CIA-UAP-D001, Intelligence Information Report, USSR, 1973

Investigation reading

This Release 02 item is WAR.GOV/PURSUE manifest row 4, a Central Intelligence Agency PDF titled CIA-UAP-D001, Intelligence Information Report, USSR, 1973. The manifest describes it as a CIA intelligence information report about human-intelligence reporting from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with one section describing a source's alleged observation of a bright green unidentified object or mass in the sky. [S1][S2]

The document itself is not a standalone UAP incident report. It is an OCR-layered scan of a CIA information report on the Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range. The first page explicitly says it is an INFORMATION REPORT, NOT FINALLY EVALUATED INTELLIGENCE. Most of the visible text concerns range facilities, Site 4 warhead checkout activity, System-75 / SA-2 and System-300 / Aldan / GALOSH missile-related material, and rumors of laser-weapons experiments. The UAP-relevant material appears in numbered paragraph 14 on the last visible page. [S3]

The manifest row gives incident date 12/20/73, while the source paragraph places the observation on one evening in late summer 1973. For this draft, the exact observation date should be treated as unresolved: 12/20/73 is preserved as the manifest incident-date field, but the source text itself only supports a late-summer-1973 observation window. [S2][S3]

What the released item appears to contain

The visible CIA report frames the source as a former Soviet citizen acquired in Germany and describes the Sary Shagan range over a reporting period printed as November 1972 to November 1973. The OCR is imperfect, but the page images and text layer support a three-page excerpt: summary and front-matter on page 1, missile/warhead detail continuing on page 2, and the UAP paragraph on page 3. [S3]

The UAP paragraph says the source was at Site 7 and had stepped outside while watching a Canada-USSR sports competition on television. He reported seeing an unidentified sharp or bright green circular object or mass in the sky west of the site, at an angle of sighting of approximately 70 degrees. The altitude was described as undeterminable; a field comment says there were no clouds that evening and that the source believed the green mass would have been higher than cloud level, but the source could not estimate its diameter. [S3]

The same paragraph says that within 10 to 15 seconds the green circle widened and, within a brief period, several green concentric circles formed around the mass. Within minutes the coloring disappeared. The source reported no sound, including no explosion, associated with the phenomenon. A field comment says the source had no opinion about what the phenomenon was, that there were no resultant rumors, and that the source could not provide further details. [S3]

This is therefore a single-source HUMINT-reported observation embedded in a broader military-intelligence range report. It does not include photographs, instrument tracks, radar data, weather data, precise time, a precise coordinate, or a named witness. It also does not identify the phenomenon.

Source asset review

The reviewed source asset is the official Release 02 document-bundle PDF entry CIA-UAP-D001_Intelligence_Information_Report_USSR_1973.pdf. The extracted PDF is 154,038 bytes with SHA-256 d3039ed486d8400be3263c0c438b199abfdb8ac030156baff1536f007349d315. The official Release 02 document ZIP has SHA-256 8200c60f179767f50f5e6d0bf8373dfef7220326728610241394bcb8de22272d; this PDF entry is 154,038 bytes uncompressed, 151,450 bytes compressed, with CRC32 687a1410. [S3][S4]

Rendered-page review was used to check the OCR-sensitive UAP paragraph. The visual page supports the corrected reading unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass, west of the site, angle of sighting of approximately 70 degrees, 10 to 15 seconds, several green concentric circles, and Within minutes the coloring disappeared. The final field comment visibly preserves the awkward source wording that there were no resultant rumors; that should not be normalized into stronger corroboration or rumor claims. [S3]

The direct official PDF URL is preserved in this page. For source review, the verified bytes came from the official Release 02 document ZIP because the direct PDF endpoint returned an HTTP 403 response to a bounded HEAD probe from this environment. That access behavior is a custody/access note, not evidence against the official manifest row.

