I appreciate the effort, but this is still at least one step removed from the actual source. My citation made the claim that Solevev acknowledged the Post as the source, which at face value sounds better, but honestly still isn’t proper verification.

I could not find any reference to this on Snopes.com, which is pretty good about urban legends.

When I wrote “Attributed to The Washington Post,” this is what I meant. The original source of this material, whatever it is, really is secondary to the point of this article, and I would ask the reader to recognize that.

Six Soviet cosmonauts said they witnessed the most awe-inspiring spectacle ever encountered in space – a band of glowing angels with wings as big as jumbo jets. According to “Weekly World News”, cosmonauts Vladimir Solevev, Oleg Atkov and Leonid Kizim said they first saw the celestial beings last July (July, 1985), during their 155th day aboard the orbiting “Salyut 7″ space station. “What we saw”, they said, “were seven giant figures in the form of humans, but with wings and mistlike halos, as in the classic depiction of angels. Their faces were round with cherubic smiles.” Twelve days later, the figures returned and were seen by three other Soviet scientists, including woman cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya. “They were smiling”, she said, “as though they shared in a glorious secret.”

http://users.hcis.net/miltozah/angels.htm

I ran across a reference to this article being in Parade magazine (the Sunday News supplement) as being a “story of the year,” and I frankly didn’t pay much attention to this because it obviously had to have originated elsewhere to be categorized that way by Parade. I could not verify this on the Post website, because online version has no references to any stories of any of the Salyut stations, and searches for several combinations of “angel” and “cosmonaut” returned nothing.

Solevev’s dismissal of the story is here:

http://www.spacedu.org/Lectures/Media/Bottom/press.htm#TRUTH2

So, no, I have not been able to verify the source was the Washington Post. (This does frankly sound more like something the Enquirer, or maybe the Weekly World News would print, but I couldn’t find any references to this story on either of these websites as well. I seriously doubt a newspaper website would take the effort to post and index stories that predate their website, so I can neither confirm nor deny at this point.)

I would hope an organization dedicated to educating the public about the Soviet and Russian space programs could keep their facts straight.

The Washington Post is probably not the original source for the article, if you are really interested you might check out National Inquirer or something similar.