World Chess President Claims Aliens Invented Chess

The current president of the International Chess Foundation (FIDE), Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, claims that he was abducted by aliens in 1997, where they told him that chess was actually invented by them and not by humans as is commonly believed. 

Huffingtonpost.com reports:

Ilyumzhinov says that, on an evening in September 1997, ETs wearing yellow spacesuits spirited him out of his Moscow home and took him to their spaceship.

Here’s part of an interview he gave in 2007 for an Al Jazeera news report, “Meet the President — Kirsan Ilyumzhinov”:

I was taken [from] my apartment in Moscow to this spaceship, and we went to some star and after that, I asked them, ‘Please bring me back.’ They are like people, like us. They have the same mind and the same vision. I talked with them and I understand that we are not alone in this whole world — we are not unique.

I’m not a crazy man, but after I gave the first interview to Radio Freedom in Russia … thousands — not hundreds — thousands of people wrote me letters and called on the phone, saying, ‘Oh, Kirsan, you are a politician and you are not afraid to talk about it?’

Following a 2010 television interview in which Ilyumzhinov freely spoke of his alleged meeting with aliens on a spaceship, a member of the Russian Parliament — Andre Lebedev — voiced several concerns to President Dmitry Medvedev, according to BBC News.

Lebedev wanted to know if Ilyumzhinov was “fit to govern.”

“He is also concerned that, if [Ilyumzhinov] was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets. … Assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke, it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin,” the BBC quoted Lebedev.

“[Lebedev] also asks if there are official guidelines for what government officials should do if contacted by aliens, especially if those officials have access to state secrets.”

Considering his alleged otherworldly encounter and his long-term association with FIDE, it’s not surprising to hear Ilyumzhinov make an out-of-this-world connection between aliens and the game of chess.

“My theory is that chess comes from space. Because it’s the same rules — 64 squares, black and white, and the same rules in Japan, in China, in Qatar, in Mongolia, in Africa — the rules are the same. Why? I think maybe it is from space.”

In a 2001 Radio Freedom (Czech Republic) interview, Ilyumzhinov described how his alien encounter unfolded:

It was not in our Russian space vehicles, but with aliens. They came in a flying saucer, picked me up, and I spent a whole day in outer space.

It was from my apartment. They flew in and picked me up. They were wearing yellow spacesuits. I remember this moment exactly. We went off to their interplanetary ship, and I started to feel a lack of air, a lack of oxygen. They gave me a spacesuit as well.

One of the aliens pointed to his chest and indicated that the oxygen supply could be regulated by turning a dial. So this is what I did.