Someone in the car saw the circle first.
Albert Trofimov was riding in the back by then. He had been driving towards Kimry through the night, but after passing Dubna he felt sleep coming on and exchanged places with his companion. The other man was at the wheel when he called the group’s attention to something ahead.
They stopped. The headlights went off, though the smaller running lights remained on. Through the windscreen, Trofimov said, a brilliant shape hung just above the horizon, roughly in line with the road. Four people had set out together; now they were looking at something Trofimov could not identify.
The account survives in Vadim Chernobrov’s UFO archive, where it is attributed to Trofimov. It places the stop about twenty kilometres before Kimry, in what was then Kalinin Oblast, on the early morning of September 14, 1977.
A circle with a dark centre
Trofimov had described the night as cold and clear, with stars visible. Against it, the bright form was almost round, slightly stretched vertically. Its outer region seemed silver to him, with darker flecks. The light weakened towards the middle until its centre looked nearly black. He wondered whether he could see stars through it.
The engine was still running while they watched. Trofimov first looked through the windscreen rather than stepping onto the road. Trees hid a little of the circle’s lower edge, so the shape was already partly screened by the landscape even before they drove on.
The circle was not the whole sight. Lower inside it, Trofimov described another shape, long and irregular, lying across the opening. The left side looked broader and held a brick-red triangular glow. Dark red bands appeared along and within its outline.
Those details gave the travellers two things to watch at once: a luminous boundary and a darker form within it. Trofimov did not supply a photograph or a measured angular size in the surviving entry. What he left was a description of colour, position and a changing relationship between shapes, seen from a car on the road.
For ten or twelve minutes, they remained stopped. The circle appeared to grow. To Trofimov, it gave the impression of coming closer. He later wrote that his wife felt as if an enormous body might collide with Earth. The two women wanted the driver to turn back.
Instead, according to Trofimov, the car went forward.
Trees across the view
The road bent right. As the car moved, trees came between the travellers and the light. The form no longer looked the same from this changing position: Trofimov compared its altered outline to the cap of a mushroom. Then the trees hid it entirely.
At the first stop, the group had watched from one fixed place. Now the car was moving and the trees repeatedly cut across the horizon. The bend hid the light entirely, but Trofimov was not ready to leave it behind.
Trofimov asked for another stop. He placed it some ten to fifteen minutes after the first. The car pulled up where the trees opened towards a field. From there, he said, lights on poles near Kimry were visible to the left. The travellers got out and walked closer to the field. He estimated they were still about fifteen kilometres from town.
What appeared above Kimry now seemed different. Trofimov reported that the inner, elongated form remained, but the surrounding circle was gone. He felt less afraid, he said, because the shape appeared to be drawing away.
The first stop had offered a ring with a dark centre; the second offered the dark shape without the ring. The town’s lights gave the travellers something fixed beneath it. They drove towards those lights, and the sky changed again.
Through Kimry and beyond
They drove into Kimry. Trofimov said the object was no longer visible when they arrived. The road, however, took them out of town again, and they saw it once more. Now it appeared to be on the right of the car rather than ahead or left.
In his account, the travellers continued watching as they drove. He described the shape as receding, still in view until the night began to give way to morning. During the sixth hour, clouds came from the north and finally concealed it. Trofimov estimated that the entire observation had lasted about an hour and a half.
The timing in the archived version is not a minute-by-minute log. Trofimov said the two couples left Podlipki at about one in the morning, placed the first encounter after three, and also remembered watching until the approach of dawn. His duration is an estimate, and the account does not tell us exactly when each stop or change of view occurred.
That leaves the journey’s order clearer than its clock: a halt before Kimry, a decision to drive on, another stop near a field, the disappearance of the shape in town, and a last view from the road beyond it. At each stage the car, the trees and the travellers’ position changed. The reported light was never observed from one fixed station for the whole interval.
Trofimov’s account describes a night shared by four people. What survives publicly, though, is his telling of what they saw and did. The driver has no separate voice in the record, nor do the two women. Their reactions reach us through Trofimov, just as the circle, its dark centre and the reddish form do.
What Is Known
The publicly accessible Kimry record is an entry in Chernobrov’s Chronicles of UFO Visits, numbered 1172/3-10. It attributes a first-person account to Albert Ivanovich Trofimov and records his route through Dubna towards Kimry, two stops, descriptions of the changing sight and an observation into the early morning. September 14, 1977 was a Wednesday, as the account says.
The archive’s introduction dates the compilation to September 2002 and explains that its entries were edited for readability while retaining much original wording. It does not give a date for Trofimov’s statement, identify the original collector for this entry, or publish separate statements from the other three travellers. Versions of the same text on other sites are copies of this source trail.
The archive also places a report of a white light near Bolshoye Svinorye, outside Moscow, at roughly four that morning. It is a distinct report, and the available record gives no basis for treating the two observations as one event. No identified object or cause emerges from the Kimry entry itself.
The Bigger Picture
The timing places the reported Kimry drive six days before the far better documented Petrozavodsk light display. A 1978 Soviet research supplement on that later event counted dozens of witness reports and carefully separated direct accounts from reports passed through newspapers and agencies. It did not study Trofimov’s drive as part of the September 20 phenomenon. The two dates should remain separate.
That comparison shows what the Kimry case lacks without diminishing the human story in the archive. Petrozavodsk left a dated scientific paper and multiple reporting channels. For Kimry, the route and the successive views are preserved in one attributed narrative whose original collection date is unknown. The changing circle remains vivid because Trofimov described where the car stopped, where the trees cut off the view, and where the light appeared again. Those landmarks make the story possible to follow. They cannot, by themselves, tell us what hung beyond the road.
Sources
- Vadim Chernobrov, Chronicles of UFO Visits, entry 1172/3-10. Edited archive transcription of a first-person account attributed to Albert Trofimov; compilation dated September 2002, original statement date unspecified.
- Chernobrov, introduction to the same archive. Provenance and editorial policy for the compiled entries; this is the same source trail, not independent corroboration.
- L. Gindilis, A. Makarov, D. Menkov and I. Petrovskaya, supplement on the September 20 Petrozavodsk phenomenon, 1978. Independent historical context for Soviet investigation of sky reports later that month; does not investigate Kimry.
