alone is significant. It’s confirmation that the CIA was doing something. Let’s see if we can figure out what they were up to. So this CIA document, translating this Ukrainian newspaper article, in fact exists in our physical world.

What are we supposed to do with this? Why is it here? The CIA reading room gave us a lot of information about the document. But it didn’t tell us why the document was made in the first place. So let’s think for ourselves and try to figure out this situation. Logically. This whole situation apparently stems from the Weekly World News article. And that article claims to be based on CIA leakers. So the real issue here is this. Did the CIA give the Weekly World News the information for that article or not? Well, we just don’t know.

So this means that we have two possible realities. The weird reality in which the CIA actually gave Weekly World News this information. And the likely reality in which Weekly World News just made it all up. So let’s take a little deeper look at each of these potential realities and see if we can figure out what the CIA was up to. First, let’s talk about the weird reality in which Weekly World News is being honest and the CIA leakers actually gave them this information. This leads us to several potential possibilities. We’re going to talk about four of them.

Weird reality option one. Believe this one at your own risk. It’s all real. The CIA leaked this information to Weekly World News and it’s real. All of it. The Soviets shot down a UFO and some angry aliens got revenge. Most people will throw this one out. I get it. But Siberia, where this incident purportedly took place, does have a history with strange, potentially otherworldly activity. For example, in 1908, residents of southern Siberia reported seeing a fireball shoot across the sky. A few minutes later, there was a shock wave that knocked many residents off their feet.

Humans weren’t really that active in the skies at this time, so that narrows down our options. Now, when I first heard of this incident, to me it sounded like a meteor. But there were no crater or meteorite fragments found. Some speculate that the fireball was either aliens or aliens shooting down an object to protect Earth. Unfortunately, there weren’t smartphones around at that time to catch it. But it sure seems like something was in the skies in Siberia in 1908. Then, in 1982, just a few years before the Soviets allegedly shot down that UFO in Siberia, in Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, three Soviet Navy diver trainees reportedly died pursuing what survivors described as a group of humanoid creatures dressed in silvery suits.

This is actually a pretty wild story. If you’d like to see a full episode on either of these incidents, or if there’s another strange Russian incident that I need to look into, let me know down in the comments. But this area definitely has a reputation. So much so that, in 2012, BBC reported that a group of about 50 enthusiasts set up camp near Lake Baikal to go UFO hunting. Also, this wouldn’t be the first time that the Soviets or Russians claimed to have shot down a strange object from the sky. In January 2023, they claimed to have shot down… well, something.

Local media shared a video of a small glowing object flying at about 5,000 feet. So the Russians did what Russians do. They shot it out of the sky. A Russian governor confirmed on Telegram that they decided to quote, liquidate it. It sounds like a great value terminator. The liquidator. The governor didn’t specify what it was, but he did say that it was in the shape of a ball. Now, is any of this real? I have no idea. And this 2023 event that we just discussed took place while Russia was in the middle of a war with Ukraine.

So there’s plenty of possibilities. But since everything is real in this weird reality, we can probably assume that the CIA document is either the CIA keeping tabs on the incident or the CIA investigating a potential leak. Weird reality option two. The soldiers being turned into stone was actually caused by an advanced nuclear weapon that the Soviets were testing in Siberia. So the science channel speculated that what happened was actually a nuclear accident. And their experts say that the Soviets liked to use accounts of aliens as cover stories. They allude to the idea that the Soviets invented a new weapon that basically caused instant petrification.

But the science channel never mentioned anything about this story coming from the Weekly World News, at least not in the YouTube version that I watched. So to me, this seems a little misleading. Science channel is clickbaiting, but I think they mainly just wanted to talk about petrification. And in fairness, they managed to make petrification halfway interesting. But it looks like the Soviets did used to test nukes in Siberia. And the Soviets got pretty experimental with nukes during the Cold War, which was still going on when the Soviets supposedly shot down that UFO in 1987.

For example, in 1961, the Soviets set off Tsar Bomba, the king of the bombs over the Arctic Circle. Tsar Bomba was the largest hydrogen bomb ever and was 3,300 times as destructive as the weapon that leveled Hiroshima. Look, humanity needs to cut it out with the nuclear weapon stuff. But let’s give credit where credit is due. Whoever named this thing Tsar Bomba deserves a raise. Nailed it. But the Soviets developing a revolutionary weapon in the 1980s seems a little unlikely based on what we’ve seen lately. Recently, Russia decided that it would be a cool idea to invade Ukraine.

By the way, very not cool. But the Russians messed up the design of their new tanks so badly that the Ukrainians were taking them out with cheap drones. They say that more than 1,900 tanks have been taken out. So the Russians had to pull out decades-old tanks that were designed in the 1940s. The point of this tangent is that the science channel may be giving the Russians little too much credit for developing this weapon. This theory also doesn’t explain the two Soviet soldiers who supposedly lived through whatever happened in 1987. And it seems unlikely that they would have lived through any type of nuclear attack that humans might be capable of.

