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Home » “I Was Taken By Aliens In 1997!” – President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov on American Alchemy (Transcript)

“I Was Taken By Aliens In 1997!” – President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov on American Alchemy (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s interview on American Alchemy Podcast with host Jesse Michels, December 15, 2025.

Brief Notes: Former Kalmykian president and longtime FIDE boss Kirsan Ilyumzhinov sits down with Jesse Michels to give his most detailed account yet of the night in 1997 when he says he was “invited” aboard a UFO from his Moscow apartment while in office. Ilyumzhinov describes walking through a glowing tunnel into a vast craft staffed by tall beings in yellow suits who communicated telepathically, showed him other worlds, and told him humanity is still too primitive and warlike for open contact. His chief of staff appears on camera to confirm that Kirsan mysteriously vanished from a locked, guarded flat for about an hour that morning and then suddenly walked out of a bedroom they had already searched. The conversation then widens to what Yeltsin, Putin, Kissinger, NASA officials, and other heads of state allegedly know about UFOs, why lunar missions abruptly stopped, and why Ilyumzhinov believes world leaders are quietly being prepared for a post-disclosure civilization.

Introduction

Jesse Michels: I’m here with the great Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. This is an honor. I can’t wait to speak to you today.

You were the president of Kalmykia, which is one of three Russian republics that is Buddhist and the only European Russian republic that is Buddhist. And you were also president of the World Chess Federation. And perhaps most importantly, for the purposes of our show, which covers extraterrestrials and the nature of reality, you are, to my knowledge, the only leader of a prominent nation who was abducted by aliens and taken up on a spacecraft while you were a sitting president in 1997.

And so it’s an absolute honor to be with you. I want to maybe just start with the abduction itself. We spoke a little bit about this, but what happened to you in September of 1997?

The Night of the Encounter

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: Well, the most ordinary thing happened. Probably what happens to many aliens—that is, earthlings. You know, we call them aliens, and they call us the same, because we are the fifth civilization on our Earth. Everything seemed ordinary. It was at the end of September 1997.

I was in Moscow on a business trip at that time. I was getting ready to return to Kalmykia to hold the Youth Self Government Week. In Kalmykia, we carried out an experiment where we handed over all the power in the Republic to young people under twenty-five, from the position of President of Kalmykia to ministers, the Prime Minister, and district heads. Before that, they trained for about a year. The idea was to show that everything moves forward, that the new generation must learn and take on responsibility.

So it was a regular working environment. And around ten in the evening, I returned from our Republic of Kalmykia office, which is located in Moscow, not far from my apartment. I got there, turned on the television, as usual, and lay down to sleep to get some rest.

Later, I kept analyzing the situation: was it a dream or not? But I had three witnesses—the driver, my assistant, the Minister of the Republic of Kalmykia, and my friend who came for me the next day.

So I turned off the television, and then it was like a vision, like a half dream. But I think it was reality, because I saw someone, or rather some sound was coming. My apartment is on the top floor, only the roof above. There were no nearby balconies to move from one to another. It was September, and I always sleep with an open window, and now someone is calling me.

The Glowing Tunnel

I approached the window, and there was something like a translucent pipe glowing, made of some matter. Or maybe it was some kind of energy, and someone called me to go there. At first, I thought about whether to go or not, like any person would, because it was kind of in plain sight, but I decided to go. Everything unknown is interesting to me, so I went along this tube, or corridor, and found myself in a space, a very large space.

There were many people, or rather beings, very similar to us. As the Great Buddha wrote two thousand six hundred years ago, in our solar system, there are four more planets similar to planet Earth, where practically the same exact people live, only with different skin color. And therefore, it wasn’t too surprising to me.

You know, in childhood, when we played football, we saw a saucer hovering over the football field, a few dozen boys watching it. Then, when I was at the Artech summer camp near Mount Ayudag in the Republic of Crimea, and later when I served in the Soviet Army as well.

Jesse Michels: So what did the aliens look like, their faces and what were they wearing?

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: I saw them clearly, although there was a bit of a lack of air. They were wearing yellow garments. One of them kind of suggested that I should press somewhere here on the chest. I pressed, and then it was easy to breathe again. I felt pretty comfortable, the air even smelled like the sea or the forest or something.

I was pretty calm, I wasn’t nervous. I just asked, “Will we be here for long?” They said, “We’ll be back soon.” Then I remembered the science fiction stories I had read about time fluctuation. I said, “Maybe an hour will pass here, and on Earth a hundred or a thousand years will have passed. And when we will return there, I will not meet my friends, nor my family, nor anyone. Maybe we will find ourselves there, in another time, in another millennium.”

But the one who was escorting me said, “It’s fine, we’ll return you to where we took you from, and at the same time.”

Telepathic Communication

I was a bit surprised at first, because I was speaking, and they were not.