Igor Maltsev

General Igor Maltsev is a Russian military officer who served as Commander of the Soviet Air Defense Forces (PVO) and Chief of Staff. In the early 1990s, he issued a standing order to Soviet pilots to avoid intercepting UFOs due to their potential for retaliation, as confirmed in interviews with journalist George Knapp in 1996. Maltsev referenced over 100 visual UFO sightings reported by unit commanders and detailed a 1990 incident near Pereslavl-Zalesski where UFOs appeared on air defense radars, prompting combat aircraft intercepts, as published in his article 'UFOs on Air Defense Radars' in Rabochaya Tribuna. In 1990, as Chief of Staff, he publicly affirmed the existence of UFOs, stating skeptics and believers could take it as official confirmation. His directives were part of a massive USSR UFO investigation involving thousands of military reports, aimed at analyzing anomalous technologies, under Colonel Boris Sokolov at the Ministry of Defense.