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8: Sweden. Archives for the Unexplained and Ghost Rockets
216 Plays11 months ago
I am joined by Clas Svahn, international director of UFO-Sweden and chairman for Archives for the Unexplained, one of the largest UFO archives in the world. Together we explore the riches of this archive, with a particular focus on how it is currently used by researchers from across the world. In the second half of this episode we take a look at the Ghost Rockets phenomenon and two crash retrieval expeditions conducted by Clas.
Interesting links/references:
Archives for the Unexplained (AFU): https://www.afu.se/
AFU’s online archive: https://files.afu.se/Downloads
UFO Sweden: https://www.afu.se/
Clas Svahn’s new book: UFO. Närkonktakterna Som Skakat Världen
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Call to Action
00:00:05
Speaker
you
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode number 8 of European UFOs. I'm your host Sebastian and if you liked this episode then please make sure to subscribe and leave a review, it really helps. Today we're delving into the intriguing world of Swedish UFOs, focusing on two compelling topics.
Klaas Svan Joins: Swedish UFO Phenomena
00:00:31
Speaker
Firstly, we'll mention the archives for the unexplained, a huge and unique archive of historical records dealing with UFOs and related phenomena.
00:00:40
Speaker
Joining us in this exploration is Klaas Svan, a seasoned investigator actively researching UFOs since the 1970s. With nearly 30 books to his name, Klaas is not only an esteemed author, but also a frequent expert on Swedish radio and TV.
Ghost Rockets and Swedish UFO Fieldwork
00:00:57
Speaker
As the International Director of UFO Sweden and Chairman for Archives for the Unexplained, Klaas brings a wealth of knowledge to our conversation.
00:01:07
Speaker
Our journey then takes us to the mysterious Ghost Rockets phenomenon as Klass recounts his experiences from two expeditions investigating, landing and or crash site in Sweden's isolated expanses. These ventures provide a unique perspective on the challenges and findings of UFO fieldwork in this part of the world.
00:01:30
Speaker
So join us as we explore the archives for the unexplained and journey through the remote corners of Sweden in search of UFO mysteries. As usual, the unknown awaits and who knows what discoveries may lie ahead. Hi class, very nice to be on the podcast, how are you doing?
00:01:52
Speaker
Ah, hi Sebastian. It's nice and cold and wintry in Stockholm, so yeah, I'm good. Before we started, you're already talking about you had the pleasure of shoveling some snow at your house. We've been spared this sofa in Berlin, but yeah, well,
00:02:11
Speaker
I've called COVID instead, so that's also my chore for the week.
Klaas' Journey: Journalist to UFO Society Founder
00:02:16
Speaker
But listen, very, very good to have you on. I always ask this, my guests, so could you perhaps elaborate a bit on who you are and how you got into researching and exploring the phenomenon, as it was called these days?
00:02:33
Speaker
Well, yeah, I'm a journalist, as a profession. Since 1978, I have just retired a couple of months ago, after 45 years as a professional journalist with Sweden's largest newspaper, Doggens Nieder.
00:02:52
Speaker
I started to get interested in UFOs around 1968-69 maybe, collecting newspaper clippings and asking my mother and father to buy me books about astronomy and eventually about UFOs. But in 1974, when I was 16 years of age, I
00:03:15
Speaker
I started my own UFO Society in my hometown of Marjorstad and I also attended UFO Sweden, the nationwide research organization, which I am now a chairman of. So I've been interested for quite a while. It's 50 years, next year of active research.
00:03:38
Speaker
which is quite interesting because I've seen quite a lot coming and going and you know there are scares and flaps and highlights of interest and things are coming and going up and down and it's returning in different packages I should say.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's just truth to that, especially to the UFO
Early UFO Investigations in Sweden
00:04:05
Speaker
phenomenon. I think it comes in different guises, but it always reappears. That's definitely, I think, part of the phenomenon. When you founded your own UFO society, was that triggered by a flat
00:04:21
Speaker
Because I'm just thinking of the 1970s, lots of things were going on in the United States during that era in terms of UFOs. Were there similar developments in Sweden?
00:04:32
Speaker
Was this just out of general curiosity for the topic? Yeah, it was more like general curiosity. I have read about UFOs for quite a few years at that point. But in 1974, I decided that I should try to make a difference. So me and a couple of friends
00:04:55
Speaker
not a single female, old men, boys, I should say, at that time, decided to go out and investigate the UFO cases that were happening around the area we were living in. So since no one of us had a driver's license, my father drove us around and we knocked doors and we came there with our cameras and tape recorders and forms to fill out.
00:05:22
Speaker
asking people what they have seen and trying to find a solution to it. We were quite good at it at that time and I think EU for Sweden is still very good at finding solutions. But in all that we saw that there was stories, observations that were very, very hard to find a decent solution to.