So this theory seems pretty unlikely. And maybe that’s for the best. Weird reality option three. The CIA gave this information to Weekly World News as part of a propaganda campaign. And this CIA document was made in follow-up. Why would the CIA do this? Why does the CIA do anything that it does? For example, ever heard of Operation Acoustic Kitty? In the 1960s, the CIA spent about 20 million dollars to basically put radio parts in a living cat so that they could eavesdrop on the Soviet embassy in D.C. Those parts included a microphone, radio transmitter, and an actual antenna.

They performed surgery on the cat to do this. But it was worth it, right? National security. Mission accomplished. Well, the cat survived the surgery. But before it got to the embassy, it got hit by a taxi and died. I’m not creative enough to make this stuff up. 20 million dollars, by the way. But the CIA also has a very real history of meddling in the media. That’s exactly what they did in Operation Mockingburg. In that operation, the CIA attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. How’d they do that? Well, the CIA recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and influenced the operations of front groups.

According to a Rolling Stone article in 1977, there were more than 400 American journalists who in the prior 25 years had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA. The most valuable of its associations, according to CIA officials, was with the New York Times, CBS, and Time. So much for independent media. At least we have independent media now, right? Well, CNN’s Anderson Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the CIA. This is very true and very convenient. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. My point with all of this is that if the CIA were a person, we would probably call it a psychopath.

And even though Weekly World News probably made up this Soviet UFO story, this kind of CIA history is the only reason I’m even willing to entertain the idea that the CIA actually gave Weekly World News this information. Maybe the CIA wanted this news to get to Russia and used Weekly World News as their conduit, poking the old post-Soviet bear to see if they’d do anything about it. And Russia did. They wrote an article about it and called Weekly World News authoritative. Sounds like this foreign paper may be spreading misinformation, doesn’t it? Well, that leads us to Weird Reality option 4.

The CIA gave the information to Weekly World News as part of a misinformation or disinformation campaign. I think these types of campaigns by our government are basically undeniable at this point. But there’s plenty of examples. Let’s look at one. The story of what the U.S. government did to Paul Benowitz. Rabbit hole warning. So during World War II, Benowitz was a radio electronics engineer for the Coast Guard. He was a businessman after the war and later a UFO enthusiast. He claimed to have discovered alien devices and communications at Kirtland Air Force Base.

That’s a base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He even went to the base and presented his findings to the officials there. Well, a CIA document claims that Richard Doty, who was with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, was actually running a disinformation campaign against Benowitz. It basically drove Benowitz crazy. He ended up accusing his wife of being in control of the extraterrestrials and attempted to barricade himself inside his home using sandbags. We’ve all been there, am I right? Jokes aside, this was serious for Benowitz. He ended up being put in a mental health facility by his family.

Again, never rule out the possibility of our government doing just about anything. I just hope they aren’t using Rogan for misinformation. For better or worse, we still need to talk about the likely more boring reality. Weekly World News probably just made up the claim for entertainment and didn’t actually have a CIA source. Maybe they took inspiration from that 1982 late bike haul story, changed it up a bit and got creative with it. But this would probably mean that the CIA was investigating Russian and Ukrainian papers that mentioned the CIA.

And they actually needed a translation so that they could understand what the foreign paper was saying about them. This actually makes perfect sense and wouldn’t really be nefarious. I would think that they would keep tabs on most papers in the world and definitely the ones that mentioned the CIA so that they can keep tabs on what the papers are saying about them and what the general sentiment towards America is in other countries. And we saw that the Ukrainian paper called the Weekly World News authoritative. So it seems likely that the paper was trying to mislead the public about the West.

Or maybe the Ukrainian paper that published it is a tabloid. Look, I can handle navigating the CIA website and even making some sense of it. But I don’t speak Ukrainian or Russian and I don’t have a great way of researching this paper. So if you know anything about the Ukrainian paper that published this article, join our Discord and let me know. The bottom line is this, the Weekly World News is not meant to be taken seriously. And the CIA document doesn’t appear to confirm the Soviet alien encounter at all. Did the CIA tell the Weekly World News about this Soviet alien encounter? Maybe, but we don’t really have any good evidence for that.

It’s more likely that the CIA was just keeping tabs on what this foreign media outlet was saying about them. But the CIA was up to something. As we’ve seen, they almost always are. There’s more to talk about when it comes to questionable government activities. If you’re new to the channel and want to see more about SUS government behavior, on the previous episode, we talked about the Bush family’s connections with the Bin Laden family, odd FBI behavior, and allegations that Bush appointed family friends as CIA operatives while he was the head of the CIA.

You can catch that video here. I appreciate you taking the time to join me on this project and we’ll see you on the next one. Until then, watch out for the lizard people. [tr:trw].