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“ & Flash seen in the sky was Soviet rocket fuel | By David Shoup Times Writer / A month ago, dozens of North- west Alaska villagers reported _ seeing a bright flash in the sky. Some reported the flash as a UFO. . It wasn’t. Instead, what the villagers saw was the dumping of fuel from the tanks of a new-genera- tion Soviet rocket launched from Tyuratam, the Soviet central Asian space center, according to Rocket: Alaska flash Continued from page A-1 “It (Cosmos 1833) was about 200 miles up when you (Alas- kans) saw it,” he said in a tele- phone interview from his home near Houston. The villagers reported sight- ing some kind of space vehicle, described by many as a UFO within a glowing cloud. “It was a fuel cloud,” said Oberg. Such clouds are created when rocket fuel is purged from tanks in flight. Oberg said Alaskans typically can’t see traces of Soviet rocket launches because their trajecto- ries take them.too far from the Alaska coast and too low in the sky to be detected. But this launch was different. For one thing, he said, the _ March 17 launch utilized the So- viet SL-16, a newly designed Rus- sian booster rocket which is very large and has been used only a handful of times. For another, Cosmos 1833 was pushing a Soviet spy satellite into a higher-than-normal orbit — about 600 miles up, he said. So when the fuel was jettisoned a prominent scientist. James Oberg, a flight control- ler for Rockwell Shuttle Opera- tions, On contract to the National Aeronautics and Space Admin- istration’s Shuttle Program, said Saturday the flash seen from Elim, Gambell, Savoonga and several other places in Alaska was caused by the launch of Cosmos 1833. Oberg is a promi- nent author of several books on Soviet space technology. See Rocket, page A-5 Siva - SAH{L ASVYOHINY 6 tude came from launch of Soviet Oberg said Alaskans typically can’t see traces of Soviet rocket launches be- cause their trajectories take them too far from the Alaska coast. and higher altitudes, from the rocket’s tanks, a nor- mal fire-prevention procedure, it was at an altitude of about 200 miles, high enough in the sky to be seen from Alaska. “With this new kind of rocket you’re likely to see quite a few of these in the future,” he said. Oberg first heard about the mysterious flash in the sky in a letter from Dave Cartier, a resi- dent of Pilot Station, a Yukon River village near St. Marys. Cartier, who saw the glowing cloud that night, had written to “Skeptical Inquirer,” a Buffalo, N.Y., quarterly that carries arti- cles on such things as UFO sight- ings, and the magazine editor forwarded the letter to Oberg. On his own time, much of which is devoted to investigating Soviet. space attempts, Oberg discovered Cosmos 1833 had been launched from Tyuratam at pre- cisely the right time to create the brilliant flash. “It’s.a pretty standard phe- nomenon,” he said, noting that fuel clouds from Soviet rockets SPy satellite are spotted Several times a year onde uth America. In fact. he caer’ Australians have grown ac- fre rome tO seeing fuel clouds ha American rockets, which tran: nN passing near Aus- a a Coastline since the 1960s. . (sn’t the first time a paght light in the northern sky rock N attributed to Russian ie etry. In October 1985, a So- onbit missile falling out of low on created a bright white light €r Southcentral Alaska that Was widely described as a UFO fie ai the U.S. Alr Force identi-