Sullivan, Walter: New York Times, Wednesday, 17 October 1973
By Amid reports from at least six American states that unidentified flying objects had been seen and even been visited, Moscow reported last night the detection of radio signals that may have originated with another civilization.
The signals were recorded by a network of four stations operating under the direction of Vsevolod Troitsky, a well-known Soviet astrophysicist. According to news reports from Moscow the signals were in the form of pulses detected several times a day, each time lasting several minutes.
Earlier Soviet radio astronomers had reported detecting signals coincidentally at four stations from the Pacific to the vicinity of Moscow. However, the recordings occurred only in daylight and were finally attributed to outbursts on the sun.
A report by the Soviet press agency Tass said Prof. Samuel Kaplan of Gorky University was the first to identify the signals. It added that their origin from a man-made earth satellite had been ruled out.
The signals have been under discussion for some months. The Russians said they were not Soviet spacecraft and inquired if they might be from an American satellite. They were reportedly told "no," but this did not rule out the possibility that the space vehicle was of a clandestine nature.
It was also possible that the signals originated sufficiently high in the earth's atmosphere to be recorded by very widely spaced stations, the Moscow announcement said.
Meanwhile, news agencies yesterday carried reports of unidentified flying objects, or U.F.O.'s, from Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and West Virginia. They followed earlier television accounts of such sightings in Georgia. In the past such publicity has typically been followed by a rash of additional reports.
An Ohio report, by the Associated Press, concerned a woman who phoned police "hysterically" to say that an oblong object had landed in a field and killed two cows. The police investigated but were unable to confirm the account.
United Press International told of two shipyard workers in Pascagoula, Miss., who said they had been taken aboard a fish-shaped craft and subjected to examination by "an eye-like scanning device."
It added that Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University and Dr. James Harder of the University of California had examined the men under hypnosis and believed their account to be genuine. Dr. Hynek, who formerly investigated U.F.O. reports for the Air Force, has long sustained the majority view that they should be taken seriously.
If the signals reported by Moscow originate in some distant part of the heavens, because of the earth's rotation they should only be detected across the width of the Soviet Union during the same period each day. The Soviet account, however, did not specify the time interval between each period of signal receipt.