What Did They See?
When the National Archives released its Russell sighting file in 1985, one document was withheld from the same Record Group for security reasons. The UFO research organization CUFON filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the withheld item, and it was finally released in very heavily redacted form in 1993. The pages below are reproduced courtesy of CUFON.
The document, Air Technical Intelligence Center "ELINT Progress Report Supplement," dated October 15, 1955, may or may not have a bearing on the Russell incident, but its contents may give some clues to the nature of the objects Russell saw -- or at least what ATIC suspected they might be.
Although the document has been so heavily sanitized that it is almost unreadable, it is obvious that it is describing the emissions of Soviet radar transmitters that had been recently recorded at Air Force Security Service installations at undisclosed locations. Published sources indicate that at the time of the Russell sighting, the US maintained listening posts in countries adjacent to this area of the USSR, and these may have been able to detect signals from the Baku region.
The document makes clear reference to detection of a UHF signal (see page iii below). It also refers to various signal modes from the target transmitter. It seems possible that this refers to the emissions of the tracking and guidance system of the SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.
The missile entered its test phase in 1954 near Lake Balkash, and Moscow, Leningrad and Baku were the sites of the system's first full-scale deployment in 1958. The area where the Russell objects were sighted was a rail junction near the Iranian border and seems to be a reasonable location for an air defense site positioned to protect military installations and the city of Baku from attack from the south. A Federation of American Scientists map of SA-2 and later SA-3 deployment in the former Soviet Union shows sites very close to, if not exactly at, the location of the sighting (arrow, below).
The date of the sighting seems very early for this missile, but the installation might have been an operational test location. Since the SA-2 was a major threat system to US aircraft from the late 1950s to the present, destroyed Gary Powers' U-2 near Sverdlovsk in 1960, accounted for many aircraft losses in the Vietnam war, and is still in service with some military forces, the long-term sensitivity of the ATIC document may be understandable, if this interpretation is in fact correct.
The apparent launch of the Baku objects from ramps (described by one witness as "a missile-like ejection"), and their wavering initial trajectories, might make sense if they were in fact SA-2s, which were often launched in salvos of two or more missiles at short intervals. This could also explain the fact that Gros was told by US Embassy personnel in Moscow that his group had passed through a "missile testing area" just as two missiles were launched, even though no major missile test installation existed near Baku.
Chinese soldiers run toward Soviet-designed SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile battery
The photo above shows the components of an SA-2 battery. In background at left, with its two dish antennas and box-like vertical and horizontal tracking antennas, is the "Fan Song" radar array used to track target aircraft and send commands to the missile in flight. The "Fan Song" had a highly distinctive audio signature, emitted at about 2900-3000 Mhz, that was detectable by western signal intelligence analysts as a "bird-song"-like tone. It also used a UHF-band guidance beam, transmitted by the dish antenna, to control the missile.
At the center of the picture, in the middle distance, is a truck with a double-X-shaped pole-mounted Yagi antenna. This is the "Knife Rest" early warning radar component of the system, operating on a frequency band of about 70-73 Mhz. With a detection range of about 350 km (over 200 mi), the signal of a Knife Rest sited near Alyat, Azerbaijan should have been detectable by USAF listening posts in Iran.
Photos below show an SA-2 launch:
SA-2 ready to fire
SA-2 launch
