The Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives contain many documents that drift between the historical, the operational, and the obscure. Among them is a one-page 1993 translation and report marked “UNCLAS” and processed through the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), originally sourced from a Ukrainian-language newspaper and passed on from a Russian outlet. The file, indexed under FOIA request F-2010-00651 and released to the public in 2011, recounts an event purportedly sourced from KGB archives. The report alleges that a Soviet military unit in Siberia was involved in an encounter with a UFO, which, following a hostile exchange, resulted in the deaths of 23 soldiers by means described as molecular transformation.

The article in question was reprinted in Bolos Ukrayiny on March 27, 1993, quoting the Ternopil-based paper Ternopil Vechirniy. The central claim is that, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the KGB’s Top Secret Intelligence Administration under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, sensitive materials were leaked, including what was described as a 250-page dossier. The file, according to the article, contained both eyewitness testimony and photographs documenting the encounter and its aftermath. These materials reportedly fell into the hands of U.S. intelligence and, at some point, were reviewed by CIA personnel.

According to the document, a saucer-shaped object appeared at low altitude over a Soviet military training area during standard field maneuvers. For reasons not explained in the file, a surface-to-air missile was fired at the object, which was struck and brought down. What followed is the core of the document’s unusual contents: five humanoid figures, small in stature and described with disproportionately large heads and black eyes, allegedly emerged from the wreckage. As per the two surviving witnesses, the beings grouped together and merged into a single spherical form that began emitting high-frequency noise before producing an intense burst of white light. At the moment of the flash, 23 soldiers observing the phenomenon were reportedly turned into stone-like formations.

The term used in the document is “stone poles,” a phrase that implies some form of biological petrification. The document goes on to say that the only two soldiers who survived had been in the shadow at the time and were therefore partially shielded from the flash event. These accounts, again according to the KGB materials cited by the Ukrainian article, formed part of a larger report that included post-event analysis. The resulting observations led to the claim that the transformation was not a conventional burn, radiation exposure, or chemical attack. Instead, specialists—reportedly from a research facility near Moscow—were said to have concluded that the soldiers’ molecular structure had been altered, turning their organic material into a composition chemically indistinguishable from limestone.

The reference to limestone is notable. In practical geological and chemical terms, limestone is primarily composed of calcium carbonate. The idea that a biological entity could be converted into this mineral compound through an external energy source implies some form of instantaneous atomic or molecular restructuring, a phenomenon not currently supported by known technology or natural processes. It is unclear what scientific tests, if any, were cited in the original KGB report. There is no indication in the CIA summary that any part of the original dossier was released or reviewed independently by U.S. scientists.

The CIA document makes brief reference to a quote from one of its unnamed personnel. The quote, paraphrased in the Ukrainian article, refers to the event as a “horrific picture of revenge on the part of extraterrestrial creatures.” The phrasing is unusually emotive for an intelligence document and may reflect the original article’s translation rather than a direct statement from CIA records. Nevertheless, the quote forms the core premise of what the Ukrainian paper described as “cosmic revenge,” a term included in the boldface headline of the reprinted article.