"The people of Earth have a dream to meet someone outside our planet. Alas, that's an ungrounded desire. I know what I say," he remarked to a news conference on his sensational venture jubilee.
"I led an expert commission that was delving into extraordinary events in space, and we never came on a single reliable instance-I swear."
The Russian cosmonaut offered newsmen a retrospect of unusual celestial objects seen on Earth. He regards some as due to weather, others to space rocket launches. Their exhaust fumes often take bizarre shapes in the upper atmospheric layers. "Thus, many saw crosses, with huge rings round them, staying long in the sky, especially on fine cold weather. That was so near the Plesetsk space center, in the Saratov Region, and in the Baikonur space center, after Soyuz booster rockets were launched. Many people saw them, and thought they were UFOs. That was how myth-making started.
"No one in the whole wide world, for that matter, has ever made a photograph in which something would clearly show that we could assuredly qualify as an UFO.
"Besides, no shots are coming up now that almost all have mobile phones with a camera built in-just why?" reasoned Leonov.
