The UFO Tass Missed : Extraterrestrials: A Soviet emigre relates his own unearthly experience with a saucer-sighting in Moscow.

After 17 years of silence, I have decided to come forward and report that in the spring of 1972 I saw an unidentified flying object over Moscow.

After recent events at a park in the city of Voronezh, as reported last week by Tass, I am a little hurt that at the time I saw them, the aliens did not come out for a stroll and left no debris.

For this there are two possible explanations:

Aliens felt no urge to set their feet in the mud of the Chertanovo area of Moscow, where I lived. Considering the depth of the mud, their “object” would have had a difficult time on takeoff.

Aliens, like some of Russia’s new freethinkers, waited for glasnost before they ventured to show the world that they are humanoid after all.

I will refrain from further speculation and, instead, limit myself to the facts, withholding nothing, especially the details that do not support my account. The facts are these:

-- I was 13.

-- The only other witness was a seven-month-old German shepherd named Santa, now dead.

One spring morning Santa and I observed a large object hovering at approximately 37.5 degrees over the horizon, directly above the smokestacks about three miles away.

The object was different from the one recently sighted in Voronezh, 300 miles from Moscow. Ours was shaped like a saucer, and as it moved slowly in our direction it emitted a clicking sound, like a 10-speed bike--which at the time I did not yet own.

After 10 or 15 seconds the lights on the saucer went off and, as it continued toward us, Santa and I ran into the apartment building. We were not eager to be kidnaped, or dognaped, at the point of a laser gun.

One telling detail was that Santa ran ahead of me, tail between her legs. (A skeptic might say the dog was neurotic or simply picked up on my panic.)

This is a true story, inasmuch as something like this can be a true story. I have no idea whether I saw what I seemed to see. I can say I certainly wanted to see it.

When I described the sighting to my friends, all of them believed me. They, too, thought they had seen something similar on other occasions. No doubt stories were being made up on the spot. Some may have been repeated enough times to become believable--even to those who invented them.

Everyone I knew had read excerpts of Western books that described the alleged role of space aliens in construction of Mayan temples, Egyptian pyramids and other wonders of the world.

When I told the story to my astronomy club at the Moscow Planetarium, the club leader, who, as I recall, had a doctorate in astronomy or astrophysics, said that the authorities receive thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects and do nothing about them. It seemed entirely plausible that the authorities knew everything but did nothing. He also noted that my dog’s reaction was typical. Animals are said to fear UFOs.

I have not seen any UFOs since, certainly not after emigration to the United States. Worries about my next manuscript or my next contract have left no room for thoughts as extraneous as extraterrestrials.

In the world I now inhabit it is not desirable to spot flying objects and talk seriously about UFOs or life in space. This is a tested way to be written off as a lunatic or a New Ager. If I saw a banana-shaped object hover, or even land, in my neighborhood, I would simply look the other way.

However, in the course of one project, a book about the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, I ran into an unexpected reminder that even the brightest of my former countrymen ponder life in far reaches of the universe.

“In the infinity of space there must be other civilizations, including those more adanced, more ‘successful’ than ours,” wrote Andrei Sakharov in the conclusion to his Nobel lecture in 1975.

“I happen to be a proponent of a cosmological hypothesis, which holds that cosmological development of the universe is basically repeated an infinite number of times . . . . “ Sakharov wrote.

Granted, UFO sightings and cosmology are eons apart. Still, no one asked Sakharov to take a stand on the existence of extraterrestrial life. He brought up the matter voluntarily--and unabashedly.

On a recent trip to Moscow I spent an evening milling with a crowd on Pushkin Square as it merrily ignored police orders to disperse.

In one group, a couple of Armenians talked about the killings in Nagorno-Karabakh. In another, hippies talked about their friends doing time in mental hospitals. In the third, men who looked otherwise intelligent talked about sightings of extraterrestrials.

It was a little painful to hear such matters discussed so close to the monument to Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, and the site of what had been an annual human-rights demonstration.

But that was my problem; not theirs. Those people discussed their sightings and exhibited no desire for segregation between the real world and the world of tabloids. That distinction cannot exist in the Soviet Union--at least until Tass moves enough stories to fill a tabloid.