Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, was president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia and simultaneously president of FIDE, the world chess federation — two elected posts he says earned him a Guinness listing. He also served in the Russian parliament and the State Council, headed the Russian Chamber of Entrepreneurs, and moved in circles that included Yeltsin, Putin, Gorbachev, Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Pope John Paul II, and the Dalai Lama.
The 1997 event. Late September 1997, in his Moscow apartment. He went to bed after watching television, heard something calling, and found a glowing translucent tube at his open window. He objects to the interviewer’s framing throughout — “I was invited by them.” He describes walking the tube into a space the size of several football fields, occupied by tall human-like beings in yellow who communicated by thought and largely ignored him. He was shown a porthole view of what looked like a heated, fiery body from which cylinders or boxes were being loaded aboard. He asked them to broadcast their existence to Earth; they declined, telling him humanity’s development doesn’t yet permit contact, and comparing the gap to humans conversing with ants.
Corroboration. His longtime aide Vasily gives an on-record account: he let himself in with his own keys around 11 a.m. to take Ilyumzhinov to the airport, found clothes hanging and two mobile phones on the nightstand but no Ilyumzhinov. The group searched every room, questioned building security, checked cameras, and called police. After roughly an hour, Ilyumzhinov walked out of the bedroom they had already searched repeatedly.
Official reactions. He says Yeltsin held him back after a State Council meeting, moved to a side seating area, and asked carefully whether he had “been up there,” mainly checking his mental state. Putin later asked him to recount the whole episode in detail, including whether he had been sober. The political cost was real: Garry Kasparov argued he was unfit to lead FIDE, and Kalmykian opposition figures called for his removal and psychiatric treatment.
Kissinger. Ilyumzhinov met Kissinger repeatedly from 1990 onward and played chess with him. At a sauna visit in Moscow with Gorbachev, Kissinger circled the subject obliquely — asking how they were, what they said — while giving nothing back, until Gorbachev pushed him: “Come on, Henry, tell him.” Kissinger only smiled. At a later meeting he was more forthcoming, and Ilyumzhinov concluded he was deeply versed in the US files held by the White House, CIA, or NASA. In the same conversation Gorbachev relayed a story from KGB chairman Yuri Andropov: at a Brezhnev–Nixon meeting, the US president opened a small folder for Brezhnev, and afterward lunar programs on both sides abruptly halted.
Other claims. Italian businessman Maurizio Zamparini showed him landing circles in a wheat field; an unnamed sitting president of a large country told him privately that he and his wife saw a craft descend while fishing; world champion Vasily Smyslov described a translucent entity that played out an entire match against Hübner the night before it happened. He also recounts friendship with the Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga, who he says predicted both his presidencies before they occurred.
Broader themes. He argues chess was given to humanity by another civilization (64 squares mapping to 64 DNA codons); that underground and undersea civilizations exist; that the Vatican’s observatory research is classified; that US and Soviet defense establishments quietly exchanged UFO data after both mistook underwater craft for the other’s weapons; and that the real frontier is the human brain rather than deep space. He closes on Ukraine, saying Putin’s terms have been on the table since Istanbul and that peace requires mutual compromise.
One note worth carrying into any use of this: several supporting claims he offers as established fact are not — the “we use 3–4% of our brain” figure, the Delhi iron pillar being unreproducible, Giordano Bruno being burned for saying Earth is round, and clock gears found inside marble. These are long-circulating errors, independent of whatever one makes of his personal account.