All Episodes
Previous Next
April 1, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:12
Edition 389 - Clas Svahn

Leading investigator Clas Svahn - who holds Europe's biggest archive of UFO cases...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much.
If you sent me an email recently, don't forget I do get to see and read and take on board all of your emails.
And if you require a response, then I try and make sure that you get one quickly.
Thank you very much for getting in touch at the website theunexplained.tv.
And if you've made a donation to the show recently, thank you very much for that.
Gratefully received.
And if you haven't, then please do consider doing that at theunexplained.tv.
There is also a new section on the website that allows you to make direct contact with Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, to tell him your thoughts about the website and also the functionality of receiving the show, that kind of thing.
Anything technical which is above my pay grade, then it goes to Adam and he will get back to you about that.
And thank you very much.
Seems to be settling down nicely now.
The new website's been running for what, two and a half months or so?
Three months now, yeah?
Three months.
Wow.
That's just flown by, hasn't it?
No shout-outs really this time.
Just to say hello to new listener, Scott, near Denver, USA.
Nice to know you're there, Scott.
Dean, thank you for your story.
Lee says that he's concerned about the fake light phenomenon when we die.
He says he's heard on the radio and internet that there's a fake light that we see when we've just died that is drawing souls into it.
But that light is a fake.
It's a trap set by entities to recycle human souls back to Earth quickly to feed off the energy.
I need to know some more about that, Lee.
If you've got anybody who you're in contact with or you're aware of who's researching that, I'll try and find out some more about that, Lee.
Thank you.
Debbie tells me a story from some years ago when she was living with her family at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and your dad was in the U.S. Marine Corps.
And basically, there was an entity that you saw, a black silhouette.
It walked out from the main hallway across the room in the family home, passing solidly in front of the TV set that your father was watching and right through the glass sliding doors.
It looked completely human and moved like a human would with hands moving in step.
Wow.
That sounds, I don't know how that is truly an unexplained story.
I suppose the definition of an unexplained story is one that you cannot explain.
And that sounds both unexplainable, inexplicable, and scary, too.
Thank you for sharing that story.
If you've got a story you want to share, go to the website and you can do it there.
That rhymes.
So the one-stop shop for the show is theunexplained.tv.
Now, this time, the guest is somebody who you've suggested.
And a good suggestion, too.
Klaas Svahn is probably Scandinavia's leading UFO investigator.
This man is very serious about his work and very well known there and around the world now.
So we're going to talk about UFOs in Sweden and around that area and some remarkable stories that I don't think you will have heard before.
So Klaas Svan, the guest on this edition of the show, I think basically that's all there is to say for now.
We're well and truly into springtime here in London, which is good news.
And before we know it, it'll be the middle of the year and then it'll be Christmas again.
But there's a lot of ground to cover and many guests to talk to between now and then.
And was very interested recently, and I will put it on the podcast if I haven't done so already, to speak with Paul Hellier, the former Defense Minister of Canada, and get his thoughts at the age of 95 in 2019 about all the things that he said about ETs and there being an agenda involving a group of them and something that you would probably call the Illuminati.
So I'm going to try and put that on the website.
It was from my radio show very soon.
Okay, theUnexplained.tv, that's my website.
That's the way to contact me.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Right, let's get to Sweden now.
Evening time there and evening time here.
I think just an hour's difference.
Klaus Svarn is there, leading UFO investigator.
Klaas, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
First time guest from Sweden.
I've had a guest from Iceland in the past, but first time for Sweden.
So a special welcome to you, Klaas.
Nice to have you there.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Okay, I've been reading your biography, and you are a leading UFO investigator, I guess is the best way to describe you in your country and indeed in Europe.
From what I'm reading, you got interested in all of this from the age of 14.
Yeah, that's right.
I got started for real when I was 14.
I was slightly interested in both astronomy and the UFOs.
Before that, I started collecting newspaper clippings when I was 10 or 11.
But when I was 14, I started getting books, Christmas presents and books about astronomy and about UFOs.
And when I turned 16, I started a UFO group in the small city I'm from, which is called Marius Todd.
Right.
And are UFOs a thing in Sweden?
Are they something that is often talked about in the media?
Do people consider them?
You know, we tend to think that UFO sightings are things that happen in Russia or Kansas or somewhere like that, but not Sweden.
Well, yeah, for sure.
Whenever UFO Sweden, which I'm working with, UFO Sweden is the main group here in Sweden, have any activity, it is widely published.
And we have also around 300 or 350 reports about unidentified flying objects every year that we are investigating.
