On October 27, 1955, a CIA scientist sat down to interview a sitting United States Senator about something that had happened on a train. The senator was Richard B. Russell Jr. Democrat of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The interviewer was Herbert Scoville Jr. then Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, joined by a consultant named Dr. Francis Clauser. What came out of that interview is a two-page memorandum, marked Top Secret, that sat in CIA files for decades.
What the record describes
Russell had been traveling by train from Baku to Tiflis in the Soviet Union, by his own request, since he preferred rail travel whenever it was practical. About an hour and a half outside Baku, resting alone in his compartment with the lights off, he noticed a greenish-yellow ball rising rapidly into the night sky. He went and told the rest of his party. A few minutes later, they saw a second object do the same thing.
The accounts did not quite match. Russell himself never saw a shape, only the glowing ball. His interpreter, Mr. Efron, described two lights that looked like eyes. Colonel Hathaway, a military aide traveling with the group, reported a shadowy object with a single light, and separately described something triangular with three lights, as if launched from a site on the ground. No one could judge the size or distance of what they were watching, there was nothing nearby to measure it against. Witnesses described the objects as “whirling,” moving along a single unbroken path, glowing yellow without any blinking lights.
A separate account of the trip, not part of Scoville’s memorandum itself, describes the Soviet train crew growing agitated once they realized the Americans were watching something out the window, and pulling the curtains down. The memo on which this article is mainly based does not include that detail.
A separate incident is mentioned in CIA records from the same trip: during a motor journey between Moscow and Borodino, Russell reported seeing military barracks, radar installations, and an object he called a “big egg-beater,” reportedly some 20 feet (6 meters) away, according to The Black Vault’s account of the document. The memo treats this as a distinct event. It does not say whether investigators thought the two sightings were related, and nothing in the available record connects them.
What the CIA concluded
Scoville’s memo is not shy about its own answer. In his judgment, Russell’s account did not support the idea that the Soviets had built anything resembling a flying saucer or an unconventional aircraft. His stated explanation was plainer: the objects were most likely the exhaust trails of ordinary jet aircraft climbing steeply. A CIA historical review by Gerald Haines later summarized the finding the same way.
Scoville wasn’t working alone in his skepticism. Wilton Lexow, who headed the CIA’s Applied Sciences Division, reportedly asked why the Soviets would keep developing conventional aircraft if they already had a saucer. The memo also records Scoville questioning Efron’s account specifically, suggesting the interpreter’s perception may have been shaped by hearing Russell call it a flying saucer before Efron looked for himself. Of the whole party, only Hathaway’s testimony was described as actually supporting the idea of an unconventional craft.
The memo weighs the obvious objection, too, that the train trip was arranged to stage something for the Senator’s benefit, and dismisses it, on the grounds that Russell had asked for the train route himself, long before anyone could have known what he would see from it.
What the memo leaves open
Even with its own explanation on the page, the memo does not close the file. It allows that the jet-exhaust theory is probable, not certain, and says further discussion would likely be needed before the matter was fully settled. No instruments recorded altitude, speed, or size; everything rests on what four or five people, in the dark, from a moving train, say they saw. Scoville’s own notes raise the possibility that Russell’s party had been shown something staged by Soviet authorities, for reasons that are never spelled out. The record does not say what became of that question, or whether the “egg-beater” sighting near Moscow was ever folded into the same inquiry.
The paper trail
The memo was first released in redacted form in 1978. It stayed that way until The Black Vault, run by researcher John Greenewald, filed a Mandatory Declassification Review request on January 6, 2020. The review took a little over two years, and the full, unredacted memo became public via that process, published by The Black Vault on July 11, 2023. A related document, a CIA Current Intelligence Bulletin dated October 15, 1955, had already disclosed the Moscow-area sighting separately, through Project Blue Book files, well before the Russell interview memo saw daylight in complete form.
None of that paperwork answers the question the memo itself leaves standing. It tells you who looked into it, when, and what they concluded. It does not tell you, finally, what rose out of the dark outside Baku.