The father of Soviet ufology Felix Siegel and 6 hypotheses of the origin of UFOs

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The father of Soviet ufology, astronomer Felix Siegel, was fond of science since childhood. At the age of six he assembled the first telescope, and at sixteen he left with an expedition to Kazakhstan to observe the eclipse of the sun on June 19, 1936. The trip forever turned the life of a Soviet boy, because an American expedition was located nearby - Felix met astrophysicist Donald Menzel.

Perhaps this expedition determined the fate of the young man. Siegel decided to become an astronomer and later devoted his life to educational activities. In the 1980s, every Soviet family had his books on astronomy, from Entertaining Cosmonautics to Treasures of the Starry Sky. But the special area of attention of the scientist has always been the study of unidentified flying objects. UFO Felix Siegel was engaged in spite of everything. However, his whole life was like this - in spite of the circumstances.

To the stars

Felix Siegel was born on March 20, 1920 in the family of the Russian German Yuri Siegel. A week before his birth, his mother, Nadezhda Siegel, should have been shot "for counter-revolutionary activities," but pardoned and released. In 1938, his father was accused of preparing a sabotage at the Tambov Aviation Plant and was arrested, but later released. Because of this story, Felix was expelled from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. And at the beginning of the war, the Siegels, together with other Germans, were sent to Kazakhstan. However, Felix managed to recover at the faculty, graduated from Moscow State University, then graduated from the Academy of Sciences, defended his Ph. D. thesis in astronomy and began teaching.

It turned out that the young scientist had the gift of a lecturer. Young people from all over Moscow came to his stories about the structure of the Universe in the Moscow Planetarium - the queues for tickets stretched for hundreds of meters. Siegel's lectures at the Geodesic Institute were popular with students. The astronomer arranged whole performances, to which dummy spectators were connected.

Science fiction aroused great interest then, and the fall of the Tunguska meteorite became a popular topic. Siegel studied the testimony of people who saw a body flying in the sky and heard the explosion, and decided that the "meteorite" was an aircraft. The scientist came to this conclusion by comparing the testimony of eyewitnesses from Angara and Nizhnyaya Tunguska - they did not coincide. It turned out that before the explosion, the object made maneuvers, which means it was controllable.

It was Felix Siegel who became one of the initiators of sending the CSE to Tunguska - complex independent expeditions, which included young scientists-enthusiasts. Official science criticized Siegel's theory of the artificial origin of the Tunguska meteorite, but this only fueled interest in the topic.

UFO problem

In 1963, when Siegel was already an assistant professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute and the author of a textbook on the physical foundations of cosmonautics, he got his hands on Donald Menzel's book "On Flying Saucers", published in the USSR. In it, the author argued that the UFO phenomenon does not exist. It was after the book by the American that Siegel decided to sort out the problem. However, his initiatives quickly met with hostility from Soviet officials. Even science fiction writers began to call him a saboteur of the West and assured that after his lectures labor productivity dropped by 40%!

At first everything was fine: in May 1967, in Moscow, under the leadership of Major General Stolyarov, a group of scientists was formed to study the phenomenon. They collected information about UFOs in the USSR and analyzed it. In the autumn of the same year, a UFO department of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee of DOSAAF was created at the Central House of Aviation and Cosmonautics, the very first meeting of which was attended by 350 scientists and journalists.

On November 10, Stolyarov and Siegel appeared on television and asked the residents of the USSR to send evidence of UFOs. The material that the scientists received was so extensive that on its basis they wrote a whole collection of articles.

But soon the work was interrupted: at the end of November, an emergency meeting of the DOSAAF Central Committee was convened, at which a decision was made to dissolve the department. Siegel's opponents held a series of lectures with refutations: UFOs do not exist in the USSR!

Siegel was stubborn: together with other scientists, he lectured, told and proved that the phenomenon exists. In early February 1968 in the House of Journalists a meeting of scientists with representatives of the media was held, at which academicians, doctors of sciences, pilots and engineers argued about UFOs, and academician Mikhail Leontovich, navigator Valentin Akkuratov, editor N. Pronin and engineer from Nalchik B. Egorov reported about their own observations of UFOs. Even a senior researcher at the VVIA im. Zhukovsky, General Grigory Sivkov said that Soviet radars had repeatedly spotted UFOs, and demanded that the problem be studied.