Source custody and provenance

Primary provenance is the official WAR.GOV/PURSUE Release 02 landing page and manifest row 4. The row identifies the item as Central Intelligence Agency, Release 02, release date 5/22/26, kind PDF, redaction flag TRUE, incident date 12/20/73, incident location USSR, and official PDF URL https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/documents/CIA-UAP-D001_Intelligence_Information_Report_USSR_1973.pdf. [S1][S2]

The manifest row also gives thumbnail URL https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/thumbnails/CIA-UAP-D001_Intelligence_Information_Report_USSR_1973.jpg, image alt text A CIA report about a UAP sighting in the USSR., and VIRIN 260508-O-D0360-1073. The reviewed PDF bytes are tied to the official Release 02 document ZIP entry named above; the ZIP hash, entry size, compressed size, and CRC32 are recorded to keep the source path auditable. [S2][S4]

No DVIDS media page, video ID, audio file, or paired source-media record is attached to this row in the manifest. This item should be modeled as a WAR.GOV document/PDF source with an OCR layer and rendered page images, not as a video/audio evidence item.

Graph context

The current Open Sky graph probe returned no exact graph records for this Release 02 slug, title, official PDF URL, or dataset row. It also returned no Release 02 dataset label counts in this worker context. That absence is not evidence against the document; it means this page is operating from official WAR.GOV manifest and source-asset provenance until Release 02 graph ingest catches up.

No graph-derived finding is made here. Future graph integration should separate the source document, the CIA information-report metadata, the Sary Shagan range context, Site 7, the single-source observation claim, and the field comments about altitude, absence of sound, absence of rumors, and lack of source opinion. Any title-related Soviet, Sary Shagan, missile-test, or green-luminous-phenomenon records already in the graph should be treated as leads unless explicitly tied back to this exact Release 02 row, PDF URL, or source-file hash.

Leads to check

• Reconcile the manifest incident date 12/20/73 with the source paragraph's late summer 1973 observation wording and the report's December 1973 distribution context before assigning a final event date.
• Identify the specific Canada-USSR televised sports competition mentioned by the source, if possible, because it may narrow the date, time, or witness context.
• Locate or model Sary Shagan Site 7 cautiously. A site-level coordinate would improve sky-geometry checks, but it must come from credible range documentation rather than guesswork.
• Run prosaic checks before escalation: missile or ABM test activity, rocket/upper-atmosphere plume behavior, high-altitude releases or exhaust, astronomical/meteor activity, atmospheric optics, weather/cloud cover, and range operations around the late-summer-1973 window.
• Preserve the observation as a single-source HUMINT report. Without sensor data, named witness context, exact time, and independent corroboration, it should not be promoted into a finding.
• When Release 02 graph ingest is ready, create provenance-first records for the PDF, text chunks/page images, source claim, location mentions, and source-field comments before making any cross-case analytical links.

Limits

This page is a source-review draft, not a finding. It does not conclude that the green object or mass was anomalous, technological, Soviet, U.S., astronomical, missile-related, atmospheric, or non-human. It preserves what the released CIA source appears to say and where the source itself is thin.

The PDF is a scanned, OCR-layered historical document with copy-disabled encryption and OCR noise. The UAP paragraph is readable in both extracted text and rendered-page review, but the full report still needs archival-grade transcription before exact quotations or field labels are used in downstream graph claims.

The report is HUMINT-derived and explicitly marked as not finally evaluated intelligence. Its source description, redactions, uncertain dates, lack of precise location/time, and lack of corroborating sensor records are material evidentiary limits.

Sources

• [S1] WAR.GOV/PURSUE Release 02 landing page: https://www.war.gov/UFO/
• [S2] WAR.GOV Release 02 manifest CSV, row 4, CIA-UAP-D001, Intelligence Information Report, USSR, 1973: https://www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv
• [S3] Official PDF URL, CIA-UAP-D001_Intelligence_Information_Report_USSR_1973.pdf: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/documents/CIA-UAP-D001_Intelligence_Information_Report_USSR_1973.pdf
• [S4] Official Release 02 document ZIP bundle containing the verified PDF entry: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/release_02_document_bundle.zip