Polish Air Force Encounter 1991

On May 14, 1991, just two years after Poland's democratic transition, Polish Air Force radar detected an unidentified contact over the Silesia industrial region. Two MiG-21bis interceptors were scrambled from 2 Tactical Air Regiment. Both pilots obtained visual and radar contact with a metallic disc hovering at 5,000 feet before accelerating to 20,000 feet and performing maneuvers the pilots described as instantaneous direction reversals impossible for any aircraft they had flown or trained against. Ground radar tracked the object accelerating to speeds in excess of 5,000 km/h. The 20-minute incident produced a classified military report, but in the new political atmosphere of post-communist Poland, elements of the report leaked to the press — making it one of the first Eastern Bloc nation UAP cases to receive public domestic media coverage. Polish defence researchers subsequently compiled a database of communist-era UAP encounters that had been suppressed, revealing dozens of similar incidents over Polish airspace since the 1960s.