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THE U FO REPORT
Then it began to grow, touched the Earth and quickly began to grow until it was the size of the fi rmament. Then , just as quickly, it dispersed , melting away like a rainbow. Above the Earth where the sphere had been , a black body seemed to be suspended . We watched all this for three minutes , as did people from a service bus stand ing beside us . ' '
Yu. Grankin, head of a photographic laboratory "On August 25 , 1988 , my wife and I were at our datcha when at 1 1 : 08 p . m . we saw a huge sphere , six or seven times bigger than the moon , flying across the forest and the taiga from the direction of Krasnorechen , toward Dal negorsk. There was no sound. It approached at a tremen dous speed, during which time we noticed that it was spinning and there were spots on it, but I couldn't make out what sort of spots . . . . Then it began to go down behind the hill not far from Dalnegorsk , and began to spread very quickly . . . . The sky was black, but where the sphere had gone down it was milky-white . My wife and I were very frightened , thinking it was a nuclear ex plosion . ' ' [These three sightings seem to me to be more probably due to Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) tests , or barium gas experiments , but Nikolai Lebedev is sure they were not-Editor. ]
Pavlik Pavlov (graduated from the lOth Class, 1988) 8/27188 " On August 27 , at 10 :43 p . m . , as I was getting off a bus in the center of Dalnegorsk, I saw a large sphere de scending just above the Party Committee building, white, yellow, and orange in color. Its size was approximately one-fifth of the full moon . It hung for a short while over Dalnegorsk, then moved off in the direction of the quarry. I watched it for two or three seconds . Its speed was about 80 k . p.h . As it moved it emitted several bright flashes , as if at one-second pulses . ' '