00:05:44
Speaker
And that is my point of view even today, that there is a very, very small percentage of all those observations that are worth further study.
Media Evolution: 70s Newspaper to New Age
00:05:54
Speaker
But most of the things that are coming into the EU Sweden's report center are quite easy to explain.
00:06:03
Speaker
I think it's, you always hear statistics like it's over 90% that have a mundane explanation and the rest that's worked for the exploration. So it's interesting to see that that's also the case in Scandinavia.
00:06:19
Speaker
How were UFOs back then reported? So I'm just imagining you and your group of friends being caught around by your dad or by your parents. How back then in the 1970s were you made aware of UFO cases? Was this reported by the media? Yeah, it was very much in the newspapers.
00:06:45
Speaker
very seldom on radio and very, very seldom on TV. But newspapers were reporting local UFO observations.
00:06:58
Speaker
And that is quite different from today, because today the local newspapers nearly never report sightings anymore. They are writing articles about UFOs from time to time, but more like broader context and not what people have seen in the skies. But in the 70s there were loads of them, so it was quite easy to find people who had seen things.
00:07:26
Speaker
And in 1978, when I turned a journalist full time, I was able to write quite a lot about UFO sightings myself as a professional journalist as well.
00:07:38
Speaker
That's especially from where we are today. I mean, I think we've more or less come back full circle because it's not a topic any more than that is ostracized to the same extent that perhaps was. But it's very intriguing to hear that in the 1970s. You could actually do professional journalistic work about the phenomenon.
00:08:00
Speaker
And I'm just wondering, and I'm curious, how is, in your opinion, having worked on this for so many years, how has the media outlook on this topic shifted over the years? Are there general trends? Yeah.
00:08:21
Speaker
I mean in the 1980s there were quite a lot of articles as well but in the late 1980s and the early 1990s the cable TV networks came to Sweden and suddenly I was sitting in every sofa on every channel talking about UFOs because that was something that the viewers really wanted to see and listen to. So that was
00:08:49
Speaker
really something that changed the field. Loads of people were suddenly interested in different aspects of UFOs when TV broadcasted so many programs about them. But also the new age
00:09:07
Speaker
view on UFOs, which we haven't seen in the early 80s, were very prominent in the late 80s and early 90s. And you could see that it was during maybe all of the 90s. Nowadays, the new age view is not very much covered in the press anymore, and not on TV.
00:09:30
Speaker
But at that time, I think more than half of the programs on 3DTV that discussed UFOs were more like new age discussions than research about UFOs.
00:09:44
Speaker
So by new age, I presume you mean individuals referring to their space, brothers, etc. And kind of giving it a more kind of spiritual occult twist or? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Your experiences, star travels and well, not the hardcore observations that we were trying to, to investigate.
Swedish vs US Abductions and New Age Experiences
00:10:15
Speaker
And this is kind of getting ahead a bit, but I think it's pertinent now. So have there been many kind of
00:10:23
Speaker
encounters of between these beings and an individual. So close encounters, so to speak, or is this kind of a rare phenomenon? Because I think for this kind of new age twist of interpretation, you probably have this as a precondition or sort of whether many people are reported kind of close contact scenarios.
00:10:49
Speaker
Well, if we look at the people telling stories about being abducted, which I do not call New Age, I mean, when I talk about New Age, I mean, the inner experience is more. When people are telling about being abducted from their bedrooms or meeting entities, things like that, we were trying to investigate those reports. But they are very, very few in Sweden, I should say.
00:11:18
Speaker
compared to the US. There is really just a fraction of them being reported here in Sweden. So they never really were a big part of the UFO phenomena in Sweden. Not many books were published about it either, because most of the books that I read in the 1970s and the 1980s were more about
00:11:45
Speaker
ETs, spacecrafts, and not very much about entities or meeting with entities, but just observations of different crafts, things like that.
00:11:57
Speaker
All right, so there's not this kind of negative, per se, negative connotation of having experienced the phenomenon, because I think, you know, in the US, with with this
Swedish Military's Historical UFO Interest
00:12:08
Speaker
review, I spoke on so on, it's become couched in these quite, quite negative terms that something that's involuntary, forceful, and violent. It's interesting to hear that.
00:12:22
Speaker
in Sweden, they are very rare, these sorts of encounters, and perhaps also not cast in these terms, so I think that's quite interesting. No, I should say they are not cast in those terms, but in the late 1960s, there were some people who claimed contact with Space Brothers and claimed to be able to foresee when
00:12:52
Speaker
when UFOs were to be seen in the skies or flying saucers, I should say, because they were sure that those were big visitors from other planets. And that was just the nuts and bolts guys, really. But in the 90s, especially in the 90s, the nuts and bolts were not that prominent anymore. And the more new age, new HE interpretations were the more discussed in the media, I should say.
