Marina Popovich
Soviet test pilot and UFO hunter who set scores of world records
MARINA POPOVICH, who has died aged 86, was a celebrated Soviet test pilot nicknamed “Madame MIG”; during her career she tested more than 40 aeroplanes, set 102 aviation world endurance records, including the world record for the longest flight for a woman pilot, and became the first female pilot to break the sound barrier in a MIG-21 fighter jet.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, she developed a new line as an expert on UFOS, publishing a book entitled UFO Glasnost (2003), in which she claimed that Soviet military and civilian pilots had confirmed 3,000 UFO sightings and that the Soviet Air Force and KGB had recovered fragments of five UFOS from crash sites around the Soviet Union.
She was born Marina Lavrentievna Vasiliyeva on a farm on July 20 1931 in Leonenki, a village in the Smolensk region of Russia. During the war her family were evacuated to the city of Novosibirsk where she entered the Novosibirsk Aviation College. She also joined a local flying club, where she made her first flight in a Yakovlev UT-2 in 1948.
In 1951 she graduated from the Novosibirsk Aviation Technical College, then spent two years as a design engineer at the Komintern plant in the city. She subsequently enrolled at the Central Flighttechnical school in Saransk, where she worked briefly as an instructor. After joining the Soviet military, she later graduated from the Leningrad Academy of Civil Aviation and in 1964 became a military test pilot 1st class, the only woman in the country to reach such a position.
Of her 102 records, many of them achieved piloting an Antonov An-22 cargo plane, 13 were registered with the Fédération aéronautique internationale.
In 1955 she married the Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich. Though she herself qualified as a cosmonaut, she was never given the opportunity to take part in a space mission.
Marina Popovich was honoured as a Hero of Socialist Labour and awarded the Order of Labour Red Banner and many other awards.
In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, she made what seems to have been her first visit to the West, to address a University of California-berkeley conference on UFOS, at which she claimed that Soviet scientists had placed a blood sample inside a purported flying saucer landing site, which had subsequently undergone chemical changes.
She displayed what she claimed to be the last photograph taken by the Russian probe Phobos 2, showing an unexplained cylindrical figure, before it disappeared without trace in 1989, just after arriving at Mars.
She went on to make regular appearances at UFO symposia and at international conferences on women in aviation. In an interview in 1997 she recalled a close encounter while flying a MIG-21 when she saw a brightly lit object which she could only describe as a flying saucer: “We thought it could be an enemy intruder. But it was so large that this was impossible. A collision looked unavoidable but then the object tipped sideways and disappeared in a flash. It was a really scary experience.”
Marina Popovich published nine books, including a poetry collection, and wrote two screenplays. She also appeared in a video about UFOS in which, among other theories, she suggested that dolphins “are a result of an early race of dolphin people that provided for early humans”.
Marina Popovich’s marriage to Pavel Popovich was dissolved. She married, secondly, Boris Alexandrovich Zhikhorev, a retired Russian Air Force Major General, who survives her with two daughters from her first marriage.