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.