00:13:22
Speaker
Speaking of nuts and bolts, because we already touched on what the media outlook on this topic is or was in Sweden, was there any official position on the part of the military towards UFOs in the time you've worked on this issue? Yeah, we must go back in time really to get this... We should start in the 1930s with
00:13:51
Speaker
the ghost flyer. And the ghost flyer was two different huge waves of observations in Sweden, when people saw what they thought were strange aircraft or really the lights from those aircraft in the sky. And the military was, of course, very much interested in that. I thought it could be the Russians spying
00:14:18
Speaker
And when I looked through all of those observations, and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds from the 1930s, I could see that nearly 99% of all of them were just specks of lights in the sky. Very few described crafts or aircrafts or whatever you want to call them.
00:14:40
Speaker
So, it was much of a scare really, not very much of a UFO wave, I should say. That came in 1946. And I think we will discuss that later on, but that was called the Ghost Rockets, and the military were very, very much interested in the Ghost Rockets. And that continued into the 1950s.
00:15:05
Speaker
because there was a branch of the military just working with UFO cases during the 1950s and 60s.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, fascinating. Yeah, we're definitely going to get into the ghost rockets because it's one of those hallmarks of Scandinavian ufology. And I think something that's really not well known and something I did a bit of breeding onto familiarize myself are the, you just mentioned the ghost flies from the 1930s. And
00:15:36
Speaker
So you mentioned there were specks of light. Can we imagine them as orbs, kind of luminous phenomena floating across the sky, like the Hastalan phenomena, for instance, or... No, not really. Not really compared to Hastalan. More and more lights in the sky not coming from the ground as they are in Hastalan. They are coming from the ground, going upwards. Those were just flying. It could have been
00:16:05
Speaker
anything from Venus to ordinary aircrafts. I should say, I talked to a lot of people involved in the 1930s investigations and they were really trying to pinpoint who was behind those intrusions over Swedish airspace. But they were never able to do that, because they were very, very seldom saw anything tangible.
00:16:32
Speaker
So it was lights in the sky, stars, planets, maybe a craft from time to time. But because rockets were very different from that, they were daylight observations, many of them very much describing crafts, sun shining on the hull and they could see them crashing and can hear them.
00:17:00
Speaker
So the ghost flyer and the ghost rockets are very different from each other.
Role of UFO Sweden in Modern Investigations
00:17:05
Speaker
Are the ghost flyers from the 1930s overall the earliest documented evidence of what you would nowadays call a UFO or are there events predating this in Sweden? There are events predating that of course when you look through all Swedish magazines and newspapers you can find
00:17:27
Speaker
A lot of observations are mostly strange lights. Very, very few describing craft or objects. I should say 99% of what you are finding in the 1800s and 1700s newspapers are lights in the sky, or strange behaving lights very, very near the ground as well. Very much like the ball lighting
00:17:54
Speaker
phenomenon in many ways, but sometimes stranger. Yeah, but not really what you call UFOs today. Yeah.
00:18:06
Speaker
Just to take up the before we get more into the archives for the unexplained with it, which is a big topic. We touched on the media outlook on UFOs and how it got cast partly into this more spiritual new age issue.
00:18:29
Speaker
We talked about the military in the 1930s and we're going to talk about ghost rockets. What is the military's position these days, especially after 2017 in Sweden? Has there been any official announcement? Is this a topic they're actively pursuing?
00:18:49
Speaker
Well, what did happen after the 1950s and 60s was that in 1965, the defense staff in Sweden decided that they were not to investigate UFOs anymore. They couldn't see any military significance and not a threat. And at that point, they had put lots of time into this, lots of personnel, lots of money, lots of time.
00:19:13
Speaker
But in 65, they turned this over to the defense research facility that are still today receiving reports from the public, but they're not doing any investigations anymore. But in between 65 and up until 2000 something, there were people.
00:19:35
Speaker
the National Defence Research Institute working on UFOs, but on their free time. No money, really, they were just the one, if you call them, you were transferred to this guy or this girl.
00:19:55
Speaker
Today, they are not very much interested in this anymore. They refer the reports to you for Sweden, to our organization. They are not doing any research. They have not said anything public.
00:20:11
Speaker
except two interviews. I made one interview with a high ranking officer in Sweden. And he told me that we are not very much interested in this anymore. Our air crews, they are not experiencing anything that they couldn't understand. So if you ask the Swedish military, there are no UFOs over Sweden at all. But looking back into the files, we can see that there have been
00:20:39
Speaker
loads of reports from military air crows and from other military men during the years. And I would very much doubt that it has stopped suddenly. I think they're still seeing things that they don't understand, but maybe they don't want to tell because that's sign of weakness, saying that they don't know what is flying over Sweden, of course.
