Is it a natural phenomenon or UFOs haunting a mysterious Norwegian valley?
Locals say they see UFOs and aliens, and after more than 40 years of trying to crack the mystery, scientists still have no idea what the strange lights are. Politiken joined a weeklong field study in the enigmatic Hessdalen to better understand the phenomenon.
When we are standing outside the small mountain cabin in Norway’s Hessdalen after midnight, Kim Nyland can clearly recall that Friday night two years ago when a taxi dropped him off just before midnight and he walked into the cabin.
He had rented it for the weekend in hopes of seeing the mysterious lights that appear in Hessdalen. As he was settling in, the lamps suddenly began to flicker. He sensed an inner, or perhaps an outer, voice telling him to hurry outside.
»It was exactly like being in a movie. But it was real«, says Kim Nyland.
A moment later, standing out on the mountainside with binoculars hanging from his chest and scanning the horizon, he saw yellow lights blinking in an unnatural way in different places across the dark night sky.
»The light pattern reminded me of what you see on the screen when you dial a phone number on a cellphone or an iPad, where each digit lights up briefly. Then it was replaced by two white lights and a red light that formed a triangle and began moving slowly across the night sky«, says Kim Nyland.
One visitor has brought a camera to Hessdalen to photograph the night sky. Using long exposures, they try to capture lights moving through the darkness. Kim Nyland looks over some of the images.
A car is bathed in a powerful light
He also remembers an earlier experience in Hessdalen with his then-13-year-old daughter and his former girlfriend. They had stood for hours up on the mountainside, watching for the light. When it did not appear, and they were cold and exhausted, they decided to drive back to the cabin they had rented.
»As I put the key in to start the engine, our car was suddenly flooded with an intense light. I got out and saw a light the size of a bus that stopped moving the moment I stepped out of the car. It was as if the light froze, then it changed direction and vanished toward the river down below«, says Kim Nyland. He pulls his cellphone from his pocket. He shows us the light he saw and filmed one night up on the mountain, at 12:37 a.m. on Aug. 30 last year, when he and others watched a large purple fireball hovering in the air just above the treetops for more than an hour, pulsing slightly, as if it were breathing.
»Then, all at once, the astonishing light disappeared, like someone had stuck a pin into a big purple balloon«, he says.
This time he has brought his girlfriend along, hoping she will get to see the mysterious lights of Hessdalen, too: in the woods, above a mountain lake, or hovering over a ridge. In real life, not only in recordings on his phone.
We, too, have come up into the mountains hoping to witness the light with our own eyes. After a full-day UFO conference in Trondheim, Politiken was invited to the beautiful, isolated Hessdalen, home to fewer than 200 residents, for a weeklong field study organized by researchers from Project Hessdalen, who for more than 40 years have been trying to determine where the mysterious light phenomena come from.
A road sign warns of UFOs
As we roll into Hessdalen from the north, with the Hesja River on our right and mountains rising as high as 3,600 feet on both sides, we do not doubt for a second that we have arrived in UFO country. The road signs we had seen earlier warning of moose and sheep on the roadway have been replaced by a triangular sign depicting a UFO.
As we cruise through the village, which consists of a single main road with wide gaps between houses and farmsteads where sheep and cows graze, we pass the UFO camp, where you can rent wooden cabins shaped like Sami tents and, of course, fitted with glass roofs so you can keep watch for the mysterious lights at night.
We also pass the UFO pub, which opens when the owner feels like it, or when there are thirsty tourists in town, and serves a local canned beer with a green alien on the label.
By the church, we turn around and drive back to the Red Cross cabin, where we will spend the next seven days with researchers and volunteers from Project Hessdalen. The plan is to make observations and search for the light phenomenon up in the mountains at night.
At the UFO pub in Hessdalen, locals and visitors gather over a UFO beer to share their experiences and swap theories about what the light phenomenon really is. Jan Moen (center) is one of the locals who has had many experiences in the valley. Together with his sister and brother-in-law, he has, among other things, seen an object fly over the river.
Locals witness a UFO landing
Kim Nyland, who is also taking part in the field study as a private citizen, is far from the only person to have experienced the strange light phenomena in Hessdalen, which lies about 300 miles north of Oslo and a two-hour drive southeast of Trondheim.
The lights have been observed for more than 200 years. They peaked in the early 1980s, when the mysterious glow could be seen as many as 20 times a week, drawing serious attention from Norwegian and international media.
At first, locals kept their experiences to themselves, afraid of being dismissed as village cranks who saw flying saucers and little green men everywhere..