Well, that's a lot.
I think that's on a par with groups in the UK, certainly.
So there must be a lot of activity there.
What about acceptance of this phenomenon in Sweden?
Are people, would you consider, are they more accepting or less accepting?
You know, the media here in England, you may know that we have a lot of tabloid newspapers that are very famous here.
Over the years, they've often tended to laugh at reports of UFOs and ETs.
How are these things presented to you there?
No, they are presented in a very, very good manner.
And I'm very often interviewed in Swedish radio, TV, podcasts, or newspapers, and I am never ridiculed, and the topic is always treated as an unknown, interesting phenomenon.
And when you got interested in this first as a teenager, what was it that made you want to continue that interest into adulthood?
You know, a lot of us, and I did, I was part of a UFO group very briefly when I was a kid, and then I stopped doing that.
I started getting into radio, and it's only in later years that I picked up for broadcasts, certainly my interest in all of these things.
But what was it that made you want to continue with it?
Well, it's very easy to answer because I didn't get all the answers.
So I continued trying to look for them.
And I'm still looking for the answers.
And I think that is the thing that makes UFO Sweden very special.
We do not say that we have the answers.
We are not believers.
We are not skeptics.
We are choosing a third-way ufology.
We are trying to find the solutions, whatever they are.
And as long as you say that, as long as you do that, as long as you work with a scientific basis, you are treated very well in the media as well.
If we accept that there are UFOs and there are extraterrestrials, do you think that they have a particular interest in Sweden, in Scandinavia, in the area from where you are all the way up to the pole?
Does it look that way?
One thing we know, that there are UFOs.
We don't know if there are any ETs coming here.
I am positive about that are strange and sometimes very, very strange objects flying in the Swedish skies.
But since I don't have the answer, I don't know if we are any particular pinpointed from anyone outside the Earth.
That is a question that is still to be answered.
One of the strangest stories that appeared in recent years, and one that I tried to investigate, and indeed spoke to a dive team who were working above this thing, was the Baltic Sea anomaly, which is not very far from where you are.
And I don't think it has yet been adequately explained.
It was this thing that was sort of disc-shaped and looked as if it may be concrete, it may be metal, on the floor of the Baltic Sea.
And a team of divers went down to look at it.
They claimed that the ship that they were in suffered electrical anomalies because they thought of this thing.
Do you have any news about that?
Are you aware of that case?
Yeah, I know those guys personally, and they are not very serious.
I'm not impressed at all.
The Baltic anomaly is not very much an anomaly.
It's just a hyped structure on the seafloor.
To me, it has nothing to do with UFOs.
It may be a mystery for some people.
Everything that has been looked into regarding that anomaly has shown that it is made of stone.
And there are lots of other structures looking like that.
If you look a little farther away on the same seafloor, it seems like it's something of geological, well, which is built from geological activity for many, many hundreds of thousands of years back.
So to me, it's nothing really.
It's more interesting mysteries in Sweden than that.
Really?
Okay, well, tell me about some of them then.
What are the most interesting cases that you've worked on?
Well, the one that we have been working on for quite a few years now is a crash of a strange craft in the very north of Sweden in the 1980.
And there were two people who witnessed that craft in broad daylight, elongated with small wings, coming flying over them and turning 180 degrees, coming back to them, but landing on this smaller lake and sinking in front of them.
This was investigated by the military at the time.
They didn't dive, they didn't research the lake, but they interviewed the witnesses and they were very much impressed with them.
After that, Europa Sweden have had two expeditions to this lake.
It's a very, very far north, north in the polar circle area, you can say.
We would go there again, and we have had some interesting radar returns from the seafloor that could be this object.
But that is still a mystery, but it's a very, very good observation, and it's something that you can hopefully find in the end.
Okay, so this is something that was observed and seen by people actually going into the water in that lake, and you believe is still there because of the radar returns, and you want to go back and find it?
Yeah, yeah, because those two people, very, very good observers, they have stuck to their story for all of those years.
They traveled with us to the lake when we went there for the first time.
They pinpointed the point of impact where the object sank.
And we have used ground earth-penetrating radar, which caused this object, it's down in the mud.
It's a couple of meters down in the mud in this lake.
So it's quite difficult to bring it up if we were able to do that.
From what you described then, this is definitely an anomalous object.
You could have, potentially, if you're able to get down there or able to get more proof about the thing, potentially the biggest UFO story since Roswell lying there.
Yeah, probably, because this is in line with the ghost rocket reports from the 1946, one of the first big UFO waves in the world, really.
It looks like it's a ghost rocket.