00:21:03
Speaker
So it's kind of a difference between what's happening behind the scenes and what's portrayed to the public in interviews, etc. I think so. Yeah, I mean, it's it seems to be.
00:21:18
Speaker
The case with all my other guests from Europe, I think the general threat here is that there isn't often an interest in the UFO topic, but it's definitely not on the same level as in the US on the government side.
00:21:38
Speaker
Perhaps that may also be due to a data bias in the U.S. through FOIA requests and so on. We know that there has been an active interest in the government saying one thing and is different from what they're actually doing behind the scenes. But I think might be just then to a more complete picture of the data in the U.S.
AFU: The Extensive Paranormal Archive
00:22:02
Speaker
Speaking of data, you have done
00:22:06
Speaker
a very extraordinary job. I mean, I'm still just flabbergasted by this. A huge library archive resource for UFO research in Scandinavia. It's unique. And could you give us an overview of the archives for the unexplained? Because I think it's really mind boggling what you've managed to do over the last decades there.
00:22:34
Speaker
yeah it is it really is we started in 1973 with just a bookshelf really a couple of hundreds of books and today we have around 700 square meters and 4200 meters of shelf capacity filled more than filled with books UFO reports
00:23:01
Speaker
paraphernalia, films, pictures, tape recordings, anything connected to the unknown really. At the beginning we were called archives for UFO research, but during the years we realized that UFOs are so interconnected with other topics and strange phenomena.
00:23:24
Speaker
that we couldn't really distinguish and just focus on UFOs. So nowadays we have a paranormal archive, a fortune archive with lots of mysteries, unsold enigmas and unsold natural phenomena. It's very broad. I think we have around 60,000 books in our libraries. We have several different libraries.
00:23:51
Speaker
and more than a million newspaper clippings, hundreds of thousands of magazines. It's very hard to give you the figure. It's a huge intake all the time because I travel to different countries trying to save files from being lost.
00:24:11
Speaker
I went to Germany earlier this year, giving a speech and also collecting huge library, which we sent back to Sweden, several thousand books, mostly in German. We also saved from Virginia earlier this year more than 3,500 books on the paranormal, which was a really, really fantastic contribution.
00:24:40
Speaker
And at this point, we are full, so we are looking for new premises. Lots of people are coming to us, sitting there, doing their research, people from all around the world. But we also have this download page. You can download for free magazines and files. It's tens and tens of thousands.
00:25:05
Speaker
And we have a huge electronic file, of course, that are behind a wall with sensitive information like people's names and addresses on UFO reports that we cannot make public. But we can let researchers come and look at and do their research on public data view. But at this point, we are trying to find a new premises.
00:25:32
Speaker
which is larger and more adjusted to our needs, really, because we can see no stopping in this. So many files are still out there that need to be saved. And I go to Britain every year and bring back around 2,200 kilos every year for more than 20 years, 25, I should say. Wow. Is this material from private donations or how do you acquire it?
00:26:02
Speaker
It's from private investigators from UFO societies that has folded, maybe. We saved a 50-year-old UFO societies archive from Spain a couple of years ago. We saved the flying saucer reviews full archive from Britain a couple of years ago.
00:26:27
Speaker
We saved the oldest, as far as we know, UFO paranormal societies files from Eureka in California, the Borderland Science Research Association, started in the 1940s. So I went to Eureka and packed it and then we sent it back to Sweden.
00:26:47
Speaker
And what we do is that we are ordering everything into acid free boxes. We are cataloging and we are scanning. But of course we are sitting under this avalanche of material coming in all the time. So we have not the time to scan as much as we want. But the aim for AFU is one.
00:27:13
Speaker
to make available good information for researchers and to preserve it for posterity. And I mean, it costs a lot of money to do this. We do this from our own pockets, really. We are around 50, 55 people putting money into this every month. And most of them are from Sweden. I think only two of them are from other countries than Sweden. But the users are from all over the world.
00:27:43
Speaker
So we hope that other people around the world can see the benefit of this and want to help us to make this even better and more accessible for the future. Because we are not for ourselves. We are doing this for you, for all the people out there interested, and for all the researchers interested. Yeah, thanks for this overview. And I think it's even more impressive what you managed to achieve
00:28:11
Speaker
without any direct sources of public funding, if I understood this correctly, Zolar, it's kind of a private enterprise, so to speak. That is really amazing. Do you have permanent staff or how do you manage to upkeep all of this? Yeah, we have four or five people working for free, volunteers just interested nearly every day.
