Late afternoon on July 27, 1999 several witnesses observed a missile or rocket shaped object crash into lake Backsjön, north of the town Arvika in the province of Värmland, Sweden. The object was about three meters in length with small wings at the sides. It hit the lake with a splash resulting in a large water cascade. One of the witnesses called the local rescue service and eventually a unit from the Swedish military began an intensive search for the missile.
During the first days of investigation the military gave various cover stories to the press of what had happened. They interviewed seven witnesses who were all regarded as very credible. After some preliminary dives in August a ten days search was initiated in September with a small submarine equipped with ultrasound and cameras. In spite of a very detailed search in the lake, nothing was found and this was very confusing to the military. ”We considered this report as credible. The search resulted in nothing and we really don´t know what we are looking for”, commented colonel Yngve Johansson.
The Backsjön case makes it quite obvious why these type of unknown craft are called Ghost Rockets. Since 1946 there have been hundreds of well documented Ghost Rocket reports in Sweden. Always with the same scenario, apparently physical objects crashing into lakes and the military finding nothing in spite of intense search. Swedish ufologist Clas Svahn have investigated the Ghost Rocket phenomenon for many years and regard these reports as one of the most intriguing type of UFO observations in our country.
In 2015 filmmakers Michael Cavanagh and Kerstin Übelacker released the UFO documentary Ghost Rockets. A film about the national organization UFO-Sweden and the expedition to find a Ghost Rocket that landed and sank in lake Nammajaure, in the north of Sweden 1980. After two expeditions nothing has been found so far but there are indications that some object may be hidden deep in the mud in this small lake. Hopefully a third expedition may give some final results.
To the skeptic the lack of physical evidence for the Ghost Rocket reports prove that these reports are nothing but a myth based on misidentification of ordinary objects. To mainstream scientific ufologists the Ghost Rockets are an intriguing enigma indicating unknown air vehicles. But to the open minded researcher the lack of physical evidence opens up a third option usually not considered by the two former groups.
Before the Robertson panel of 1953 and the general silence policy on the subject from 1954 American contactee George Van Tassel were sometimes visited by military men from the Air Force who had a personal interest in or had become involved in UFO incidents themselves. He related several such incidents and talks in his magazine Proceedings.
George Van Tassel at Giant Rock
In 1953 an Air Force Major, stationed at George Air Force Base, at Adelanto, California, spent many weekends with the Van Tassel family at Giant Rock Airport. The major was officially in charge of UFO investigations in Southern California. An interesting case he had been involved in told of jet pilot who radioed George Air Force Base tower that a round unidentified object had crashed into the ground near San Jacinto Mountain. The Tower phoned the Major and hurriedly he and other Air Force personal climbed into a helicopter and headed for Mt. San Jacinto. They spotted the jet circling the area and landed the helicopter in a clearing about 200 feet from the unknown object.
”The Major said they walked slowly toward it and when they were about 25 feet from it they stopped in awe because the couldn´t figure out what was happening. The Major said the object was apparently remote controlled, and was in the process of some automatically activated ”self destruct” proceedure. He said the object had a pulsing bright light in tghe middle of an ovoid mass, of what looked like black tar about two feet thick and about 12 feet in diameter. The entire black mass was quivering like jelly, shaking and getting smaller by the minute.” (Proceedings, vol. 10, no. 6, Oct-Dec 1974, pp. 11-12).
In a short time the black blob dimished until there was nothing left and the pulsing light just vanished. The group took samples of the ground where the object had been and also samples of the earth a hundred feet away. George Van Tassel never heard what the results were as the Major then stopped visiting Giant Rock when security and secrecy regarding UFOs increased in 1954.
There is a very fascinating description of this process in George Adamski´s Inside the Space Ships. During one of his contacts Adamski was told by one of the space people:
”Whenever possible these complex and highly sensitive little machines are returned to their parent craft, but sometimes, for one reason or another, the connection is broken and they go out of control or crash to the ground. In such cases emergency procedure is immediately brought into action. On each side of the mother ship, just below the disk-launching ports, is a magnetic ray projector. When a disk goes out of control, a ray is projected to disintegrate it. This accounts for some of the mysterious explosions that take place in your skies which cannot be accounted for by artillery, jet planes or electrical storms. On the other hand, if a disk goes out of control near the surface of the planet where an explosion might cause damage, it is allowed to descend to the ground where a milder charge is sent into it. Instead of an explosion, this causes the metal to disintegrate in slow stages. First it softens, then turns into a kind of jelly, then a liquid, and finally it enters a free state as gases, leaving not a wrack behind. This latter process is without danger to anyone or anything should the disk be touched while in process of disintegration. The only harm could come if, by chance, someone should see it fall and touch it at the moment the ray is applied.” (George Adamski, Inside the Space Ships, 1955 ed. p. 155).
Could the Ghost Rockets be some type of aerial device used by an alien group as described by Van Tassel and Adamski? This is just a theory of course but how come that these strange missiles are never found? And why the large concentration of Ghost Rocket reports in Scandinavia and especially Sweden?