Over time, however, residents of Hessdalen began to report that, in their view, the intense light came from UFOs that looked, unmistakably, like the flying saucers familiar from comic books and science-fiction films.
There were also accounts of UFO landings, in which the four landing struts beneath the saucers’ bellies left clear marks in the ground.
Because all of this happened before the era of camera phones, there is today no photo or video documentation of the UFOs that outsiders and local eyewitnesses said they saw landing or flying through the valley.
An electrical engineer wants to solve the mystery
One person swept up in the UFO fever of the early 1980s was the Norwegian electrical engineer Erling Strand, who dreamed of solving the mystery by approaching it scientifically.
That is why, in 1982, he traveled from Oslo to Hessdalen with a few friends. They brought walkie-talkies, measuring instruments, and camera gear, which they set up at three different locations so they could observe the phenomenon from three different angles.
Portrait of Erling Strand
After Erling Strand had mounted his camera on a tripod, what they scarcely dared hope for happened. A gigantic, powerful yellow light suddenly appeared above the mountain ridge. The light was shaped like an ellipse, slightly flattened at one end, like a projectile.
The intense light behaved oddly. It remained still for a few minutes, then shifted slightly and stopped again. It kept doing that for more than an hour and a half. Now and then, Strand says, spotlights shot out of the yellow glow, projecting both up into the sky and down onto the ground.
The Norwegian pioneer, who is also taking part in the current field study, remembers it as if it happened yesterday.
»With those spotlights lighting up the ground, it seemed as if the light phenomenon was searching for something. My colleague up on the mountainside had time to think about what would happen if the beam hit him, and he got a little scared. But then the light vanished as quickly as it had appeared«, says Erling Strand.
Ever since that experience, he has been consumed by the question of what causes these light phenomena. Even though colleagues warned him against researching UFOs if he did not want to ruin his scientific career, he could not let it go.
So, in 1983, he and four others founded ’Project Hessdalen’, where researchers could work on the project in their spare time, unpaid, and as a citizen-science effort in which schoolchildren, students, and volunteers could help observe the phenomenon.
The Norwegian military helped out at first
In the winters of 1984 and 1985, two field studies were carried out in close collaboration with Norwegian research institutions and the Norwegian military, which provided instruments and helped analyze the data produced by the fieldwork.
»During those two field studies, we witnessed the light phenomenon 53 times«, Erling Strand recalls.
The field studies also made it clear that it is not just a single light phenomenon at work in Hessdalen but four distinct types.
Type 1 consists of brief blue and white flashes lasting up to two seconds. Type 2 is mainly yellow balls of light that can last from minutes to hours, remain stationary or move at varying speeds, and change color along the way. Type 3 is multiple lights moving together, appearing to be connected to the same structure or object. Type 4, which can also be seen during the day, is described as physical, solid objects, typically disc-, saucer-, or cigar-shaped.
In investigating the mysterious lights in Hessdalen, researchers have used, among other tools, radar; magnetometers to measure the local magnetic field; and spectrometers to measure what colors the light contains and where it comes from. Something, Strand says, may suggest that the odds of seeing the phenomena are highest when there is strong magnetic activity in the atmosphere.
An object traveling at 30,000 kilometers an hour
One observation that Erling Strand has focused on in particular came when radar tracked what seemed to be a physical object. It flew silently through the valley at a speed of 30,000 kilometers an hour. By comparison, a rocket bound for Earth orbit travels at about 28,000 kilometers an hour.
At this point, an attentive reader may think of the current UFO fever in the United States, fueled in part by classified footage from American fighter jets in which pilots filmed mysterious objects moving in ways, and at speeds, that appear to defy the laws of physics.
That has revived old conspiracy theories that these flying objects come from another world and that alien beings may be among us. Perhaps we are simply waiting for some authority to deliver the big reveal that we are not alone.
Back to the light phenomena in Hessdalen. By analyzing the light’s optical spectrum, researchers have found traces of the metal scandium, which has atomic number 21 in the periodic table.
»It’s a rare element used to strengthen the steel in aircraft, but so far we haven’t found a link between scandium and the light phenomena we observe here in Hessdalen«, says Erling Strand.
Interest in investigating the lights, from both research institutions and the Norwegian military, fell sharply after 1985, when the frequency of sightings dropped dramatically. Today, about 20 incidents a year are recorded.
Monitors the valley 24 hours a day
That did not cause the researchers in Project Hessdalen to give up. So in 1998 they installed a fully automated research station in a blue container high on a mountainside. They dubbed it ’The Blue Box’.
