In August 2025, the text of a report from a speech by a Soviet cosmonaut went viral on the Internet, where she allegedly stated that she felt an extraterrestrial presence in space. We checked to see if she said anything similar.
The publications claim that at some closed meeting of veterans of the Salyut program, Savitskaya, after decades of silence, finally spoke about what she felt while in space. There are even specific quotes: “I didn’t just see emptiness. I felt seen. I wasn't the only one there. Space is not emptiness. This is a look”, “This is not fear. This is not a hallucination. This is the understanding that you are not an observer, but the observed,” “Something was conveyed to me. Without words. No images. They simply injected into the consciousness the understanding that we are not the center. Not the top. We're not even students yet. We are under surveillance”, “We have stopped feeling the Earth. We can't hear the sky. We pulled away not upward, but sideways, towards destruction. We go into space not to understand, but to conquer.” Some publications indicate that the author of the report is Alexander Babinets.
The alleged report is published by users forums, social networks (Facebook, Instagram, "VKontakte", "Classmates", Telegram) and blogging platforms (“Peekaboo", "Zen", LiveJournal).
“Verified” was unable to find this report from a closed meeting of veterans of the Salyut program or at least its mention in any authoritative source (for example, on the Roscosmos website or in the media). Quotes similar to those distributed on the Internet are found with an indication of Savitskaya’s authorship only in this text and nowhere else.
Apparently, the author of the text is indeed Alexander Babinets, indicated in many posts. It was on his Facebook page that “Verified” discovered the earliest publication report - dated August 22, 2025. At the end the author added link on their books in the online store - none of them are dedicated to space. Babinets’s main bestsellers are “Crypto for People. How to avoid getting into trouble and begin to understand digital money" and "Fitness without excuses." That is, the author’s area of interest does not hint at his involvement in space research, much less that he could be invited to a closed meeting of veteran cosmonauts.
The opinions of commentators were divided: some suggested that Savitskaya could have hallucinated under extreme conditions, others that the closed meeting at which the cosmonaut allegedly told all this was completely invented by the author (and the text was written with the help of neural networks). In response, Babinets sent all skeptics to study certain chronicles of the Salyut-7 flights, NASA publications Mission Reports and materials Roscosmos in the section “History of Cosmonautics”, however, without indicating what exactly they should find there. “Verified” studied the corresponding section on the NASA website, as well as relevant materials on the Roscosmos website (a section called “History of Cosmonautics” could not be found) and did not find there anything similar to a description of a closed meeting with Savitskaya or any of her interviews close in meaning to the widely circulated quotes. There was also nothing similar in the freely available materials about Salyut-7. In addition, to confirm his words, Babinets left in the comments a link to a 53-minute video on YouTube, voiced using a neural network, which tells the shocking story of Savitskaya’s encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. The authors of the video claim that they gained access to classified documents - however, no evidence of this is provided either.
In general, a near-mystical experience or rethinking one’s life is not something out of the ordinary for those who have survived a flight into space. In psychology, the so-called review effect: when people see from the Moon, orbit or ISS a small distant Earth flying in the middle of endless space, and on it - everything that they knew in this life, many experience a reassessment of values or other emotional discoveries. Therefore, it is possible that Svetlana Savitskaya experienced similar sensations during her flight into space. However, there is no evidence that she ever talked about anything like this, other than a story on social networks from the author of books about how to get rich in cryptocurrency and how not to quit the gym.
This is not the first time that famous astronauts have been credited with telling stories about the existence of extraterrestrial life forms or higher intelligence. Thus, the previously fact-checking project Snopes refuted allegations that American astronaut Buzz Aldrin revealed to people the shocking truth about aliens: then the Internet simply distorted one of Aldrin’s interviews, although he himself never claimed contact with anything alien, and his representatives have repeatedly denied this fake.
Also on the Internet there is a lot popular a chilling story purportedly told by astronaut Barry Wilmore: “You don't know true beauty until you see the Earth from space. And true horror, until you hear someone outside knocking on the door of the spaceship. You look out the window and see an astronaut, but your whole crew is inside and everything is in place. You use the comm to ask who it is, and he says it's Ramirez, back from a repair mission. But Ramirez is sitting next to you, and he is just as perplexed as you are. When you tell the guy outside, he starts knocking harder and louder, begging you to let him in and saying that he is the real Ramirez, while the second Ramirez begs you not to open the airlock. It’s moments like these that you really think that it would be better if you stayed on Earth.” This horror story originally appeared in a collection of pseudo-quotes from astronauts about space, published in the satirical publication Clickhole in 2015. There are other quotes attributed to various astronauts in this collection, such as Mae Jemison: “There are still several continents that can only be seen from space. So far I have counted 18 continents, but I am constantly finding new ones.” However, the rest did not gain as much popularity as the finished script for a horror film about Ramirez.
Thus, we cannot know for sure whether Svetlana Savitskaya saw or felt something extraterrestrial in space, but the story about her revelations at a closed meeting of veterans of the Salyut program was written by an author far from the space sphere. The story is written as if the author himself was present at the meeting quite recently, but he refers everyone interested in details (for example, the date and place of the meeting) to study some abstract sources, which, however, do not mention anything of the kind. This behavior may indicate that the entire story is, with a high degree of probability, entirely made up by the author.
Cover photo: Espace Lollini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- BBC. The Overview Effect and Apollo
- NASA. The Overview Effect
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