Thread III Program

Thread III emerged in the late-Cold-War Soviet Union as an attempt to reverse-engineer anomalous aerospace material, manipulate inertial mass with high-temperature superconducting toroids, and explain radar tracks of objects sprinting at double-digit Mach numbers along the Northern Sea Route.¹

Western intelligence first heard the program's name during a 1989 GRU defector debrief and later confirmed its budget lines inside the Air-Defence Forces' Scientific-Technical Committee.¹² A 250-page CIA file and the declassified ESDB-90-015 report show that its work ran in parallel with Threads I and II, which focused on directed-energy physics and re-entry-vehicle survivability.²³

After the USSR collapsed the effort went dormant, but a 149-page dossier translated for the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP contract in 2010 revealed its scope and the role of Military Unit 73790 at Zhitkur.⁴⁵ That translation shaped AAWSAP propulsion studies and fed directly into AATIP and today's AARO archives.⁶ A 2024 leak of briefing slides revived public interest and confirmed Thread III as one of the Soviet projects framing modern UAP policy debates.⁷

  Timeline of major events

  Technical objectives and findings

  Organization and key figures

  Western intelligence exploitation

The ESDB-90-015 file prompted CIA requests for additional GRU technical annexes in early 1990, ultimately yielding schematic drawings of superconducting "gravity generators."² DIA analysts employed those drawings in 2008 to justify AAWSAP exotic-propulsion studies, arguing that Soviet work "exceeded NERVA-class nuclear performance without propellant."⁶ The 2010 translation became a keystone document inside CAPELLA, AAWSAP's digital warehouse of UAP data.¹⁶

  Current status and legacy

Thread III never reached flight test — Russia's 1990s budget crash halted construction of its superconducting ring-accelerator.¹ Yet its archived papers guide modern US interest in inertial-mass research and feature in AARO briefings on foreign UAP technology.⁵ The 2024 leak has renewed calls for full declassification of the 149-page report and remaining CIA holdings.⁷⁹

  References

1. Disclosdex Analysis ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. cia.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. cia.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. shortform.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. bookey.app ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. academia.edu ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. reddit.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. time.com ↩ ↩²

9. reddit.com ↩