What if a government document seemed to prove a terrifying alien encounter? Deep in the CIA’s public archives, a file tells a bizarre and violent story—one that ends with 23 Soviet soldiers being turned to stone. The report has sparked years of debate, with its chilling tale of advanced technology and cosmic revenge blurring the line between an official record and something out of a nightmare. The story itself is shocking, but the real mystery is how this incredible report ended up in a CIA file in the first place.

A Terrifying Story from Siberia

As the file tells it, the event kicked off during routine army drills in the Siberian wilderness. A silent, saucer-shaped craft dropped out of the sky, a sudden visitor in highly secured airspace. For reasons the report doesn’t explain, a soldier fired a surface-to-air missile, hitting the ship and sending it crashing to the ground. From the smoking wreckage, five short figures are said to have walked out. They had large heads and huge, dark eyes, a perfect match for the classic “Grey” aliens of UFO lore.

The two soldiers who survived to tell the tale said the beings didn’t try to speak or run away. Instead, they huddled together and somehow melted into a single, glowing ball of light. The sphere buzzed loudly, swelled in size, and then burst—not in a fiery explosion, but in a flash of blinding white light.

The 23 soldiers who were looking right at it were instantly changed into what the report calls “stone poles.” A supposed KGB investigation later claimed that some unknown energy had transformed the men’s living cells into a substance no different from limestone. The two survivors were only spared, the story goes, because they were standing in the shadows, partially shielded from the blast. The file wraps up with a chilling quote from an American intelligence source who claimed to have seen the KGB photos, calling them “a horrific picture of revenge on the part of extraterrestrial creatures, a picture that makes one’s blood freeze.”

Lost in Translation: Unpacking the CIA File

While this wild story is right there in a CIA file (DOC_0_005517761.pdf), a closer look at the paper itself changes everything. It wasn’t actually written by the CIA. It’s a translation from a now-defunct branch called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The best way to think of the FBIS is as the agency’s librarians. Their job wasn’t to spy or check facts, but simply to read and translate foreign news—newspapers, radio shows, speeches—so U.S. analysts could get a feel for what was being said in other countries.

The document clearly names its source at the top of the page: a Ukrainian newspaper called Holos Ukrayiny (“Voice of Ukraine”), from an article published on March 27, 1993. Just because the FBIS translated it didn’t mean they believed it; it just meant the story was out there and they took note. As former CIA agent Tracy Walder explained, “This is not a document that the CIA originated.” The agency wasn’t reporting an alien attack; it was just noting that a Ukrainian newspaper did. And that “Approved for Release” stamp you see? It’s just red tape. It means the file doesn’t hold any national security secrets, not that the story inside is true.

Following the Trail of a Rumor

Tracing the story backward is like watching a rumor catch fire. The source, Holos Ukrayiny, wasn’t some supermarket tabloid; it was the official newspaper of the Ukrainian parliament. This lent the incredible story a false air of importance, making it seem like a big deal—big enough for the FBIS to clip and translate it.

But the paper wasn’t breaking the story. It was just reprinting an article from an even smaller, local paper, Ternopil Vechirniy. Each time the story got passed along, it seemed more real, further removed from where it actually started.

And here’s the kicker: the Ukrainian papers said they got the story from the “authoritative magazine Canadian Weekly World News,” which they claimed had the scoop on a 250-page KGB file. This creates a perfect feedback loop.

A Ukrainian paper quotes a Western source about a KGB-CIA affair; the CIA translates the Ukrainian paper; and decades later, people find the translation and think it’s the CIA confirming the whole unbelievable tale. The loop completely hides the story’s true starting point.

The Joke That Fooled the World

So where did the story really come from? The trail ends at an American supermarket tabloid: the Weekly World News. From the late 70s until it stopped printing in 2007, this paper was famous for making up bonkers stories and printing them as straight news just for fun. This is the paper that gave the world “Bat Boy“—a half-bat, half-human creature—and never-ending “reports” that Elvis was secretly alive and well.

Fact-checkers pinpointed the petrified soldiers story to the September 8, 1992, issue. A quick look at the other headlines that day tells you all you need to know. Next to the alien story were articles about a vampire who killed himself and an elderly couple who took a trip to paradise. The story of the Soviet soldiers wasn’t a serious report; it was a piece of fiction written to entertain an American audience who knew it was all a joke. It only became “evidence” when it was lifted out of that context and dropped into a foreign country where no one got the punchline.

A Story Stronger Than Truth

The fact that this story just won’t die says something fascinating about us. Its journey from a tabloid joke to a declassified “secret” shows how a really good story can feel more real than the truth. These tales stick around not because of evidence, but because they tap into something deep inside us: our fear of powers we can’t control, the mystery of the unknown, and the old idea of cosmic justice. They’re just the modern versions of the myths and legends we’ve always told.

The heart of the story—men turned from flesh into stone—touches on a basic human fear about how fragile we are in this vast, unpredictable universe. The story becomes a modern myth, a way for us to process our anxieties about life, death, and power. Believing in it isn’t just about being gullible; it’s about the mind’s powerful need to find patterns and create meaning, to build a reality that makes sense out of chaos. It shows that sometimes, our need for a good story is stronger than our need for facts. How we see the world is something we’re always building, piecing it together from what’s happening outside and what’s going on within us.

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