'Close Encounters in Afghanistan': The 1981 Cable on Soviet Lights
Travellers in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan described silent lights bright enough to flood miles of sky. The U.S. consul in Peshawar started as a sceptic, then an NBC producer saw one near Khost.
What this record is
ISLAMABAD 01515 is a confidential telegram dated 4 February 1981. The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad forwarded it to the Secretary of State and the embassy in New Delhi, repeating in full a cable sent the same day by the U.S. consulate in Peshawar (PESHAWAR 0047). The Peshawar cable carries the drafter’s name, D.B. Archard, and the whole text is marked confidential. Its subject line, “Close Encounters in Afghanistan,” borrows the title of Spielberg’s 1977 film, but its tags are military ones (MOPS, MMOL, with the country codes for the USSR and Afghanistan). This was not a UFO report so much as a report on a possible Soviet battlefield technology that had picked up a UFO reputation.
The State Department declassified and released it in full in December 2025. It appears in the National Archives catalog by February 2026.
What it says
The consul opens with his conclusion: he is convinced there is substance in many travellers’ reports that the Red Army was using “a type of very powerful, high intensity light” in Afghanistan, perhaps for perimeter defence or road security. Peshawar, the main gateway for journalists and adventurers crossing into Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of December 1979, had been hearing and reporting such stories since the previous September, mostly from French journalists. They described strange lights illuminating large parts of the Afghan sky, often a quarter of it or more. Sightings had been reported to the consulate from Ghazni (August 1980), Gardez, Nuristan (September 1980) and Khost (January 1981).
The accounts, the cable says, agreed on the brightness of the lights, the distances from which they could be seen and the size of the area lit, more than five miles across and perhaps much more. They disagreed on details. Some mentioned narrow beams like lasers or searchlights, while most described diffuse light. Some said the lights waxed and waned slowly, others that they came on at full strength and went out instantly.
The consul had been sceptical of stories with what he called “a UFO cast” until NBC producer Joe De Cola came back from Paktia in January. He knew De Cola well and considered him a careful observer. Around 1 January, about 12 miles south of the Khost garrison, De Cola and his crew “saw the light.” It was already at full intensity when they noticed it. They first thought it was carried by a helicopter searching for them, but it did not move and they heard no engine. They left as fast as they could and were sure it stayed visible and stationary for at least 20 minutes. De Cola thought it came from an airborne source a few hundred feet up, perhaps hung from a balloon, and, like other witnesses, he wondered whether its main purpose was to frighten would-be attackers. He was sure it was not a hand-held magnesium parachute flare of the kind the U.S. Army used, because it neither moved nor burned out, and not a mortar-launched flare, because there was no explosion and no drift.
A second account came on 3 February from Dominique Vargas, a French professional photographer who, the consul noted, seemed to have some scientific and military background. Near Asadabad in Kunar the previous September he had seen a light “colder and whiter” than a tungsten source. It lit an area at least 5 to 10 kilometres across in what he called a perfect, clearly outlined hemisphere. It reached full intensity at once, held it for two or three minutes, then spread outward over about 15 minutes while fading to nothing. Vargas thought the source was on the ground, since an airborne light would have lit more than a hemisphere. He heard no sound.
The cable closes by setting aside a different case: a moving night light over Islamabad’s Margala Hills, seen by diplomats a few months earlier and reported in the press, which the consul assigned to “the moving light, classic UFO school” and judged unrelated.
Context
The cable is a good example of how an unexplained light is read differently depending on where it is seen. In a war zone, the consul’s first and last question was military: what were the Soviets using, and why? The witnesses’ descriptions, a silent, stationary source lighting miles of ground, coming on at full strength and fading over minutes, sit comfortably with military illumination, whether a searchlight array, a tethered or balloon-borne lamp, or illumination rounds fired in a way unfamiliar to Western observers. The cable itself notes that De Cola ruled out ordinary flares, but his reasoning rested on a single sighting at night from 12 miles away. None of the witnesses saw the source.
The expanding, fading hemisphere Vargas described is harder to place. It resembles the domes of light reported elsewhere during rocket launches and high-altitude releases, including the Kuwait Airways sighting of June 1980, though nothing in the cable connects his sighting to one.
Status
The State Department never presented this as a UFO case, and neither should anyone else. The consulate concluded that the Soviet army was probably using a powerful lighting system in Afghanistan and passed on the best eyewitness descriptions it had. No follow-up telegram identifying the equipment is in this file. The lights are unidentified in the narrow sense that the record never names their source, but the likeliest explanation is the one the consul offered in his first paragraph.
Sources
- National Archives catalog, ISLAMABAD 01515, “Close Encounters in Afghanistan” (4 February 1981): https://catalog.archives.gov/id/608863156
- File: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/608806625/059UAP00004_81_ISLAMABAD_1515.eml.pdf
- Series: Records from the Department of State Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/608806625