In February 2026, NewsNation broadcast an interview with former FBI agent and UFO investigator Ben Hansen discussing the long-awaited release of Soviet UFO files that investigative journalist George Knapp physically smuggled out of Russia more than thirty years ago. The documents confirm what researchers had suspected: the Soviet Union maintained active, secret UAP investigation programmes running in parallel with its public dismissal of UFOs as Western propaganda.
How Knapp Smuggled the Documents
Knapp made connections with Russian military and Ministry of Defence personnel who wanted the information to reach the outside world. The mechanism of extraction was direct and pragmatic: some of the documents still carried “classified” markings on their cover sheets. Knapp removed the cover sheets and placed the documents among his other papers for transit out of the country. Without the classified designation visible on the document itself, there was no basis for an espionage charge. The documents crossed the border in plain sight.
Hansen’s assessment on NewsNation: the Russian personnel who facilitated the handover wanted the world to know — but their superiors did not. The files moved through a gap between what officials in the field believed should be public and what officials higher up the chain were prepared to release.
What the Files Contained
The documents confirm the Soviet Union ran multiple UFO investigation programmes simultaneously — tracking thousands of reports of anomalous objects and close encounters, including claimed abductions. This ran in direct contradiction to the Soviet government’s official public position, which characterised UFO reports as American propaganda or mass hysteria. The classified programmes were tracking the same phenomenon the US government was tracking, through the same Cold War decades, arriving at the same conclusion: no final resolution, but the matter warranted serious investigation at the highest levels.
The 1980s Soviet Mass Sighting: Russia’s Phoenix Lights
Among the cases documented in the smuggled files is a mass sighting event from the 1980s in a small Soviet town. The object described was approximately 450 feet in size with a jellyfish-like configuration — identical morphology to the Iraq Jellyfish UAP documented in 2018 and to other contemporary sightings. Hundreds of witnesses observed it at close range. Hansen characterised the event as the Soviet equivalent of the 1997 Phoenix Lights: a mass public sighting that generated no Western media coverage at the time because the Soviet information environment simply did not permit it.
The 1978 Global Sighting Spike
The Soviet files also document a sharp increase in UAP encounters after 1978. Hansen confirmed this matched the pattern on the American side — a global sighting flap in the late 1970s that produced the Travis Walton case, the Coyne helicopter encounter, and numerous other documented incidents. The parallel spikes on both sides of the Iron Curtain rule out cultural contagion as the explanation. Both intelligence establishments were tracking the same phenomenon simultaneously with no information exchange between them.
Where to Access the Russian Files
No official Russian government portal for UAP files exists. The primary access points are: the CIA FOIA Reading Room at cia.gov/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact-or-fiction (search terms: “KGB,” “Siberia,” “Soviet Military”); the Archives for the Unexplained (AFU) at afu.se in Sweden, which holds physical and digital copies of Russian case files; and the work of researcher Paul Stonehill, who has translated and published Soviet naval USO encounter reports.
Source: NewsNation, Jesse Weber Live, February 10, 2026. youtube.com/watch?v=pYnDYLv1NPo. 275,000 views. Ben Hansen interview. George Knapp testimony.