According to her granddaughter Tatyana Konstantinova-Ziegel's memoirs, the sight of a "doomed young beauty in her last days of pregnancy" had such a disturbing effect upon a senior investigator officer that he promptly opened the door and let her go.

[4] Felix Ziegel spent his early years at the family's countryside dacha in Tarusa where at the age of six he constructed a primitive telescope and started his first journal of astronomical observations.

Two years earlier the sixteen-year-old took part in his first scientific expedition; along with a team of senior scientists he traveled to Kazakhstan to observe the total eclipse of the Sun.

The latter, based on Alexander Kazantsev's sci-fi short story "The Blast", had a soldier protagonist played by a professional actor, who was making a point to involve the audiences into the discussion as to the nature of the 1908 Tunguska event.

[4] Felix Ziegel was the first in the USSR to come with the hypothesis for Tunguska blast having been the result of an alien spacecraft crash which, according to the author, had made a 600-kilometers-curve maneuver before exploding in the air.

In 1963 Ziegel, now the co-author (with Valery Burdakov) of the first Soviet university textbook on the cosmonautics and space exploration became the astronomy docent in the Moscow Aviation Institute.

In May 1967 the first official Soviet UFO Study Group held its meeting at the Moscow Aviation and Cosmonautics Center with Major General Pyotr A. Stolyarov at the helm and Ziegel as his deputy.

[7] Preceding this was the publication of Ziegel's article in Smena magazine, in which he wrote:These UFOs have been seen all over the USSR; the craft of every possible shape, small, large, flattened, spherical.

By this time Ziegel has completed his chapter in the book called Naselyonny Kosmos (Inhabited Cosmos), which presented the data collected by the team of well-known Soviet scientists, as well numerous reports by the Russian pilots drawn from the Ministry of Civil Aviation archives.

The project's Editor-in-chief was Boris Konstantinov, the Academy's vice-President, academicians Vitaly Ginzburg, Anatoly Blagonravov and Vasily Parin were among the team of scientific reviewers.

Several days later he received a letter from Edward Condon, the director of the University of Colorado UFO Project, suggesting that the Soviet and the American groups should cooperate, starting with the information exchange.

Ziegel and twelve other members of his group signed a letter requesting the Soviet government to create the state-sponsored organization that should coordinate all the UFO research in the country.

The resume signed by Artzymovich and Fesenkov, read: "Along with the articles based on strong scientific evidence we found there some pseudo-scientific scoops (UFOs, Tunguska meteorite, etc.)

[10] In the early 1973 Ivan F. Obraztsov, the Moscow Aviation Institute rector (and later the RSFSR Minister of Education) asked Ziegel for an update on "the current situation around the UFO issue."

[11] Ziegel called for the special meeting of the Academy's Radioastronomy Council, inviting some well-known scientists like Vsevolod Troitsky and Nikolai Kardashev.

On 28 November 1976, sci-fi writer Yeremey Parnov published in Komsomolskaya Pravda an article entitled "The Technology of Myth-mongering", calling for "this whole UFO business to be sorted out," and labeling ufology "pseudoscience".

[3] Ziegel responded by "The Technology of Lies" article (which none of the central press wanted to publish) and made an unsuccessful attempt to sue Parnov for libel.

While one of them found Ziegel's professional activities in the institute flawless, another took a deeper approach, involving studies of his family history, notably his parents' pre-1917 "behavior".

As A. P. Kazantsev informed me, speaking at the Writers' Union special Science fiction authors' congress on February 23, 1977, Yeremei Iudovich insisted that "Ziegel's lectures were the act of foreign ideological subversion.

Obscurantism and common ignorance, unveiled malice from one group of people and secret jealousy of another – those were the reasons that prevented him from bringing his ideas to the general public's awareness.