00:28:39
Speaker
We have a couple of people that are paid for through the employment agency, and we pay a part of their salary. So I should say every day there are maybe eight or 10 people working at AFU. And we also have this shop, AFU shop, where you can buy surplus material. And we are selling for around 2,000
00:29:07
Speaker
to 3,000 euros every month, because every third copy of a book we are having, we are selling. So two copies we are keeping, and the third one we are selling. And we also sell magazines, of course, when we are surplus magazines. So that's a very important thing in what we are doing, to help people to acquire things that are very, very hard to find.
00:29:34
Speaker
And having achieved this level of coverage on the UFO and related subjects, have you had any contact with notable researchers? And I'm thinking especially of researchers that work on archival and database projects like Jacqueline or John Greenwald, for instance, have they been in touch? Yeah, absolutely. Jacqueline is a good friend of ours.
00:30:04
Speaker
Other researchers have been visiting us like Hilary Evans, the late Hilary Evans, one of the greatest researchers in Britain for many years. When he passed away, or before, he donated all of his files and his library to us. So I went there and we packed for a week.
00:30:25
Speaker
full lodge lorry and sent it back to Sweden. And we have historians from the US coming over, sitting doing their research. We have quite many folklorists coming to us, researchers from Europe and Sweden. A couple of years ago a guy from Japan flew in for three days from Tokyo. He was sitting three days just looking at our Japanese archive.
00:30:55
Speaker
And in the 90s, I went to Moscow and saved a copy of the KGB files and a lot of other stuff. So we are trying to find things all over the world. And we have a cooperation with other archives because there are archives around the world, local archives, just focusing on their countries. We are focusing on all the world.
00:31:25
Speaker
That's the difference. If you use the world, our heritage really.
Academic Focus at AFU: Folklore vs Physical UFOs
00:31:30
Speaker
Something I'm very interested in is the academic study of the phenomenon and given that you have created this archive, you're probably able to give an overview of what types of research questions people visiting your archive actually bring to the table. Would you be able to see a red thread there to categorize it?
00:31:53
Speaker
For instance, are there mainly nuts and bolts type of research questions, or are there people from religious studies like, for instance, Dana Pasulka researching the kind of more adiational background of the UFO phenomenon? So I'd just be interested what the current trends are you see in research on the topic.
00:32:15
Speaker
The other trends are quite, I should say, pointed towards beliefs, religious beliefs, folklore, things like that. I should say maybe nine out of ten visitors we have are looking into that. Very few with nuts and bolts background, and very few physicists like
00:32:45
Speaker
researchers into astronomical mysteries, we have loads of them. I mean, we have so much of that. But that kind of researchers we are seeing very, very, very seldom, which is very, very sad, really, because I think they should take a look at what we are not only the belief systems are of interest, of course. So I invite people from every, every
00:33:14
Speaker
every scientific point of view really to come to us and ask for information. And of course, a lot of people are just interested. We got loads of emails from private interested people asking for things asking for observations or what's happened on a certain date. They are looking for corporate cooperation with us in different projects. And we do have cooperation with
00:33:43
Speaker
The New York based company Enigma Labs for now, we are scanning stuff for them. We also are having quite a big cooperation with Mufon in the US. So quite a lot of people are coming to us asking for help and finding help, I should say.
00:34:04
Speaker
And without having to name institutions now, but are there also academics visiting you from different universities? Because in what I'm doing right now, there's sort of a problem with finding current academics researching the topic seriously because it's still cost and these somewhat negative terms.
00:34:33
Speaker
for a lot of people, it's a career killer in academia, unfortunately. And so I'm just curious if academics from certain institutions actually visit you or if they come. Yeah, we do have that. We have, for example, the historian, Greg JGN coming to us for two consecutive summers.
00:34:57
Speaker
His book is soon being published and he said to us that I didn't have to go anywhere else in the world. I just went to AFU and that was fine. So that's nice to hear. And right now I'm helping, I cannot name it, but it's a university in Scandinavia, which are planning some big event and we will help them with that.
00:35:25
Speaker
So yes, there are Academians coming to us asking for help. Yeah, I think that's very promising to hear because it's definitely a topic that is so complex that needs scientific and more academic attention. So that's a very promising trend I gather there.
00:35:46
Speaker
In terms of the... Sorry, I saw a couple of points about the AFU. One is the kind of historical depth. How far back do the sources go, you have in your archive, just broadly? Yeah, well, it's hundreds and hundreds of years back when it comes to articles and excerpts from books and things like that.
