Soviet Press Called Other-Worldly : Science Fiction: American experts cast doubts on reports of aliens with ray guns.

We hate to tell you this, Comrade Mukhortov, but those aliens you claim to have interviewed near Moscow probably weren’t really from another planet.

For Times readers who do not subscribe to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Party youth newspaper, Pavel Mukhortov was identified in Thursday’s edition of the official Soviet publication as a reporter who had chatted with a few exotic aliens. The report is the latest in a series of stories published by the normally staid Soviet press claiming that weird creatures with shining eyes and ray guns had landed at various sites around Moscow.

The Soviet people have long been fascinated with the subject of extraterrestrials, but what makes the recent reports rather startling is that they have appeared in the official press in what seems to be a ratings war, a high-water mark for glasnost. Soviet Television has become so much more liberalized in recent months that one of the most popular television personalities in Moscow is a faith healer.

But, party poopers that they are, American scientists have their doubts about aliens from space.

Astronomer Carl Sagan, who is almost as well known in the Soviet Union as he is in the United States, would love to believe the stories are true because he has spent much of his adult life promoting programs to search the cosmos for other intelligent beings.

“It would save me a lot of trouble if they were already here,” Sagan said when told of the conversation Mukhortov claims to have had with the visitors. But he said the reports from Moscow are just a little too “weird” for his tastes.

In the past, he said, such reports “would have been suppressed as not serious or unscientific, but now it is permitted to come out. So, suddenly, it just pops out.”

And popping out is just what the reports are doing these days all over the Soviet Union.

It began with a story in Tass, the official Soviet news agency, that claimed that schoolchildren had seen creatures with knobby little heads near the city of Voronezh.

“Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently landed in a park,” the Tass report stated. “They have also identified the landing site and found traces of aliens who made a short promenade around the park.”

Not very likely, snapped Thomas McDonough, a Caltech professor who also would like to believe that aliens have indeed landed on Earth. As the coordinator of the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” for the Pasadena-based Planetary Society--and the author of a book by the same name--McDonough does not rule out the possibility of interstellar travel, but not this time, thank you.

And he figures that if aliens came all the way to Earth for a visit, they probably would want to do something other than stroll around a Soviet park.

Even the noted science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who said he thinks “there may be other intelligences in the universe,” believes that other creatures probably would find something better to do with their time.

“Here on Earth and doing the silly things people say they are doing?” Asimov asked with a note of incredulity.

Asimov admitted that his novels sometimes go beyond the facts. For example, he has written of instances in which beings move through space faster than the speed of light--although Albert Einstein said they couldn’t--”but that’s science fiction.”

Still, you can’t rule out space travel entirely, he said.

Asimov believes that mortals might some day leave Earth for another solar system, but they probably will travel in a spacecraft so large that it will become the permanent home for them and the generations they spawn. That’s not the sort of saucer that could land unnoticed in a Soviet cornfield.

McDonough, who speaks Russian, said tales of invasions from space have been featured for years in Soviet underground publications equivalent to the National Enquirer. The only difference now, he said, is the endorsement of the bizarre stories by the official press.

Pravda, however, appears to be getting a little edgy about the story, indicating concern that the fantasy has gone too far. In an article Friday, Pravda warned that “clear and well-argued answers are required immediately. Otherwise, rumors of alien landings could suddenly spread all over the globe.”