Reported incident at a Soviet strategic missile regiment near Byelokorovichi in the Ukrainian SSR on 4 October 1982, in which a disc-shaped object is said to have hovered over the base while, in the underground launch control centre, the panels began an unauthorised launch sequence and ran for a period of seconds before stopping on their own.
Where the account comes from
The case reached the West after glasnost, through Soviet officers who spoke publicly and through documents that circulated in the 1990s; Robert Hastings gathered it into the Nuclear Interference literature, and it appears in the case lists of Imminent. Its evidential position is not the same as the American missile-field cases: there is no released service file of the kind Project Blue Book left behind, and the account rests on the officers’ testimony as relayed.
Why the shape matters
The American cases are mostly about objects near weapons. This one, as told, is about a weapons system doing something its operators did not command. That is the difference the Nuclear Interference argument turns on, and it is why the case is cited far more often than its sourcing alone would justify. It should be held at the weight its sourcing carries, not at the weight its shape suggests.
Connections
Nuclear Interference · Robert Hastings · Minot AFB 1968 · Malmstrom AFB 1967 · Project Blue Book · Imminent