Ghost rockets

Ghost rockets

Type	Case (sighting wave)
Swedish name	Spökraketer
Date	26 February – December 1946, with a revival in January–March 1948
Place	Mainly Sweden and Finland; also Norway, Denmark, Greece and elsewhere in Europe
Reports	About 2,000 sightings, May–December 1946
Investigators	Swedish Defence Staff and Ghost Rocket committee, British Air Ministry, U.S. Central Intelligence Group, Greek government
Best-known event	Lake Kölmjärv crash, 19 July 1946
Also known as	ghost rocket, Scandinavian ghost rockets

The ghost rockets (Swedish: spökraketer, also called the Scandinavian ghost rockets) were rocket- or missile-shaped unidentified flying objects reported in 1946, mainly over Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia, including Finland — a year before the term "flying saucer" was coined. About 2,000 sightings were logged between May and December 1946, with peaks on 9 and 11 August. Some 200 were said to have been verified by radar, and the authorities recovered fragments attributed to the objects.^[1][2]

At the time, the objects were widely believed to be Soviet tests of captured German V-1 or V-2 missiles fired from the former German rocket base at Peenemünde, and they drew the attention of Swedish, British and U.S. military intelligence. Investigators concluded that many sightings were meteors, but the episode was never fully explained, and it is often seen as a forerunner of the American flying saucer wave of 1947.^[1][3]

Background

The development and testing of Germany's V-weapons had taken place at Peenemünde, on the island of Usedom on Germany's Baltic coast, where Wernher von Braun was technical director of the army's ballistic missile work and the Luftwaffe developed the V-1 flying bomb. Hundreds of test V-1s were launched over the Baltic during the war, and several strayed into Sweden: the remains of a V-1 were found at Karlskrona in November 1943, another came down near Brösarp in Skåne in May 1944, and on 13 June 1944 a stray V-2 exploded about 1,500 metres above a farm near Bäckebo in Småland, 350 kilometres from Peenemünde. The Bäckebo wreckage was examined by the Swedish aircraft-wreck expert Henry Kjellson and then flown to Britain for study. According to the researcher Joel Carpenter, its airburst misled the Swedes into thinking such missiles were designed to explode above the ground and disintegrate.^[2][3]

Soviet forces occupied Peenemünde on 5 May 1945, and both the Soviet Union and the United States raced to recover German rocket technology and experts. There are no known rocket launches from Peenemünde or the nearby island of Greifswalder Oie after February 1945. By 1946 relations between the Western powers and the Soviet Union had soured: Winston Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain" speech in March, and by late August the press was publishing predictions of another world war. Scandinavia had also seen an earlier scare in 1933–1934, when unmarked "ghost fliers" were reported flying at night over northern Sweden, Finland and Norway, sometimes shining searchlights; the cause was never established.^[1][2][3]

The 1946 wave

The first reports came from Finnish observers on 26 February 1946. In Sweden, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported on 24 May that two night watchmen in Landskrona had seen a "wingless, cigar-shaped body of dimensions of a small airplane, which at regular intervals spurted bunches of sparks from its tail", flying southwest at about 100 metres. An air expert told the paper that the objects might be V-1s fired by the Soviets from the Baltic coast, noting that the intermittent sparks matched the V-1's engine. Within days similar fireballs and wingless objects were reported from Gävle, Karlskrona, Helsingborg and the Stockholm area, and on 1 June a silvery, cigar-shaped "ghost airplane" as long as a training plane was reported over Katrineholm, flying faster than any fighter. The same day the British air attaché in Stockholm, Group Captain Simpson, informed the Air Ministry in London.^[1][2][3]

Reports soon came from Denmark, where a farmer near Ringsted watched a slow, shining object trailing sparks, and from Finland, where a luminous "ghost rocket" was seen over Helsinki in June flying at 900 to 1,200 feet with a smoke trail. A June 1946 report from Finland passed to the U.S. Army Air Forces said a "V-bomb" seen over Helsinki was believed to have been launched from the Soviet-held Porkkala area. On 12 June the Swedish Defence Staff ordered all military personnel to report unusual observations and asked its attachés in Norway and Denmark to collect reports there. By 8 July about 30 sightings had been reported to the Defence Staff, and reports multiplied sharply over the following days.^[2][3]

