On September 27, 1989, between 6:30 PM and 7:15 PM, residents of the Yuzhny Park district of Voronezh — a city of approximately one million in western Russia — witnessed what became one of the most widely-reported mass-witness UFO-and-entity events in Soviet history. Dozens of children playing in the park and approximately fifteen adults observed the slow descent of a large silver disc approximately 15 metres in diameter, which hovered for several minutes before landing in a wooded area at the park's edge. From the craft, three beings emerged: described as approximately three metres tall, with small heads on long necks, and accompanied by a shorter 'robot-like' fourth figure.
The entities reportedly walked in the park for approximately ten minutes, examining the ground and making measurements with an unidentified hand-held device. According to witness testimony, one of the beings 'touched' a 16-year-old witness with a long rod, which caused the boy to become briefly invisible; when the rod was removed he reappeared. The entities re-entered the craft and departed vertically. The landing site in the park was subsequently examined by Voronezh police, Soviet Academy of Sciences investigators under the Ministry of Defense's Setka UFO program, and biologists from Voronezh State University. The landing zone showed unusual depression patterns, abnormally elevated radiation (approximately twice background), and soil-chemistry alterations.
The Soviet state news agency TASS issued a formal report on October 9, 1989 acknowledging the Voronezh landing — an unprecedented state-media acknowledgement of a UFO-entity event. The TASS dispatch was carried by every major wire service in the world and generated international news coverage; the New York Times published a lengthy front-page article. The Soviet Academy of Sciences' Setka program's final report on the case, partially declassified in 1997, classified the event as 'a physical occurrence of unknown causation with multiple-witness corroboration.' The Voronezh case remains one of the most widely-reported and officially-acknowledged entity-contact incidents of the twentieth century, and a key reference in Russian UFO research.