It was outfitted with video cameras and other measuring instruments so that, 24 hours a day, year-round, researchers could monitor the area of Hessdalen where the light phenomena have been recorded especially often - a so-called hotspot. An internet connection ensured that data could be retrieved from the station no matter where in the world one was.
The Blue Box is still there today and has been upgraded over time with newer, more sophisticated cameras and instruments. When we stop by the research station, we meet the German computer scientist Rainer Haseitl inside the blue container. In his day job, he works at a particle accelerator in Darmstadt, Germany.
Portrait of Rainer
He joined Project Hessdalen nearly three years ago and works on it in his spare time. He is responsible for the cameras, sensors, software, and data processing. Right now, the German computer scientist is checking what the cameras have filmed over the past 24 hours and whether they recorded anything unusual. He, or other members of the project, does that 365 days a year.
The video recordings are compressed into 20-minute bundles as a single image, and if that image shows something more or less unusual, they can go back to the original video to check what it is.
In the vast majority of cases, it is something that can be explained — a water droplet, for instance, or an insect that has crept onto the lens. Or it may be weather balloons, the northern lights, satellites, drones, the headlights of a car or a snowmobile, airplanes, ball lightning, a meteor, or a SpaceX rocket. Or simply a bird that, for a moment in flight, has tucked its wings close to its body and could be mistaken for a UFO.
»Because it was very foggy and rainy yesterday, birds and insects were the only flying objects our cameras recorded and not any mysterious light phenomena«, says Rainer Haseitl.
It was not like that on Christmas Day last year. That day, the cameras recorded a ball of light that, at high speed, hovered around partly inside the forest and partly along the mountain ridge.
»It’s unclear what it was, but it’s a good example of how our video cameras on the roof of The Blue Box can capture the mysterious light phenomena when they occur«, says Rainer Haseitl.
Is a wormhole or a natural battery at play?
Because researchers at this point do not have enough data to determine what the source - or sources - of the light phenomena are, what is happening in Hessdalen remains a mystery. Still, several theories are in circulation that seek to offer a natural explanation.
One of the prevailing theories is that the ground beneath Hessdalen could function as a natural battery. The mountains contain rich deposits of iron, zinc, and copper, which could serve as nature’s version of electrodes. And the river that runs through the valley contains sulfur from an old sulfur mine, which could act as an electrolyte. The theory holds that brief but intense buildups of electrical charge from this natural battery trigger the light phenomena in the atmosphere.
A more exotic explanation comes from the French physics professor Gianni Pascoli of Université de Picardie Jules Verne, who visited the valley in 1992. He has wondered whether it could be a wormhole connecting the Sun to Earth’s interior, allowing plasma from the Sun to be transported into the planet and then diffuse up to the surface in Hessdalen, where microscopic bubbles of plasma become large balls of light, up to a meter in diameter.
A wormhole is a hypothetical phenomenon in physics. Put simply, it imagines that two distant places in the universe could be connected by a tunnel, so that, in principle, you could get from one place to the other faster than by traveling the normal route through space. A kind of shortcut through space and time.
»There are no ‘little green men’ behind the mysterious light phenomena in Hessdalen. Rather, it is a physical phenomenon that is now being investigated thoroughly using scientific methods«, Gianni Pascoli writes in an email.
Danish experts praise the project
Professor Anja C. Andersen of the Niels Bohr Institute, who has interviewed Erling Strand about the light phenomena for DR’s podcast series ’Flying Saucer’, is delighted that the Hessdalen phenomenon is being investigated scientifically and that so much data is being collected in hopes of better understanding it.
»Data produced using scientific measuring instruments are generally in short supply in the study of unidentified phenomena in the sky. So it is quite an achievement that the researchers in Project Hessdalen have stuck with it for so many years and collected so much data in the pursuit of solving the mystery«, says Anja C. Andersen.
Kim Møller Hansen, the chairman of Scandinavian UFO Information (SUFOI), shares that enthusiasm.
»With the serious approach Project Hessdalen has today, with researchers from Norway and abroad, you can call the valley a laboratory out in the wilderness, where modern technology can be used to measure the mysterious light phenomena«, says Kim Møller Hansen, adding:
»Often UFOs, UAPs (see box), or whatever you want to call them are an elusive phenomenon, where you might think that people who experience them more than once are a little off, but in Hessdalen the light phenomena come back again and again, which makes it possible to study them and get to the bottom of what they are«.
