He never spoke of it again. But every time after that, when the northern lights shimmered green and violet over the Barents, Captain Viktor Sikorsky would glance starboard—and smile, just a little, at the empty air.
Silence in the cockpit. Zhukov crossed himself. Sikorsky stared at the disc. It dipped its leading edge—a bow, or a nod—and slid closer, two hundred meters now. Close enough to see that its surface wasn’t metal but something like polished nephrite jade, veined with faint, moving light.
The amber ring on the disc brightened. A beam of soft, blue-white light swept across the Il-38’s fuselage, nose to tail. Every warning light on Sikorsky’s panel flickered—then steadied. The radio emitted a single chime, followed by a burst of static that resolved into a pattern. Rhythmic. Almost like syllables. captain sikorsky
Sikorsky keyed the intercom. “Sensor station, give me something.”
Sikorsky made a decision he would later write down in a classified report that would be locked in a safe no one would open for thirty years. He reached out and pressed the transmit button on his yoke. He never spoke of it again
Today, something asked to fly with me. And for one night, the sky was not an empty battlefield.
“Wait,” Sikorsky said into the mic. “Who are you?” Zhukov crossed himself
Sikorsky’s jaw tightened. He was fifty-two years old, a veteran of two naval conflicts, a man who had once landed a crippled plane on an ice floe with one engine on fire and three dead gyros. He did not startle. He did not speculate. He observed.