Baron Münchhausen in Zagreb: The Forgotten First UFO Crash at Jarun

As soon as I heard the news about the crash of a (then still) unidentified flying object at Jarun, I remembered a similar news story from Večernji list from around the 1990s. Back then, as far as I remember, a UFO crashed into the small lake at Jarun, to the astonishment of eyewitnesses, and one of them captured it all with his camera. By coincidence, it was the long-time chronicler of Zagreb for Večernji list, Pavao Cajzek, who was then walking around Jarun photographing birds.

The next day, efforts began to retrieve the unidentified object. On the shore, on that chilly spring day, about two hundred brave onlookers gathered. They attentively followed the lengthy preparations of the diving team, which dived several times, but the work took time due to the muddy bottom and murky water.

In the meantime, the gathered commented on what had happened, and the main reading material was yesterday’s newspaper edition. Everyone had their version, and particularly convincing was a man who reconstructed the place from which Cajzek took the photo based on the published photograph. Holding the newspaper, he explained that his theory was correct – it was a projectile fired directly from the direction of Banja Luka.

However, there were also skeptics who claimed it was an April Fool’s joke, to which others countered with the irrefutable argument:

– But Cajzek took the photo!

Indeed, that legendary Zagreb photojournalist (1923 – 1999) enjoyed great trust from readers, who remembered him even many years after he retired.

Meanwhile, the divers finally found something. A few of them managed to pull an old bathtub and some other trash from the bottom of Zagreb’s sea. The skeptics were right, and with such a finale, the April Fool’s joke from Večernji list gained an ecological dimension. We apologized to those present, who sportingly accepted the fact that they had been deceived.

At that time, it never crossed my mind that another, real and much more dangerous UFO would actually crash in the Jarun area about 25 years later, just a kilometer and a half to the north. The April Fool’s play almost turned into a disaster. Even if the 120-kilogram bomb is a product of ministerial imagination, we must not even think about what the crash of a 14-ton aircraft would cause on a student dormitory or a nearby large residential building.

However, it seems to me that the journalistic playfulness of the 1990s was more responsible than today’s statements from politicians who seem to compete in April Fool’s jokes, just like Baron Münchhausen himself. And who knows, maybe he flew from Ukraine to Jarun on his cannonball via Romania and Hungary.