Frederik Uldall, head of the Danish Network for UAP Studies, hopes that Danish researchers will both visit and draw inspiration from Project Hessdalen.
»You want to know what it is that can fly at several thousand kilometers an hour, brake abruptly, and head off in another direction at the same high speed. It would be wonderful if talented Danish researchers would help study and explain such anomalies«, says Frederik Uldall.
When Frederik Uldall takes off his leadership hat, he is, in his private view, convinced that there are intelligent beings on Earth besides us.
Who removed two tons of soil?
On the way back from The Blue Box to the Red Cross cabin, Rainer Haseitl says there are two other mysteries in Hessdalen still waiting to be solved.
Since 1998, the Blue Box has monitored the skies over Hessdalen. The small blue structure functions as a laboratory, with cameras and measuring equipment recording around the clock. Rainer Haseitl works with the system and reviews the footage to look for possible anomalies.
On Sept. 15, 1984, two hunters out grouse hunting discovered something unusual in a side valley off Hessdalen. In a remote spot reachable only after a long hike, they found a pentagonal piece of turf that had been cut with great precision from the marshy ground. The turf had been placed about two meters from the hole the cutout left behind.
It measured about four meters on the long side and three meters on the short side and stood about 40 centimeters high, with perfectly straight sides and a flat bottom, as if it had been cut with a laser. It was estimated to weigh as much as two tons, and there were absolutely no tire tracks from machinery - no cranes, no excavators.
The turf and the hole are still there today, and Rainer Haseitl has seen them with his own eyes, along with other members of Project Hessdalen.
»It’s a mystery what could have moved such a heavy, large piece of turf in one piece without leaving a trace. It’s also strange that the cut marks can still be seen and that some of the sides still haven’t grown back in with vegetation, which seems very odd, given that it happened more than 40 years ago«, says Rainer Haseitl.
The research team will now try to examine it more closely. Interestingly, the same phenomenon has been seen on the Norwegian island of Andøya and in Chile, where the same mysterious light phenomena as in Hessdalen have also been reported.
Birds do not fly into the silent zone
As we pass the road sign warning of UFOs in the area, Rainer Haseitl tells us about the last mystery. In another valley neighboring Hessdalen, there is a place where local hunters claim animals refuse to enter, and birds make a sharp 90-degree turn to avoid flying into the airspace above the valley. The area has therefore been dubbed ’The silent zone’.
Because many animals, including birds, presumably use their magnetic sense to navigate, Rainer Haseitl set up data loggers to measure the magnetic field in ’The silent zone’.
»I couldn’t detect anything unusual about the magnetic field in the silent zone. So we have no idea why animals avoid that area. It’s another mystery on the list«, he says.
A Ukrainian research team has also joined the ranks of Project Hessdalen. They plan to install two boxes packed with instruments to monitor what happens in the airspace above Hessdalen. They have used the same technology back home in Ukraine to monitor airspace in the war against Russia. The instruments can measure humidity, air pressure, air temperature, the magnetic field, the gravitational field, and quantum fields.
»In Ukraine, we also have a hotspot with mysterious light phenomena that resemble those here in Hessdalen. We will compare data from Ukraine and Hessdalen, and perhaps we will be able to conclude that the light phenomena are the same in both places«, says Dr. Artem Bilyk, who leads the ’Center for Analyses of Anomalies’ in Kyiv.
A 90-year-old has seen UFOs up close
In the absence of a natural explanation for the mysteries of Hessdalen, the supernatural accounts from firsthand witnesses will endure, told and retold in the small community.
We feel that one morning when Jon Arvid Aspås, 90, pulls into the parking lot in front of the Red Cross cabin in his small car and settles at a picnic table. He has a steady, warm gaze and a faint smile on his lips.
Jon Arvid Aspås has logged more than 100 sightings of the light phenomenon in Hessdalen, making him the person who has seen it the most. The first time was in 1981. One evening, he was working on a snowmobile with his eldest son outside their home when a glowing sphere came down through the valley and stopped just outside the barn. It hovered for about five minutes before moving toward the mountains and switching on powerful spotlights aimed at the landscape below. Jon Arvid is certain that there is a solid object behind the lights and that the phenomenon is being controlled by something.
Word quickly spreads that »the local hero« - »the holy grail« - has arrived and is ready to tell the story of the time he and three others got up close to a UFO up in the mountains. Before long, a ring of field-study participants is standing around, listening.
