ET seems to feel at home in southern Russia. Recent unexplained lights in the sky, which have been caught on camera, are among the increasing sightings that are baffling the locals.
“The shape of these projectors made us believe that this was a flying saucer, or whatever it was it was rather large,” says Sergey Kolpikov, who has witnessed the lights in his home village in Russia’s Krasnodar region, which is preparing to host the Winter Olympics in 2014.The Kolpikovs were the only people to film the lights and have become overnight celebrities. The UFO tape was immediately aired on local television. The local channel TVK ran a feature story about the sighting, and posted the video on the internet.Local reporter Aleksandr Kulik broke the story, which made a complete change from his usual fare of milk yields and regional politics. Now he is ready to take on the X-Files.“When we shared the video on our website, people started copy-pasting it, so we got responses from at least five other eyewitnesses all over the Krasnodar region, who also spotted this particular UFO,” says Kulik.Ufologists say the area in Russia's south is similar to that around Roswell in New Mexico – a UFO highway filled, apparently, with alien visitors. But some experts like Vadim Chernobrov from “Cosmosearch”, an international research group that studies UFOs, are not totally convinced about the sighting. Many can be explained, although not all of them.“Besides the Chinese lanterns, or hot air balloons, or fakes, or atmosphere phenomena, Krasnodar region has a very high frequency of real extraterrestrial activity, almost the highest in the whole country. And in places like Sochi, which is a big city that stretches along the coast, there is of course a better chance to spot something unusual,” says Chernobrov.So why all this interstellar traffic in the Russian South? Maybe they are getting a sneak preview of the Sochi Olympics, or maybe they just like the place. Whatever it is, the truth is out there – somewhere.