It's elongated, cigar-shaped with small wings.
And in 1946, 1,000 reports of possible ghost rockets came to the Swedish military.
And after that, those rockets, if they are rockets indeed, have been seen over Sweden and Norway and Finland up until this day, really.
And this is something that I know that you've made a documentary about the ghost rockets.
They've been very hard for people to explain over the years.
And what do you think they might be?
That's a big question.
The one thing is for sure they are real objects.
You can hear them, you can see the sun shining on their hulls, and you can hear the engine, if it is an engine, but some sort of sound.
And you can see them on radar.
I talked with a Swedish fighter pilot who in 1946 chased one of those but were outflown by it.
So they are real.
So what are they?
I don't know.
They are an enigma this far, but something that can be researched, I think.
And in total since 1946, roughly how many reports of these things have there been?
Well, in 1946, it's 1,100, and after that, a couple of hundreds, maybe, something like that.
But the strange thing is that they are crashing always in lakes.
Not a single one has ever crashed on land.
But the cases we have investigated have been in lakes all around Sweden and also in Norway.
Do you think there's any possibility, has it been suggested, that perhaps these things are some kind of military research?
You know, the one thing we know about Scandinavia is that various countries in the more remote parts have flown things over there in the past.
So it wouldn't be beyond the bounds of possibility that some kind of test sky vehicle was flown over there.
But not for such a long period of time, though, I would have thought.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's one thing that we looked into.
One of the first theories we looked into.
And of course, we suspected, as we always do here in Sweden, that it was the Russians who made this.
But at that time, in 1946, the Russians were moving the V-2 bombers from Germany into the Soviet Union.
And they were not shooting.
They did that the year after.
But those cigar-shaped objects were flying much longer than any of those V-2 rockets did fly during the Second World War.
And we have to say, just for people in North America who may not know about these things listening to you now, the V-2 rocket bombs were one of Hitler's weapons.
They were a particularly deadly weapon.
They were remote cigar-shaped rockets that they refined over the years to fire at places like London, but not only London, and they caused a great deal of damage during the Second World War in London.
They were these unmanned rockets, fired at great speed and power.
We were able to intercept some of them, but others got through to London and caused a lot of loss of life and damage.
So that's what the V2s were, weren't they?
Yeah, absolutely.
You had the V1, which were easily to intercept.
The V2, you could never intercept.
They were just falling from the sky.
But when they hit ground, they left hundreds and hundreds of kilos of debris.
But those ghost rockets, when they hit the sea or the lakes, they never leave anything except indentations in the seafloor from time to time.
You can see the impact, but you cannot find any metallic debris from them.
How are you going to continue that research then?
I presume what you need to do is to recover one if you can.
Yeah, we are going back this winter, I mean December, probably, or maybe January, and drive on the ice with some sort of snowmobile with this very special equipment that can see things in three dimensions that are resting in this four-meter of mud, which is down at the very bottom of the lake.
And then we can see exactly what is there, if it is this ghost rocket or not.
And after that, we must have permission to bring it up, because this is an area, a natural park, it's a reserve.
So we have very, very special permissions to be there at all, to do this research.
This is something that's going to take an enormous amount of planning by the sounds of it.
You must be preparing for this now.
Yeah, I mean, the two first expeditions took half a year to plan, every one of them.
And every single kruna, every single pound or dollar, I got from donators that I called by telephone or emailed or met.
So the money was put in from hundreds and hundreds of people who wanted to help us.
And I think it will be the same this time.
This will be cheaper because it's easier to drive when it's winter.
It's very much more difficult to bring your boat there.
One of the things we know if we look back at the history of certainly the Second World War is that nations' power games have often been played out in Scandinavia.
The Nazis occupied Norway for a while, didn't they?
Sweden they didn't get to, but Norway they did get to.
Do we think that it is maybe something to do this ghost rocket phenomenon with somebody's military?
Maybe even your own military?
I don't think so.
I really looked into that, and I cannot see anything that points in that direction, really.
This is completely strange to me.
It's just nothing that I can say that I know the origin of, really.
No.
Right, so it's going to be a major thing for you to investigate.
But as you say, if you're able to bring this up, or one of these up, or some fragments up, then you're going to have something that is going to get you in the newspapers all over the world, I would have thought.
Absolutely.
I mean, this far we have been on Russian TV several times, on American TV, on documentaries, and all around the world, the first two expeditions.
So will we find something?
It will be a huge thing, of course.
And I really hope we can do that.
I hope that.
When was the most recent sighting, as far as you're aware?
