The following case is used with permission from UFO Casebook.

by BJ Booth

There have been numerous legends about UFO crashes; some of them have quite a bit of documentation and eyewitness testimony. Others are based mostly on legend and folklore.

Two of these crashes alleged occurred in or near Spitsbergen, Norway. However, there is just not enough verifiable evidence to support either of these events, and here are the reasons:

1946 Spitsbergen UFO Crash

The 1946 case, more than anything else, is memorable for its characters. The legend goes something like this; In 1946, General James H. Doolittle was sent to Sweden by the Shell Oil Company, supposedly to investigate the mystery of the “Ghost Rockets.”

Why an oil company would investigate UFOs is beyond my understanding; unless they felt they could strengthen their profits somehow.

Somehow, Doolittle supposedly wound up in Spitsbergen. There are a number of Internet sites which claim that there was a short-lived article published in America of a UFO crash in the Norwegian city about this time.

Some people claim to have seen the article.

The really odd thing about the tale of this case is what does Doolittle have to do with anything, since he is only mentioned as being in the area, and that is the end of his involvement.

The only redeeming part of this particular case is that it was reported by Dorothy Kilgallen, celebrity for her years appearing on the “What’s My Line?” TV game show.

She claimed that someone in the upper echelon of the British government informed her that a UFO had crashed near Spitsbergen, and was under investigation by the British and American military.

Supposedly, this informant was Lord Mountbatten.

Some investigators claim that since no mention of the name Spitsbergen was found in the reports, that the location’s mention was to cover up a crash in Great Britain. A crash in Great Britain during the same time period has no basis in fact either.

In addition to being a game show regular, Kilgallen also was a journalist of a sort, having written “gossip columns,” but she also was well known for covering hard current events.

She had covered the headline-grabbing Lindbergh kidnapping story.

In the 1950s, she had covered one of the top stories of her time, the Sam Sheppard murder trial.

Her last real claim to fame was in the 1960s when she got an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald killer, Jack Ruby. This interview was carried by the “Los Angeles Examiner.” She told friends that she had information that would “break the case wide open.”

On 8th November, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her New York apartment. She was fully dressed and sitting upright in her bed. The police reported that she had died from taking a cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates.

The notes of her interview with Ruby and the article she was writing on the case had disappeared.

Luckily, she had given a friend a draft of her interview. Kilgallen was probably fearful for her own life, since several other writers who had worked on the Oswald / Ruby case had died under “unusual circumstances.”

Kilgallen’s reputation and notoriety was the only thing that kept the weak story of the Spitsbergen crash of 1946 alive. The last hope of further research into the Norwegian crash died along with her, as her sources were never verified.

1952 Spitsbergen UFO Crash

by Loy Lawhon

The other Spitsbergen crash story first appeared in the German newspaper “Saarbrücker Zeitung” in June 1952. The article, entitled “Auf Spitsbergen landete Fliegende Untertasse”, was soon picked up by several other German newspapers, with many of them citing “The Stuttgarter Tagerblatt” as the original source.

The story was that jets of the Norwegian Air Force spotted a crashed UFO while flying over Spitsbergen on maneuvers. The craft was disc-shaped with a series of jets around the rim of the disc to make it spin.

According to the first article about the crash, the craft was an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle with Russian writing on the controls, but as the story was embellished with each retelling, it soon acquired seven alien crewmen who were burned to death in the crash.

The post The Legends of UFO Crashes at Spitsbergen, Norway, 1946 & 1952 first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

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By CLAIRE BATES, Daily Mail

A strange jellyfish-shaped object spotted hanging in the sky over Norway, may have been caused by light from the aurora being bounced off a space satellite, experts say.

If proven it will be the first known case of a satellite reflecting the Northern Lights.
The mysterious phenomenon was photographed last week by amateur photographer Per-Arne Milkalsen over Andenesm, Norway.

The photographer became fascinated with aurorae after working at a rocket launch site in the far north of Norway for 25 years. The northern lights are often visible here because it is so close to the North Pole.

Aurorae are caused by the interaction of the solar wind with Earth’s magnetic field and so are particularly prevalent at the poles where the magnetic forces are strongest.

Mr Mikalsen told the Mail Online: ‘I have never seen an object like this before, and I am eager to find an explanation to the phenomenon.’

The photographer first assumed the odd optical effect was a spot on his camera lens. But after he posted his photographs on Spaceweather.com he was inundated with emails from interested experts from around the world.

Lead scientist Truls Lynn Hansen from Tromsø Geophysical Observatory said he doubted the picture, taken on January 20, was due to a simple camera fault.

He told the Mail Online: ‘The “phenomenon” has the same greenish colour as the Northern Lights. That means the Northern Lights is the source of light causing the strange phenomenon.’

However, Mr Hansen said it was unlikely the Northern Lights could create the optical effect on its own. Instead the aurora might be bouncing off an external source like a satellite or an airplane.

In this way it would act like an ‘iridium flare.’ The flares are created by sunlight reflecting off iridium satellites. They appear as bright white flashes in the sky.

One problem with Mr Hansen’s theory is that the light intensity from the Northern Lights is 100,000 times weaker than the sunlight. But Mr Hansen said this did not exclude the satellite reflection hypothesis.

‘The intensity of an intense aurora is not far from the intensity of moonlight,’ he said.

‘And the (jellyfish) phenomenon is also quite weak. Apparently many orders of magnitude down compared to the solar iridium flares.’

Pal Brekke, senior adviser, at the Norwegian Space Centre, told the Mail Online: ‘A reflection from streetlight would be the most straightforward explanation.
‘But why is it green? One should think it would be white or yellow if it was a reflection from the streetlight.

‘So while I am not yet fully convinced it was a satellite – one cannot rule this out.’

The post Was mysterious jellyfish in sky caused by space satellite reflecting Northern Lights? first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

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By Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos  and Ole Jonny Brænne

Photograph, in the popular philosophy, is the best evidence to prove the existence of something, e.g. “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In observational sciences, astronomy for instance, photographic records are basic.

Hessdalen in Norway has produced innumerable eye-witness reports of anomalous phenomena, and is therefore an area of special interest. In addition to the human observers, there is a large amount of instrumented evidence, in the form of photography and video, either by persons or through automated recordings by on-site equipment.

In spite of a recurrent phenomenon photographed at least since the early eighties, surprisingly no one has decided to produce a decent inventory of all photographic and film evidence obtained over the years in this area.

We do not intend to produce such a long-awaited, exhaustive register of anomalous activity in Hessdalen; however with this catalogue we attempt to stimulate the interest of Hessdalen researchers to compile such a definitive work. Starting with data from the FOTOCAT Project and combining that data with documentation supplied with the cooperation of Ole Jonny Brænne, from local organization UFO-Norge, we test the possibility of creating a preliminary catalogue of all UFO occurrences reported in Norway. Although the present catalogue also collects the photographic events in Hessdalen (collated by performing a comprehensive, but probably not exhaustive, review of the literature), it is mainly targeted at the gathering of UFO reports in Norway, as far as pictures and films are concerned.

View the Report

The post Norway in UFO Photographs: The First Catalogue first appeared on The Black Vault Case Files.

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