FT264

Last year, the wife of the Japanese Prime Minister caused much surprise when she went public with her story of alien abduction from sleep to the planet Venus. Now it’s the turn of the President of Kalmykia, an impoverished Russ­ian republic. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a millionaire former businessman and President of the World Chess Federation who has ruled Kalmykia since 1993, claims he was taken for a trip across the Universe by aliens while on a business trip to Moscow in 1997. “They took me from my apartment and we went aboard their ship,” he said. “We flew to some kind of star. They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around.” He described the spaceship as a “semi-transparent half-tube” and said there were three witnesses to his abduction: his assistant, his driver, and a minister. The aliens told him telepathically they had visited Earth to collect samples.

Ilyumzhinov’s story first surfaced in the West in 2006 when the Guardian profiled the eccentric leader as having two great pass­ions: chess and his belief that his alien visitors would return to rescue his people from their problems. When he repeated the abduction story on a talk show on 26 April, his claims came to the attention of an MP who asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate. In a letter to the President, Andrei Lebedev says he is concerned that Mr Ilyumzhinov may be unfit to govern or, if he really was abducted, that he may have revealed state secrets to aliens. According to a BBC report last January, Ilyumzhinov’s homeland, a remote Buddhist region on the shores of the Caspian Sea, was in the grip of an epidemic of UFOs, angelic visions and other strange phenomena.

Guardian, 21 Sept 2006; BBC Radio 4+11 Jan; BBC News, 5 May 2010.