Felix Ziegel

Felix Yurievich Ziegel (1920 – November 28, 1988) was a Soviet astronomer and cosmonautics researcher at the Moscow Aviation Institute who became the most prominent public UFO researcher in the Soviet Union. Operating within a system that officially dismissed UFO reports, he nevertheless advocated for the scientific investigation of the phenomenon, and in 1967 he appeared on Soviet state television appealing for systematic UFO reporting—a rare public acknowledgment of the subject in the USSR. He was involved in the scientific track of the SETKA program (SETKA-AN) through the Academy of Sciences, and he collected and analyzed thousands of Soviet UFO reports, documenting cases from military installations, nuclear facilities, and civilian observations. His work provided a foundation for understanding UAP activity in the Soviet sphere during the Cold War.