Well, it's three or four every week, but most of them are just lights in the sky.
Of the 300-plus reports we get every year to Eurofo Sweden, maybe 10 or 15 are of greater interest and maybe one will be labeled UFO after we have investigated all of them.
So I mean we are very good at investigating.
I think we have one of the best teams in the world to find the solutions.
But people see things all the time.
They are not prepared.
They are not aware of what they can see in the sky.
They are filming, taking pictures, but they don't know really anything about what to see in the sky.
I mean quite often I get sent these days pictures and video of things that people are convinced may be extraterrestrial in origin or certainly anomalous in their formation.
And a lot of the time I get these things looked at, some of the time I get a man here called Jason Gleves, who you may have heard of, to analyze the footage.
And the most recent one of those, but it goes for a lot of them, turned out to be a star.
As you say, a lot of these turn out to have perfectly rational explanations.
But the ones that interest us are the ones that don't have rational explanations, aren't they?
Yeah, there are a few, maybe one every year or so, but they are good enough.
I mean, I met with a couple who were driving a car just a couple of years ago in the western part of Sweden.
And in the middle of the night, they saw this very, very bright ball of light, you could say, coming flying down towards the road and turning and heading onto their car.
And the second before they were going to collide with this, it just lifted itself a meter or so and flew over the car.
And they can feel the car was moved by this object.
It was pushed by this object.
And the radio had some disturbances.
And they can see this object flying behind the car, lightening up all of the environment behind the car and then vanishing.
So this was very strange because to move this car, which weighs a couple of tons, it takes quite a powerful object to do that.
And the people who observed this, presumably they were very shocked.
Yeah, they had their little daughter in the back seat as well.
She was sound asleep.
She didn't see anything.
She was just one years of age.
So they were a little worried about her first.
But the lady turned around and saw this object flying.
And the guy who drove the car, he saw it from the rearview mirror.
So they could both see it flying away.
They were scared, but they still headed on back to their house.
And after that, I met with them and made a thorough interview.
And we tried to find an explanation, but we have not succeeded to do that yet.
And was it a lonely area or was it a place where other people might have witnessed something?
No, it's quite a lonely area.
They were traveling in a very lonely area.
There was no one near kilometers, kilometers away, but no one there.
Well, that is definitely a very strange story.
Does some of the alien abduction phenomenon happen in Sweden?
Have you had reports of anything like that?
Very, very, very seldom.
It was quite a few years ago that we had a report about any abductions.
The reports that are coming to us about meeting with so-called aliens or abductions are often from the 1970s or 1960s.
The people are coming to us now telling.
And that's really something that you can see all over the world, that the best stories, they are coming many, many years afterwards.
And they don't happen now.
They happen before.
Well, that's frustrating, isn't it?
I often remark about that, that many of the best stories The Betty and Barney Hill case was more than a decade before that.
It does seem that the best stories, if we can call them the best stories, are way back.
Or maybe just the phenomenon is changing.
Perhaps it's becoming different now.
It could be like the best stories, as we say, are so strange that people don't tell about them now, but wait for 20, 30 years before they do that.
We made an inquiry.
We knocked 1,600 doors on several different locations in Sweden and asked people, have you seen anything in the sky that you could not explain?
And 10% of them said that, yes, we have.
And not one of them had reported it to any UF organization or on any authorities.
So there are one million Swedes with observations that they are carrying with them, not telling about.
Probably some very, very interesting ones that we will never get to know about.
That's astonishing.
I don't know anything about the mechanics of how these things work in Sweden.
I know Sweden is a very liberal and open country, but I wonder if you do make a report, just as people in the old days were able to make reports to the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom.
If you were to make a report today in Sweden, who would you go to and how would your report be handled?
99% of the reports are coming to us to EU for Sweden.
1% are going to the military and they are redirecting the reports to us.
So in essence, every report comes to EU for Sweden in the end.
Well, isn't that interesting that the military actually collaborate and cooperate with you?
We have very good cooperation with the military.
We even use their radar returns to identify what people see.
I have been in a military radar station seeing myself, a UFO, flying around a lake in the northern part of Sweden.
When was this?
That was 2002 or something like that.
Because several people saw this object and they also took a picture of it.
It was the first Mobile phone picture here in Sweden.
And we went there, we sent a team there to interview those two guys.
And I went to the military and we looked through the radar returns and I could see an object flying around the lake at the time the observation was made.
But we were never able to identify it.
So we don't know what it was.
It was a very, very bright light, a ball of light, really.
I think it must be very rare that a UFO investigator gets to observe something like that from a military radar station.
