Five UFO stories from the Urals: a legend, a factory newspaper, a video and a prosecutor's investigation
Unidentified objects have been reported several times in Sverdlovsk Oblast over the past decades: in the taiga, above an airport and near a TV tower. An October 10, 2026 roundup by URA.RU brings together five earlier cases, but their reliability varies greatly: they range from a legend without official confirmation to a prosecutor's investigation.
The URA.RU roundup lists five cases of varying reliability, so it is worth separating at the outset what lies behind each of them. The Verkhoturye crash is a legend without official confirmation, the events in Shalya rest on eyewitness and video claims, the Asbest case is based on a contemporary report in a factory newspaper, the 2018 Yekaterinburg phenomenon was recorded by cameras and identified by an expert as a fireball, and the 2019 Airbus incident was the subject of a prosecutor's investigation whose outcome was not published.
The best-known story concerns April 15, 1980. According to URA.RU, ufologists hold that on that night the radars of the 4th Separate Air Defense Army detected targets maneuvering at twice the speed of sound that did not respond to identification friend or foe signals. One of the objects attacked one of the scrambled interceptor jets head-on, whereupon the pilot opened fire, and the object crashed into the taiga about twenty kilometers south of Verkhoturye. According to eyewitness descriptions, it was a disc roughly 26 meters in diameter and five meters high. Some accounts also speak of the bodies of two small beings. No official source ever confirmed the case. The article quotes only one elderly Verkhoturye resident, who claims he heard from an acquaintance in the secret services that the thing really happened.
The second case is the one that has a printed primary source: in 1990, Uralsky Asbest, the factory newspaper of the Asbest mining and processing plant, reported on a sighting on April 11. According to the paper, a cigar-shaped object landed east of the town. It quotes by name two eyewitnesses who were two kilometers apart: Sidorov, a resin collector, saw a flame in the night sky coming from a silent, cigar-shaped object, and Pudov said that the object hovered above the pine trees, directly above their house, and that it was as bright as day. Eighteen days later, the plant sent a radiation-measuring expedition into the forest. In its report, the paper published no measurement results, only that, according to the researchers, the Urals are a place where passage between dimensions is easier.
The third story belongs to the settlement of Shalya, which the article calls the Russian Roswell. According to local legend, in June 1980 a large, dark object fell into the lake, the water boiled, and fog covered the surrounding area. A deep depression was later allegedly also found on the lake bottom. In 1999, three young people filmed an object resembling two plates joined together. The footage was examined by specialists from the Yekaterinburg Film Studio and by Japanese documentary filmmakers, and according to URA.RU both concluded that it was not a fake. The Japanese also shot a film at the site. Two more recordings date from 2002. According to skeptics, these may be linked to failed ballistic missile launches, because the objects' trajectory allegedly coincides with the corridor of a secret military unit.
The February 13, 2018 phenomenon in Yekaterinburg was also recorded by cameras. Residents saw a bright sphere moving from south to north, with an orange spark at its center. Vladilen Sanakoyev, an engineer at the educational observatory of Ural Federal University, confirmed that a fireball (bolide) crossed the sky at 19:55. It was suggested that it was caused by sunlight reflecting off the antennas of the Iridium-49 satellite, but the time of the observation did not match the expected time of the satellite's atmospheric entry. The university asked motorists for dashcam footage so that the trajectory could be calculated from several points.
The most official case in the roundup took place on April 2, 2019. The crew of an Airbus A320 flying from Tashkent to Yekaterinburg spotted an object passing beneath the aircraft on a crossing course during landing. The Ural transport prosecutor's office opened an investigation into compliance with aviation safety regulations. It was suggested that it may have been a powered hang glider or a light aircraft, whose pilots are not required to notify air traffic control. The outcome of the investigation was not made public, so it is also not known what crossed the aircraft's path.
The sober take
The article itself mentions mundane explanations. The 2018 Yekaterinburg phenomenon was identified as a fireball (bolide) by the engineer of the university observatory. Reflection from the Iridium-49 satellite was also suggested, but the timing data did not support this, so the fireball explanation remained the most likely. In the 2019 Airbus incident, a powered hang glider or light aircraft came up during the investigation, but the final result was not made public. Skeptics link the Shalya recordings to failed ballistic missile launches. The source offers no explanation for the Asbest case and provides no data on the radiation measurements either. As for the Verkhoturye crash, no documents have ever surfaced, and it was never officially confirmed.