00:36:12
Speaker
when it comes to hard copies. I think we are from the 1600s when it comes to books mostly. We also acquired the source book, the William Corley's source book project archive a couple of years ago. And that goes back quite a long way as well. So,
00:36:40
Speaker
I can see no limit really, because we are always looking for files, but most of the hard files are of course from the 1900s. Yeah, I think it's definitely a historical phenomenon as well that may come in different guises, but it's
00:36:58
Speaker
at the baseline, probably quite similar in different centuries. And speaking of the different guises which the phenomenon comes, I'm very curious about this shift you made at one point from pure, eunuchological research archive to a more
00:37:19
Speaker
comprehensive paranormal archive. What sort of internal discussions did you have to make that shift? Yeah, we had quite a lot of discussions about that. The idea was from me, really. And the other guys on the board, they could see my point. Even it took a while because we had to change our name.
00:37:47
Speaker
And that was quite sensitive, of course. We could keep the acronym AFU, Archives for the Unexplained, Archives for UFO Research. But doing that was not easy, of course. But it was the right thing to do. And now everyone is very, very pleased with that. We discussed this with Hilary Evans before he passed away. He was very positive to our change into this.
00:38:16
Speaker
And all researchers we have been dealing with, have been seeing this for years and years, that UFOs cannot be dealt with justice, and not some bold thing, just isolated from all other strange phenomena. And when you're looking at William Corley's huge source book project, you can see that, wow, there are so many things that we do not understand that happens on this Earth.
00:38:45
Speaker
that are just in the outskirts of UFOs and connecting to them in so many ways. So we had a discussion and now we feel that this was really the right path to walk. Yeah, and it seems to be confirmed as well by what you said, researchers focusing on folklore and the ideational framework of ufology, visiting and using your archive. So, thank you.
00:39:14
Speaker
very much did the right thing there. Thanks for this great overview over the AFU. I'm going to make sure to include all links to the website so that listeners can find it.
In-Depth: 1946 Ghost Rockets
00:39:32
Speaker
The other major topic I wanted to talk a bit about today are ghost rockets because I think everyone heard of them. They're kind of associated with
00:39:44
Speaker
Scandinavian ufology, but you are the source of all knowledge when it comes to Ghost Rockets, so I'd love to get a brief overview of what they are and what their characteristics are. Yeah, I mean, not everyone knows about them, of course, but they were one of those
00:40:06
Speaker
phenomena that really got me interested in the 1970s. I read about them. I read that the Swedish military during 1946 had put quite an effort into finding out what people saw in the skies. And what did they see? The reports were, of course, as many reports about UFOs, lights in the night. But in the daytime,
00:40:36
Speaker
reports were pouring in from all over Sweden and Norway, Finland and partly of Denmark as well, about cigar-shaped objects with or without wings flying over Sweden and crashing always into lakes. And that was really a mystery for the military, and it's a great mystery to me as well.
00:41:02
Speaker
Because when you look at more than 1,000 UFO reports that the Swedish military had in their files, which we, me and a friend at AFU, on the Schlielegre, were able to find in the 1980s, you can see that they put a lot of effort into trying to find a solution to the ghost rocket phenomenon.
00:41:29
Speaker
and they were really, really, really puzzled about the crashes. The military sent search teams to several lakes where many people in broad daylight had seen those rocket-like things going down with a splash and a big column of water. They, from time to time, found indentations at the bottom of the lake.
00:41:58
Speaker
They could see that large stones had been thrown up on the shore, water lilies were cut off. But they never found a trace of the ghost rocket itself. And, of course, those rockets were very much like the V bombs, the Nazi Germany's secret weapon during the last years of the Second World War.
00:42:25
Speaker
They were also cigar-shaped, but with wings. And one of them crashed in Sweden in 1944, and that left behind 2,200 kilos of debris. And those ghost rockets never left anything behind.
00:42:48
Speaker
And I met with many of the researchers, so the military researchers, they were still alive in the 1980s when we found this. So I travel around and I interview them, I interviewed loads of witnesses as well. All of them are gone now. So, well, I should have done more. But I did as much as I could at that time. And they were all saying the same, that this was a mystery. They should have found something.
00:43:16
Speaker
because there were whole villages seeing those crafts going down into water, and nothing was there when the military went there trying to find it. So I also talked to a Swedish pilot who in August 1946 suddenly saw this ghost rocket came flying in front of his aircraft.
00:43:44
Speaker
And he said to me that there were no tail fin, there were no wings, there were no cockpit, there were just this maybe 15 meters big large cigar flying. And he tried to catch up, but he was out flown by it. And the ghost rocket flew into this storm cloud that he had tried to avoid earlier in the flight.
