PURSUE Release 01: State Department UAP Cable 2, Kazakhstan, January 31, 1994

This PURSUE Release 01 record is a Department of State cable dated January 31, 1994 and transmitted from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe to the Secretary of State, with information copies routed to regional U.S. embassies and intelligence agencies.¹² The cable subject is "Tajik Air pilots report unidentified flying object," and the release metadata places the incident over Kazakhstan on January 27, 1994.¹²

  Dushanbe Embassy Intake

The reporting source was Tajik Air chief pilot and U.S. citizen Ed Rhodes, joined by two American pilot colleagues.² They told Embassy personnel on January 29 that they had been flying a Boeing 747SP at 41,000 feet near 45 degrees north latitude and 55 degrees east longitude when they saw an object at a much higher altitude approach from the eastern horizon.²

The cable records the crew's account as an eyewitness report, not a completed investigation. It says Rhodes expected to send Embassy Dushanbe and the Department's Tajikistan desk copies of photographs taken with a pocket Olympus camera if the images came out, but the released PDF does not include those photographs.²

  The High-Altitude Encounter

The crew described the object first as a "bright light of enormous intensity" that moved at great speed above their aircraft.² They said they watched it for about forty minutes while it made circles, corkscrews, and 90-degree turns before leaving on a horizontal high-speed course over the horizon.²

Because the sighting occurred in darkness, the pilots said they could not determine the object's shape.² They described the emitted light as having a "bow wave," comparing it to a high-speed photograph of a bullet in flight with a small object and a larger trailing wave of heat or light.²

The cable also records a later observation of contrails. About forty-five minutes after the initial sighting, as sunrise began, the aircraft flew beneath contrails the crew attributed to the object, and Rhodes estimated their altitude at roughly 100,000 feet.² The pilots told the Embassy the contrail paths matched the earlier circles and corkscrews, but the cable does not independently verify the altitude estimate or identify the object.²

  Rhodes's Claim, Embassy's Caveat

Rhodes and the other pilots rejected an Embassy suggestion that the object might have been a meteor entering or skipping off the atmosphere, saying their airline experience included many sightings of falling stars and reentering space debris.² Rhodes then expressed the opinion that the object was extraterrestrial and intelligently controlled, and the cable reports that his crew appeared to support that view.²

The Embassy's own comment was deliberately narrow: it had "no opinion" and passed the account along for what it might be worth.² That caveat matters because the record preserves a striking pilot report and the pilots' interpretation, but it does not establish the object's origin, speed, maneuverability, altitude, or any extraordinary cause beyond the witnesses' statements.²

  Into State Department Channels

This cable matters because it shows how a U.S. Embassy transmitted a detailed civilian airline UAP report through official State Department channels in near-real time.² The record is unusually specific about the witnesses, aircraft, location, altitude, reported maneuvers, and the Embassy's uncertainty, making it useful as a primary-source account of how one high-altitude Kazakhstan sighting entered the diplomatic record.¹²

  References

  References

1. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