But it did not help. Most likely, the reason for the dissolution of the department was the chairman of the US Government Commission on UFO Studies, Professor Edward Condon, a participant in the nuclear project, who just at the end of February 1968 wrote a message to Siegel in which he offered to cooperate.

The topic was covered, but not for long. Siegel was saved by persistence. In 1974, the State Astronomical Institute opened a section "Search for space signals of artificial origin", and at the Moscow Aviation Institute, the indefatigable scientist created another group on UFOs and completed a state order - a scientific work on the appearance of UFOs in the Earth's atmosphere.

On July 1, 1976, he read a report on a UFO at the Kulon plant, which someone had drafted and put into samizdat with the author's phone number indicated.

The unimaginable began: UFO witnesses began to cut off the astronomer's home phone, called the department at the Moscow Aviation Institute. During the day, 30–40 calls were received. UFOs were seen in Armenia and Crimea, over Gatchina and in the Volga delta, in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and over the Sokolniki metro station.

In 1979, Felix Siegel became the head of a group of enthusiasts who collected and classified cases of UFO sightings in the USSR and abroad, proposed methods for studying phenomena, and wrote an introduction to the future theory of UFOs.

Six hypotheses about the origin of UFOs

Of course, the main thing that interested Siegel in the problem was contact with aliens. The astronomer put forward six versions of the origin of UFOs.

Some he considered a hoax. These were stories with fantastic plots that could not be verified. There were few such messages in the USSR. Most of the witnesses - pilots and scientists - spoke the truth, and the details were repeated from story to story.

Siegel attributed separate messages to hallucinations. There were few of them. Siegel drew attention to the fact that the phenomenon of "plates" has been known since ancient times and only those people saw them from the ground over whom the trajectory of the object passed, which excluded psychosis.

Some unidentified objects could be optical phenomena, but general and ridiculous explanations did not suit the astronomer. To the words of the American Menzel, "the plane shook the fog layer, and the moon was reflected in it" or "the pilot took the sun for a UFO and chased it," Siegel was skeptical.

Siegel agreed that some of the objects could be satellites launched by rockets or weather balloons, but there were a number of cases where the description of UFOs did not fit any of the known aircraft. For example, people saw huge crescent-shaped UFOs in the USSR. Siegel argued that these "sickles can be neither the Moon, nor the visible part of the shock wave." He found UFO sightings in the form of stars unexplained.

The scientist admitted that some of the objects may represent a phenomenon of nature unknown to people. He proposed involving meteorological services, tracking stations and observatories in observations, collecting facts, analyzing them and trying to recreate them in the laboratory.

And finally, about 10% of UFOs could be alien ships. This was supported by their unusual qualities, tremendous speeds, signs of controllability and similarity to the Earth's flying vehicles. The pilots' intelligence was indicated by the fact that they showed interest in the military-industrial complex and nuclear facilities, and the astronomer explained the invulnerability of the high development of an alien civilization.

What Felix Siegel believed in

He believed in the infinity of the material world, in the multifaceted nature of being and denied the existence of a finite and pulsating Universe. He believed that it was impossible to predict the behavior of matter in a singularity, and was dubious about the Big Bang theory, pointing out that the speed of the "recession" of galaxies is very small in relation to the background of the relic radiation. The scientist explained the theory of redshift in the spectra of distant galaxies by the large distance and the loss of energy by photons.

He was skeptical about the theory of relativity and the postulate that the speed of light can always be the same, and believed that the abolition of Einstein's theory could shed light on the phenomenon of "little plates".

Siegel predicted that wormholes in the form of black holes and anti-gravity engines would help mankind travel to the stars.

But most importantly, he believed that the UFO phenomenon conceals important information for humanity, which must be unraveled before moving on.

Felix Siegel died in 1988. He left to his followers 43 books and 300 articles on astronautics, astronomy and UFOs.