00:44:14
Speaker
But the ghost rock flew straight into this, and he couldn't follow it anymore, so he lost it. So there were really, really good observations. There were not just specks of lights in the sky. Those were seen for half a minute, for minutes. They were heard, they were seen crashing, the watercolor was seen, and the traces from the crash were seen, but the objects were never, never found.
00:44:43
Speaker
That's indeed very curious. Just out of interest, are there that many lakes in Sweden? Or why are the crash sites always in lakes? I never pictured Sweden full of lakes, to be honest. Not the lakes in Sweden. It's even more lakes than in Finland. Finland is known for their lakes. Nevertheless, there are more land than lakes in Sweden.
00:45:12
Speaker
But not a single rocket ever crashed on land, which I think tells that someone was really aiming for the lakes. It was not a capacity done. This was something that was planned. And who did plan this and why? We don't know that. That's also a mystery.
00:45:38
Speaker
Did they ever exhibit any bizarre flight maneuvers like turning right angles or were they just very fast and flying in one direction and then they crashed into a dike? They could be seen changing their trajectory at some point trying to hit the lake.
00:46:00
Speaker
but most of the time they were just crashing from above. But that said, the ghost rockets did not stop coming, 1946.
Ongoing Investigations and Scandinavian UFO Shapes
00:46:10
Speaker
They were reported from the whole of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and into the 1990s. Nowadays they are very, very, very hard to find such observations of.
00:46:24
Speaker
But we have observations more recently in the 1990s and 1980s of ghost rocket-like entities landing on lakes and sinking. And at several of those observations, the crafts were seen navigating before landing.
00:46:48
Speaker
very, very clearly seen trying to hit the water. At one point, one of those crafts turned 180 degrees and landed and sank. And that one we have been trying to find. We have had two expeditions to that lake in the very, very far north of Sweden. So we have been there twice. It's a very difficult area. It's a natural park.
00:47:17
Speaker
So we must have special permission just to be there doing that. And we cannot move anything, if we are finding something, we cannot bring it up. But we have a radar return that shows us that something is resting in the mud, a couple of meters down, at the point where the two witnesses in 1980 saw this strange thing landing and sinking.
00:47:44
Speaker
Well, I just imagine it being very frustrating that you can't actually lift it. You know something is there, but you can't really do anything. Is it a deep lake? No, it's only four meters. But after the four meters of water, there are four meters of mud. And two meters down in the mud, this thing is resting. And we will go back there again with another instrument, because now we have just seen it in two dimensions.
00:48:14
Speaker
But we will bring an instrument that can show us in three dimensions, so we can see if this really is this ghost rocket, or if there's something else. What does the two-dimensional shape look like the ground plan, so to speak? It's just really a bulb like this, showing that it's a big object resting there. And the rest of the lake, we couldn't see things like that. So it could be a reindeer,
00:48:44
Speaker
sinking there maybe in the winter time but it's large that's what we can see. And as opposed to all the mud sending divers down there it's a bit futile right because you just wouldn't see anything so. Yeah we did send divers down the first thing because we didn't know about the mud. This lake wasn't really
00:49:11
Speaker
well known at all, it wasn't measured. So the divers went down there and they could put their arm just through the mud. But of course it was impossible for them to do anything else than that.
00:49:29
Speaker
Yeah, ghost rockets are an ongoing mystery, but very fascinating because they're not just lights, they're actually structured craft witnessed by several, several witnesses over the years. And now you're even looking for for physical evidence. So it's very fascinating. And speaking in terms of the physical appearance of UFOs in Scandinavia in general,
00:49:54
Speaker
We have ghost rockets. Are there also any other shapes like typical saucers or triangles? Or is it really only an oblong, cigar-shaped craft that you get? No, we have everything that anyone else has. Really, we do have triangles. We have orbs. We have classical flying saucers. But of course, the saucers are very, very, very few. That has always been.
00:50:23
Speaker
Chris Obeck, who is a very, very good writer and a very good researcher, is the latest book, Saucers. He tries to show that flying saucers are very, very, very seldom seen. It's been a meme in many ways. It's been something that people are calling things in the sky. I saw a flying saucer, but it could have been just a speck of light or an orb or whatever.
00:50:53
Speaker
So, but we have everything of that. But what you can see is that in the 1970s, when I started this research, people were reporting those very big cigar, not ghost rockets, but more like mother ships flying on at low altitude with windows, with lights in them. Classical, really classical. That kind of observations we do not get anymore.
00:51:22
Speaker
They are completely vanished. We don't have them. But in the 70s, there were loads of them. So that's really strange. Something happened in between there somewhere. Now, thanks a lot for this overview. It's also interesting to hear that in terms of the general shapes, it does correspond to what was going on in other parts of the world. But the Geist rockets do
00:51:50
Speaker
seem to appear to be a rather unique Scandinavian phenomenon, so it's very interesting indeed. As a way to wrap this up,
00:52:01
Speaker
Klaus, what do you make of the, I feel it's a pertinent question, what do you make of the recent developments in the US, in particular, David Grush, etc, with the Schumer amendment being on the table, but also, you know, receiving quite a lot of resistance behind the scenes from what I gather? Do you think this is something that will also have an impact on your work?
