Fenid

History

Fenid, formally titled НЛО: За и Против. Исторический ракурс (UFO: For and Against. Historical Perspective), was a Russian-language academic journal published in Gomel, in what is now Belarus, by the Club of Fundamental Natural-Scientific Ideas known by its acronym FENID. The archive holds three volumes, all from the second numbered series: Volume 2 Number 1 (1990), Volume 2 Number 2 (1990) and Volume 2 Number 3 (1991). The publication is dated to the precise window between the easing of late-Soviet press restrictions and the dissolution of the USSR. The editorial board for Volume 2 Number 1 lists P.A. Avistratenko (Candidate of Technical Sciences), O.N. Efimanov, A.A. Lunin, and D.A. Patyko, with N.A. Saglyak as artist. The Club's address is given as 246000, Gomel, Kirov Street 17.

The opening "To the Reader" preface frames the journal as an explicitly glasnost-era publication. The editors describe the UFO phenomenon as having "broken through to the pages of the press through the bastions of the guardians of the materialist foundations of our consciousness" and call its appearance "one of the achievements of glasnost." Two specific Soviet cases are cited as historical reference points: the Petrozavodsk phenomenon of 20 September 1977, which made it into Soviet print only because TASS's then-leadership judged it embarrassing to receive their own news back from foreign agencies, and the Tbilisi-Rostov-Tallinn Aeroflot flight report of September 1984, published in Trud by what the Fenid editors describe as "a loss of vigilance" on the part of the editorial staff that ended in disciplinary consequences.