Soviet Union.Kovalyonok · a cosmonaut sees an object beside Salyut-6

On May 5, 1981, around 6 p.m. by its commander's account, the crew of the Soviet space station Salyut-6 was carrying out routine operations in low Earth orbit during the crewed Soyuz T-4 expedition. The commander was Vladimir Vasilyevich Kovalyonok (a career cosmonaut, Major General of the Soviet Air Force and twice Hero of the Soviet Union), accompanied by flight engineer Viktor Savinykh.

Kovalyonok had just finished an exercise session when he saw through a porthole, in front of the spacecraft, an object flying on a parallel path. The station was passing over southern Africa, heading toward the Indian Ocean. In the account Michael Hesemann published in 2002 at the International UFO Congress, Kovalyonok begins by saying he had not spoken of such things for ten years: the elliptical object flew alongside them and, seen from the front, seemed to rotate in the direction of flight; there was an explosion "of golden light", one or two seconds later another one elsewhere, and two golden spheres appeared; then he saw only white smoke and a cloud-like sphere, and when the station entered the Earth's shadow he could no longer see them. In that account he spoke of "something impossible according to the laws of physics" and warned that distances cannot be judged in space: a small object can look large and far away, and sometimes a cloud of dust looks like a large object.

In other later accounts, Kovalyonok said the object looked small (comparable to a finger held up before the eye) and elliptical at first; as he watched, it became translucent, showed an internal structure and split into two connected parts, "a bit like dumbbells", with a gas- or plasma-like emission at one end that he described as "reactive object"-like.

Kovalyonok called Savinykh, who left his post and went to the porthole. According to the commander himself, they tried to photograph it, but while Savinykh went to fetch the camera the object "exploded" or dissipated, leaving a puff of smoke, and vanished before it could be recorded. After the mission, Kovalyonok reported the incident to the SETKA-MO program (↗), the Soviet UAP-investigation program then in its third operational year.

U.S. space journalist James Oberg, a specialist in the Soviet program, argues that many cosmonaut "sightings" correspond to distant rocket launches or missile tests: their fuel and exhaust clouds in vacuum, lit at grazing angles, produce translucent, shape-shifting objects that dissipate within minutes. He compares Kovalyonok's account with missile plumes photographed from orbit and from the ground (shapes and sizes, changes of elongation, identical illumination on entering Earth's shadow) and explores a secret missile test in southern Africa. But he himself concludes that the connection "remains speculative", that no records of launches in the area have been found, and that "the true nature of the phenomenon observed by the Salyut-6 crew remains unexplained".

Kovalyonok, in later interviews (among them the Russian documentary "Космонавты и НЛО"), said he believed he had seen an unaccredited artificial object of terrestrial origin, not an anomalous entity, though he could not identify it. According to the available accounts, a cross-check of Soviet and U.S. launch schedules for that date and trajectory found no compatible event. Jonathan McDowell's GCAT catalog, which includes ballistic-missile tests, lists no orbital or missile launch between May 4 and 6, 1981, only meteorological and research sounding rockets elsewhere; the next orbital launch is Kosmos-1269, on May 7 from Plesetsk.

Everything known about the case comes through Kovalyonok, a trained observer: the station commander, who said at a 2004 press conference reported by Pravda that he had spent 217 days of his life in space. There is no instrument record (no photograph, no radar), the sources consulted carry no account of Savinykh's own, and Kovalyonok's versions, told years later, do not agree in every detail: one speaks of explosions of golden light and two spheres; others, of an object that split in two and gave off an emission.

He himself did not rule out an artificial terrestrial object. Oberg bases his proposal, the exhaust of a distant launch, on its resemblance to photographed missile plumes, but leaves it as speculative, and the launch catalog offers no candidate for those days.