00:52:28
Speaker
on the Scandinavian ufology scene or how is this currently received where you work?
Influence of US UFO Revelations on Scandinavian Ufology
00:52:36
Speaker
Yeah I mean it's much discussed here in Sweden as well of course and everyone is wanting to see if David Grösch, his sources are bona fide. We haven't heard from his sources yet, I mean
00:52:53
Speaker
Some people in the Congress says that they have talked to them, but the geologists around the world are still waiting for anything more tangible, I should say. We have heard this before, that the big revelation will be coming, and we haven't seen it. So I'm not that hopeful. I think if someone really wants to keep this under wraps, they will do it.
00:53:23
Speaker
or any truth behind what David Gross says. And there are crafts being taken care of within the US military industrial complex. They want to use it for their own benefits, I think. They do not want to share it with the world. So let's see. Hopefully, we will know more next year. But as you mentioned, the Schumer Amendment is...
00:53:53
Speaker
may be stopped. It looks more and more likely that it will be, I think. And that is very, very sad because the Schumer Amendment would have made us at least in some sort of possibility to see proof about what the US really knows about UFOs. I hope that part still will be coming through so we can see some documents, even if we cannot see
00:54:23
Speaker
the hardcore material. But nevertheless, whatever comes out of this, the private UF organizations like UF Sweden and AFU, we still have a role to play because lots of people will still see things in the sky that don't understand. They will still want to report what they are experiencing and the US military doesn't want to deal with private citizens.
00:54:50
Speaker
and of course the Swedish military doesn't want to deal with private citizens either. So we will still be there even after Grash and the revelations that may be coming. Hopefully they will be coming. I hope so. Yeah indeed and I'm totally with you that I think it doesn't
00:55:14
Speaker
discredit the role of a civic effort to unravel the UFO phenomenon. I think it's still even more important to do this in a civic context and in a public context. So yeah, I'm totally, totally with you there. One thing, this is just a personal side note. My listeners do know this. I always find that
00:55:40
Speaker
a bit strange that, you know, I think now behind the scenes they're talking about up to 50 craft or so being or materials being harbored by the US. I do find that a bit hard to believe given that
00:55:57
Speaker
The question is quite relevant why there should only, why all these crafts should come down over US soil or countries that are in direct control by or in cooperation with the US. I always find that a bit hard to believe.
Broad Perspective and Upcoming Projects
00:56:13
Speaker
But nevertheless, this is just my personal opinion. That is a problem. I think it is a real problem. Why do they crash as many times?
00:56:23
Speaker
I mean, they have been travelling, presumably from somewhere else, in a very, very high tech craft, and suddenly they just crash. I don't get that. But I should say one thing, I don't think that the UFO phenomenon is just a phenomenon, it's phenomena, and it's many, many, many answers to it.
00:56:48
Speaker
Just to look for one answer, for the ET, I think that narrows our perspective too much. We should look at this much broader. And that is why AFU is also looking at this topic much broader. So, let's be more open-minded, I should say. I think that's a perfect note to close on. Thanks so much for your time class, if you've been very generous with your time today.
00:57:14
Speaker
Could you briefly tell us what you're currently working on and what we can expect? Yeah, just a couple of hours ago I sent my redacted manuscript to the printer.
00:57:33
Speaker
And it's been a new book published in March, I think. So I've been working for that for quite a few months. I'm also working on a documentary called The Youth of Mystery, which will be aired on Swedish television in four parts in March. So it will be broadcasted on TV4 in Sweden. So we traveled to the US and filmed, and we've been traveling all over Sweden.
00:57:58
Speaker
filming, so that will soon be finished as well. So that's the two main projects I've been working on and still working on. And what is your book on, your new one? Well, that's much about the military, Swedish military, and also about what's happening in the US. Lots of observations by radar personnel here in Sweden, by pilots, by military personnel, but also trying to broaden the context, trying to show that UFOs are not that easily explained as ETs.
00:58:29
Speaker
could be a much more interesting thing behind UFOs as far as I see it. Great, that sounds fascinating. If you do give me the publisher and all the other information I'll make sure to include it in the description of this podcast and obviously I'll also link to the AFU etc.
00:58:48
Speaker
Klaus, thank you again so much. It's been a real pleasure and hope to talk to you again soon. Yeah, the very same and good luck with your podcast. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. Bye bye.