Descriptions

Most witnesses described fast-flying rocket- or missile-shaped objects, with or without wings, visible for only a few seconds; slower, cigar-shaped objects were also reported, and some witnesses heard a hissing or rumbling sound. Some objects were said to leave no exhaust trail, move too slowly for rockets, fly horizontally, travel and manoeuvre in formation, or make no sound at all. A July news report described "a greenish blue shining ball giving off a tail of light of the same color". The writer of a modern compilation of the newspaper reports notes that the accounts never fit a single picture: objects were described as flying very high or at treetop level, as up to 100 feet long or as small as a private plane, as loud or silent, and as exploding, crashing or flying away — and most reports came from untrained observers, filtered through the press.^[1][3]

The U.S. Air Force's Edward J. Ruppelt later summarised the reports as usually seen at night and almost always travelling at very high speed, shaped like a ball or projectile, coloured bright green, white, red or yellow, and sometimes making sounds, but always too far away for details to be seen. He wrote that the newspapers had soon begun to call them Soviet guided missiles "for no good reason, other than speculation and circulation", and that by the end of the summer reports were coming from Denmark, Norway, Spain, Greece, French Morocco, Portugal and Turkey.^[4]

The Njurunda fall

On 9 July 1946 the photographer Erik Reuterswärd photographed a ghost rocket from an air-surveillance tower about 80 kilometres west of Västerås; the picture was widely published. The same day a glowing object fell into the sand near summer cabins at Njurunda, near Sundsvall. According to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, it gave off a blinding light, came down at a 40-degree angle and left a small crater about a metre across, surrounded by porous, slag-like material in colours from burnt yellow to black, some of which stung the skin like lye. The Sundsvall air base press officer said the remains were very hot when found. A chemist who examined the fragments said they were not of celestial origin and resembled weathered carbide, and that one piece carried a tiny chequerboard pattern like a printing screen. The military took over the samples. On 11 July the U.S. legation in Stockholm cabled Washington that a member of its staff had seen one of the missiles, that the Swedes denied launching them, and that if they were Soviet, their purpose might be to intimidate Sweden.^[2][3]

In Norway, a "ghost plane" reported over the Oslofjord on 14 July turned out to be a Beechcraft taxi flight whose pilot had tested his landing lights while descending toward Fornebu, but other Norwegian reports followed, including two small winged objects said to have plunged into Lake Mjøsa near Feiring with a loud whistle and a large splash.^[3]

Lake Kölmjärv

Crashes were not uncommon, and almost always into lakes; some objects were said to skim across the surface before sinking. The Swedish military dived in several of these lakes soon afterwards but found nothing except occasional craters in the lake bed or torn-off water plants. The best-known crash took place on 19 July 1946 at Lake Kölmjärv in northern Sweden, where witnesses reported a grey, rocket-shaped object with wings, about two metres long, crashing into the lake; one witness heard a thunderclap, possibly the object exploding.^[1][2]

A Swedish military team led by Lieutenant Karl-Gösta Bartoll searched the lake, for about two to three weeks according to different accounts, and found nothing. In his report Bartoll wrote that the lake bottom had been disturbed but nothing recovered, that "there are many indications that the Kölmjärv object disintegrated itself", and that it was probably made of a light material, possibly a magnesium alloy that would break up easily and not register on their instruments. Interviewed in 1984 by the Swedish researcher Clas Svahn, he repeated that the object had largely disintegrated in flight and insisted that "what people saw were real, physical objects".^[1][2]

Swedish investigations

On 15 July 1946 a special Ghost Rocket committee held the first of twelve meetings at the Swedish Royal Air Administration, chaired by Air Commodore Bengt Jacobsson; its members included Henry Kjellson and representatives of the Air Staff, the signals intelligence agency and the defence research institute. Because many people suspected Soviet missile tests from Peenemünde, the Swedish military instructed newspapers not to report the exact location, direction or speed of sightings, reasoning that this information would be valuable to whoever was conducting the tests. In early August Lieutenant Lennart Neckman of the Defence Staff's Air Defence Division saw something he said was "without a doubt ... a rocket projectile".^[1][2]

