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Q: Was there a single experience that got you involved in UFOs?
A: Yes. When I was a youngster, about eight years old, I met an ex-arctic pilot who was in arctic aviation. He was a neighbor of mine. He told me that he had encountered something in 1936, and they were using primitive gatling guns for the airplane to shoot it down. It left them alone, but it was something unusual. The speeds were incredible. The object that they met was a shiny, silvery, cylindrical object. And from then on I started collecting information, and I was actually in touch with some Soviet UFOlogists, even in the worst years of the Soviet regime.
Q: Did you keep your research above-board, or did you keep it secret?
A: Well, it could never be open. So, people who were traveling were not afraid to take some of the information out of Russia.
Q: Can you talk about what you were telling me about the nuclear power plants?
A: My source is Detale Karotich (Sp?), who used to be a high-level Gorbachev official, and he worked with Yeltsin for a while too and then he quit. About two or three months ago a military exercise took place involving military jets, and missiles were being fired in the framework of the tests. One of the missiles missed a power station in Siberia by a very short distance. I believe 100 meters was mentioned. And Mr. Karotich published his article in Russia about the incident, saying, 'Look, it's been ten years after Chernobyl, we could have ten Chernobyls tomorrow and nobody basically gives a damn.'
Q: Have you seen any of that news presented in the mainstream media over here?
A: No.
Q: What percentage of news in Russia gets out?
A: The situation today in 1996 is much worse than it was in 1989 and 1991. There is no more Glasnost. They do have strict censorship over news subjects, and my friend, George Knapp, mentioned to me when he came from Russia a short while ago that the situation today is much worse than in 1993, and he's right. Very few news of importance is coming out, and especially because we have now -- meaning the United States -- difficulties with China, and Russia has a lot of cooperation with China.
Q: Can you talk about what you're working on now?
A: What I have done recently is compiled a chronology of the military interest and interactions, the Soviet military and Russian military, with unidentified flying objects. And it's very interesting because as I started working on that chronology, I tied it into a lot of things that have been happening here in the United States, and to be brief, I find a lot of cooperation between the two militaries, ours and Russian. What scares me is that things are becoming much more secret.
Q: Do you think there's a global conspiracy?
A: I don't think it's a conspiracy, but there are people who do. My friend and good acquaintance, and I'll tell you his name because the more you know of him the more he'll stay alive -- his name is Yuri Straganov. He's just finished a manuscript called UFOlogists in Military Uniforms which he hopes to publish. He has good connections with the former KGB and also some people in the former space research involved with the UFO studies. He believes there is a conspiracy: a conspiracy of the need to control information. That's most important.
Q: Is he here or is he still in Russia?
A: He's in Russia. I spoke to him recently. He told me he had very difficult times. He was sick and a lot of his research could not be conducted today as openly as it could be in 1989 to 1991, but he will go on.
Q: Has he been harassed?
A: He doesn't want to talk on the telephone, but I'll tell you this: Russian UFOlogists have been murdered, terrorized and attacked, only because they are UFOlogists. It's not the military who directly attacks them. Some fanatics who claim they are "Messengers of God" and so forth, but one UFOlogist, one research has disappeared. Somebody who I respected very much, who was not afraid of anything, his name was Alexander Rempel, stationed in the Far East, had done a lot of research, a lot of mini-expeditions, including to the site of the Tunguska 1908 meteorite crash. He has disappeared. I don't know anything about what happened to him since the end of 1994. I know that in 1992 he informed me that his research was being harassed and maybe even infiltrated by special military units stationed in the Far East to recover crashed objects -- doesn't have to be UFOs, some satellites and so forth -- and he promised to send the information to confirm, but the information never came, and I cannot find him.
Q: That must be painful.
A: It's painful because Russia today is supposed to be a democratic country, but we find that it's becoming more Stalinist than democratic.
Q: Have you been harassed?
A: In my youth I was doing a lot of things to smuggle books into the Soviet Union, Bibles, Solzhenitsyn's books and so forth. So, I knew what I was doing. I was never afraid. I was never harassed personally, but mail that was supposed to come to me never came here, and I know that a lot have been lost. Sometimes when people send me information from Russia, the Russian Post Office does not accept it. The worst incident happened in Bulgaria. My articles in Bulgarian about American UFOs and UFOlogy were banned, and the publisher of such articles, she was harassed, and she stopped.
Q: Are you writing a book?
A: I am working on a book to be published hopefully soon, Tales of Anomalous Eurasia. When it comes out I will let you know too. Meanwhile, most of my articles are published in UFO Magazine and in Faith Magazine.
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