A massive jellyfish-shaped "star" that lit up the northern Soviet sky on Sept. 20, 1977 caused an international stir at the time, made all the more intriguing by the unusually thorough coverage Russia's official state news agency Tass afforded eyewitnesses. That caught the attention of even the CIA, which documented the puzzling phenomenon in a secret assessment two days later, noting, according to since-declassified records, the "semicircular pool of bright light, red in the middle and white at the sides, then formed in this shroud" that would be visible from Finland to Vladivostok. The Kremlin swiftly began an investigation into the brilliant lights over Petrozavodsk.
Less spectacularly, but equally consequential, China three years later quietly acknowledged the work of a little-known UFO investigative office formed by a student at Wuhan University following thousands of unexplained aerial sightings across the country. Beijing embraced it, creating the government-sponsored "China UFO Research Organization," or CURO, under the division of its Academy of Social Sciences. The CIA similarly studied the move at the time, noting the organization's chairman at a conference in the Chinese capital touted one of its themes as, "searching for creatures that might be living in other solar systems.\
These events were both hugely consequential for so-called "ufologists" and profoundly frustrating. Despite the apparent acknowledgement by some of the world's most powerful countries that extraterrestrials – aliens – may exist and deserve government-backed scientific scrutiny, none produced public reports that appeared to take the subject seriously.
That, for the first time, is poised to change.
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