»We saw a light moving slowly and silently up through the forest, heading toward us. When it came close, we could see it was a craft. The shape looked like a hat with a brim and a bump on top. Light was coming out from underneath it, and it had four legs at each corner«, says Jon Arvid Aspås, continuing:
»In the bump, there was a row of lights, and we got the sense there was a room in there. But the light was so powerful that we couldn’t see what was inside. It moved slowly past us at a distance of about 40 meters and disappeared northward up that slope«, he says, pointing north.
After he leaves, Tom Andre Lunde, a field research officer with Project Hessdalen, says Jon Arvid Aspås has told the same story again and again for more than 30 years, with the same level of detail, without changing so much as a comma.
»I believe, 100 percent, everything Jon Arvid Aspås says. What would he possibly gain from lying for so many years?«, says Tom Andre Lunde.
If it truly is silent spacecraft from other worlds visiting Hessdalen, Tom Andre Lunde offers his own favorite theory.
»I think Hessdalen could be Earth’s version of a Supercharger, where UFOs stop by and recharge wirelessly using the underground battery beneath the ground, so it throws sparks into the atmosphere«, says Tom Andre Lunde, breaking into a warm smile.
Helge sees two creatures run across the road
That same afternoon, we are visited by Helge Otterå, who comes from a small island outside Bergen and for nearly two decades has been visiting Hessdalen, experiencing the mysterious light phenomena many times. He wants to show us the spot where he witnessed something unusual.
Helge Otterå often visits Hessdalen. He can spend an entire night sitting outside his cabin, staring into the darkness. Inside the living room, a live feed from Hessdalen plays on the television. Helge has experienced the phenomenon many times and has even seen beings cross the road. He hopes the light phenomenon remains a mystery.
We drive behind him and park in front of the church. Helge Otterå steps out onto the road heading north and rewinds the clock seven years, to Sept. 10 at 3:40 a.m. That night, he was walking in the dark in this very spot after seeing a gigantic fireball over the Hesja River from his car.
»Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw two beings running up from the river. They were more than two meters tall, with long arms and legs. They were thin and had oval heads. They were just as startled as I was, and they hurried across the road and up into the forest up there, where the sheep started making a lot of noise. I was left completely speechless. It was a life-changing experience for me«, says Helge Otterå.
He has his own theory about how the two aliens came to Hessdalen.
»I don’t think they were extraterrestrials from outer space. I think they were some kind of beings from another dimension here on Earth that we can’t see all the time. But sometimes the dimensions collide. There are many examples of that around the world. People see strange things they shouldn’t be able to see«, says Helge Otterå.
Contacts aliens through meditation
During the field study, one participant keeps somewhat in the background, often with a hood pulled over his head. He is the British astrophysicist and UFO investigator Rupert Guy, who says he can establish contact with nonhuman beings through meditation and get them to reveal their presence - for instance, by making UFOs appear in the sky.
Rupert Guy takes a spiritual approach to the Hessdalen phenomenon. He has come to Hessdalen to better understand it and says he has a connection to aliens who occasionally seek him out. While he is in Hessdalen, he meditates every evening to summon aliens and send a signal that he and the rest of the group have good intentions. Because if you do not have good intentions, he explains, you should not expect to see a UFO or an alien.
Because we have not had any luck seeing the light phenomena up in the mountains, Rupert Guy tries, through a group meditation with seven participants, including Kim Nyland and me, to reach out to some of the beings he says he has a friendly relationship with.
For instance, he reaches out to Tk Tk, Jean Luc, and Sashki, as well as the Nordic aliens Harry, George, and Nikki, hoping they will show their presence in the form of lights or spacecraft when we open our eyes after the meditation.
It is a pleasant experience, and Rupert Guy has a lovely, almost beguiling voice. For a brief moment, Kim Nyland feels something tugging at his ring finger during the meditation. When we all open our eyes, with the cold mountains at our backs, the partly cloudy sky is still pitch-black. Only the stars - and a single airplane - shine through.
A little after midnight, the photographer and I walk Kim Nyland and his girlfriend back to their cabin. On the way, we come upon three sheep standing perfectly still in the dark, suddenly caught in the beam of our headlamps. That is the closest we get that night to anything resembling aliens.
On his way into the cabin, Kim Nyland says:
»When I first visited the valley seven years ago, I took a very scientific approach to the Hessdalen phenomenon. I still do, but now I’m also more open to the idea that there may be more between heaven and earth that we haven’t discovered yet. Good night to you both«, he says, and closes the door.
Portræt af Erling Strand