State Department UAP Cable 2, Kazakhstan, January 31, 1994

On January 27, 1994, a Boeing 747SP carrying one Tajik Air chief pilot and two American pilot colleagues encountered an unidentified object while flying at 41,000 feet over Kazakhstan at coordinates 45 degrees north, 55 degrees east. According to the file, the crew first observed the object as a bright light of enormous intensity approaching from the eastern horizon at high speed and at an altitude significantly above their own aircraft. The pilots watched the object for approximately forty minutes as it performed rapid maneuvers including circles, corkscrews, and 90-degree turns at high rates of speed and under what they estimated to be very high G-forces. The object then adopted a horizontal course and disappeared over the horizon to the west.

The crew was unable to discern the object's shape due to darkness during the initial sighting. They described the light it emitted as resembling a high-speed photograph of a bullet in flight, with a small object producing a much larger trailing wave of heat and light, which they characterized as a "bow wave." Approximately forty-five minutes after the initial encounter, as dawn broke, the aircraft flew beneath contrails the object had left behind. The crew, traveling at over 500 knots, estimated the contrails' altitude at approximately 100,000 feet. The chief pilot noted that such altitude makes ordinary aircraft contrails physically impossible due to insufficient air and moisture. The contrail paths matched the object's maneuvering patterns, including the same circles and corkscrews observed earlier.

When State Department personnel suggested the object might have been a meteor skipping through the atmosphere, the pilots firmly disagreed. All three stated they had observed thousands of meteors and space debris during their years flying passenger aircraft for Pan American Airways, and characterized this encounter as fundamentally different. Based on the object's speed and maneuverability, the chief pilot expressed the opinion that it was extraterrestrial in origin and under intelligent control, an assessment his crew appeared to support. Photographs were taken with a pocket camera and were to be forwarded to the embassy if developed successfully. The State Department reporting officer offered no independent assessment, noting in closing that the account was being submitted "for what it may be worth."