Russians and UFO's... A Conspiracy?

Back some time ago during the 50's or 60's or something, people in Russia kept reporting seeing fireballs and bright lights in the sky. The Russian government came out and said that they knew exactly what they were. They said they were just rockets that the military had been testing. After giving this statement, however, the government funded an organization that researched these "UFO" sightings. The thing I'm wondering about is: If the Russian government knew that these "UFO"s were just military rockets, why would they spend millions of dollars to fund a research on these things? This is probably an old topic, but I'm new to the site, and wanted to see what you guys thought about this.

that the Soviets are certainly right up there with the US in their UFO research, and secrecy issues.... Unlike the US, Russia didn't have a free press, so they were able to simply state their cover story, and leave it at that... Scroll down some, and look for the thread about the Russian UFO footage on the Sci-Fi Channel special...

I'm half russian and have contacts with many ufo-researchers and we talk about the same problem. In fact when U2 was started over the skies of USA, many people think that this was UFO and provide optical observations and photo the silvery point that was not UFO object but U2 spi plane. This was maybe the first reall skywatchers. But for the photos of U2, real soviet spyies pay money and in fact this was the first connection between skywatch group in USA and soviet KGB residenture in USA. After this incident CIA was alerted and open eyes about this kind of threat of soviet spying around UFO problem and many of ufo-investigators are real CIA-agents(like Derrel Sims today).
In USSR there are too many rocket tests and it is reall possible that GRU(Soviet millitary intelegence) made master dezinformation about this tests in the sky and say to the people that they are just UFO objects. But it's very possible that real UFO objects were classificated like millitary tests...

Im sure russians have dealt with this issue.
To what extent im not sure though.
www.ufoarea.bravepages.com...
You might be interested in this.
Deep