On 10 October 1946 the Swedish Defence Staff said publicly that most observations were vague and must be treated very sceptically, but that some clear observations could not be explained as natural phenomena, Swedish aircraft or imagination; radar and other equipment had registered readings without revealing what the objects were. It added that fragments said to come from the missiles were nothing but ordinary coke or slag. A memo drafted for the committee on 3 December recorded nearly 100 reported impacts and 30 pieces of debris examined by the Swedish National Defence Research Institute (FOA); the debris was later said to be meteorite fragments. Of almost 1,000 reports received by the Defence Staff up to 29 November, 225 were considered observations of "real physical objects", and every one had been seen in broad daylight.^[1]

U.S. interest

On 14 August 1946 The New York Times reported that Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson was "very much interested" in the reports, and later documents show that U.S. Army Air Forces intelligence was too. On 20 August the paper reported that two U.S. experts on aerial warfare — General James Doolittle, now a vice-president of Shell Oil, and General David Sarnoff, president of RCA and a former member of Eisenhower's London staff — had arrived in Stockholm, officially on private business. The chief of the Swedish Defence Staff made no secret that he wanted their advice and would put all available reports before them. They were told the objects had several times been tracked on radar, and on 30 September Sarnoff was quoted as saying he was "convinced that the 'ghost bombs' are no myth but real missiles".^[1]

On 22 August 1946 the director of the Central Intelligence Group, Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg, sent President Truman a Top Secret memo stating that the "weight of evidence" pointed to Peenemünde as the launch site, based partly on a Swedish air officer's account of radar plotting, and speculating that the objects were extended-range V-1 developments aimed at the Gulf of Bothnia for testing, which destroyed themselves by a small charge or by burning. Swedish, British and U.S. investigators ultimately rejected the Soviet theory, because no recognisable rocket fragments were ever found and many objects behaved unlike missiles.^[1]

The 1948 USAFE document

A Top Secret document from U.S. Air Forces in Europe dated 4 November 1948, declassified in 1997, shows that at least some investigators considered an extraterrestrial origin for the ghost rockets and later "flying saucers". It said that during a visit to the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, Swedish officers had told the Americans that some reliable and technically qualified people had concluded the phenomena were "the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth". It also mentioned a Swedish naval salvage team's search for an object that crashed in a lake, which found a previously unknown crater on the lake floor, and ended that the Americans were inclined not to discredit the theory entirely while keeping an open mind.^[1]

Greece and beyond

Similar objects were reported in early September 1946 by British Army units in Greece, especially around Thessaloniki, and on 5 September the Greek Prime Minister, Konstantinos Tsaldaris, said projectiles had been seen over Macedonia and Thessaloniki on 1 September. In mid-September they were reported in Portugal, then in Belgium and northern Italy. The Greek government's investigation was led by the physicist Paul Santorini, who had worked on the proximity fuze and held patents on guidance and radar systems, with a team of army engineers. In a 1967 lecture to the Greek Astronomical Society, broadcast on Athens Radio, he said: "We soon established that they were not missiles", but that the army, after consulting foreign officials, had stopped the investigation, and that foreign scientists flew to Greece for secret talks with him. He later told UFO researchers such as Raymond Fowler that secrecy was imposed because officials feared admitting to a superior technology against which there was "no possibility of defense".^[1]

The 1948 return

According to Ruppelt, the reports died out in 1947 without any firm conclusions, but returned in January 1948, when U.S. air attachés in Sweden, Denmark and Norway cabled the Air Technical Intelligence Center about them. During January and February people in North Jutland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Germany reported "balls of fire traveling slowly across the sky"; the reports were sketchy and mostly from newspapers. Ruppelt wrote that the Swedish Defence Staff was said to have concluded from a comprehensive study that all the incidents could be explained as astronomical phenomena, but that despite several attempts he never obtained detailed official information. The ghost rockets, he wrote, left in March "as mysteriously as they had arrived".^[4]

Explanations

Investigations concluded that many ghost rocket sightings were probably meteors; the peaks of 9 and 11 August 1946, for example, fell within the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. However, most sightings did not occur during meteor showers, and many described features inconsistent with meteors, such as apparent manoeuvres. No physical evidence of an unknown technology was found, and debate over the origin of the unexplained reports continues. The episode is often seen as a forerunner of the 1947 flying saucer wave in the United States, which began a year after the first ghost rockets.^[1][3][4]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Ghost rockets”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.