On September 27, 1989, a group of boys playing football in a park in Voronezh, a city about 300 miles south of Moscow, said they saw a pink glow and then a deep red ball about three metres across. They said it landed, and that very tall beings with small heads, along with a small robot, stepped out and walked about. Some accounts add that one being made a teenage boy vanish briefly with a ray gun. A local police lieutenant said he had seen a body flying in the sky.
The official Soviet news agency TASS reported the story on October 9, 1989, saying local scientists had confirmed a landing site and found unusual rock. The report caused a sensation abroad, coming at a time when Soviet state media were publishing many paranormal stories under the new policy of openness.
The claims quickly fell apart under scrutiny. The TASS correspondent told United Press International he had not seen anything himself and that his source was about ten children aged 12 to 13. The head of the local geophysical laboratory said the "alien" rock was ordinary hematite and that the site had been found by dowsing; he told a newspaper not to believe everything TASS reported. A university official said a raised level of caesium at the site was a common legacy of Chernobyl, and later reports said dozens of soil and plant tests found nothing unusual. A Soviet TV crew found no witnesses other than the children.
Skeptics such as Paul Kurtz saw Voronezh as a case of children's imagination amplified by state media. The story briefly made Voronezh a destination for UFO tours, and it remains the best-known Soviet-era entity case.