I can't think that would happen in the UK.
No, I mean, but it's years and years and years of built-up trust and that we are dealing with this subject in a scientific matter.
We are trying to do this by the book, really.
We only say what we know.
We don't speculate.
And because you have good relations with the military, have you been told any things by any members of the military, perhaps pilots, perhaps people who work in the Air Corps, I don't know, or people who've perhaps been working for the military and have found artifacts and things like that?
Have you been told stories by military people?
I met quite a few military pilots who have seen things in the sky and also chased them, not only the 1946 case, but also more recent cases.
But they don't have the answer.
They don't know what it is.
That's my absolute what I really think about it.
I don't think the military got the answer, at least not here in Sweden.
I know very, very many within the military complex, and they are as baffled as we are.
They are not as curious as we are.
To them, it's just a little problematic, I think, to have those unknowns which are not very common.
They don't see them as a threat.
They just see them as something that could make problems for them if there would be a real thing coming, Russian or an American aircraft coming into our airspace or something like that.
You said that you'd had one conversation with a pilot, or a pilot had told you that he chased one of these things?
Yes, it was in 1977, but he only told us that in 1999, many years afterwards, and he was out in his fighter jet on a trainee mission out in the Baltic area when he got a call from the radar unit on ground telling him that go and identify an unknown object coming from the east going to Sweden.
So he went there and when he was around one ten kilometers away from the object, he could see it on his radar screen.
So he looked on this object so he could fly against it as fast as he could.
But the object which was stationary at that time over the Baltic started to climb suddenly.
So he started to chase it.
He flew this fighter jet as fast as he could in a 70-degree angle.
But he was outflown by this object.
He said it just vanished out in space and then he lost it.
And how was that report treated?
What was it, you know, what did they categorize it as?
He never reported it because he found it so unexplainable that he didn't dare.
He didn't want to be questioned as a pilot.
So he said to the ground control that, sorry, the Obi-Was gone when I went there, when I came there.
So he went back and he landed and he got home to his wife.
And his wife tells me afterwards that he was all shaken up at that time and said that this was nothing I can explain.
What happened today was something completely unknown to me.
How astonishing.
Of course, there is the possibility because of the direction from which it came that it might have been something that the Russians have and simply haven't told us about.
I mean, we sent the fighter jets three or four times a week in the 1970s to identify most of them Russian aircraft, some of them also from the US.
But we don't know.
But he said to me that this object to start from hanging motionless over the Baltic and outfly this aircraft he had, nobody could do that at their time.
And I think maybe not at this time either.
Yes, quite often the reports that you hear from not only military pilots, but commercial ones, certainly here in the UK, there was one recently over Ireland that you might have read about, where a few commercial pilots witnessed something.
And I played on my radio show the air traffic control recording, which somebody had been able to get hold of.
But these things are said to be able to outmaneuver anything that we are able to put into the sky.
Which is astonishing that something or somebody has technology like that, I think.
Yeah, but you must be aware that the pilots are not trained to identify things like this.
I have interviewed so many pilots who have mistaken bull eyes for craft.
They have been making maneuvers, trying to avoid a bull eye, the great meteor, which are miles and miles and miles away, thinking it was very near and flying towards the aircraft.
So they are not very good observers.
You would think they are, but they are not always that.
But some years ago in the early 1990s, I interviewed a pilot from Alitalia who met an unknown object over the English Channel.
he was landing going in for landing at Heathrow when he met this object on collision course it was like Yeah, it was like an elongated bullet.
It was daylight up where he was, but it was dark on the ground.
And his co-pilot, his name was Achilles Sagetti, and his co-pilot suddenly saw this object coming flying within a couple of hundred meters at a terrific speed towards their aircraft.
It was full of passengers.
And he contacted the ground radar at Heathrow and asked, did you see anything?
Yes, they said, we can see an unknown object 10 nautical miles behind you, going from you.
So he landed and he asked, what was it?
He filled out his form.
You must fill out if you are near to collide with someone in the air.
So he filled out his form and he asked what was it we saw?
It was a helicopter, he was told.
But he said to me, Of course it wasn't.
It was the wrong size, it was the wrong speed, it was the wrong height and everything was wrong with it.
But later on, I contacted the Civil Aviation Authority and they told me it was not anything like that at all.
It was a UFO, they told me.
But they didn't know what it was.
Right, so the British Civil Aviation Authority had actually categorized this thing as a UFO.
In other words, a UAP, I suppose, unidentified aerial phenomenon.
Yeah, they wrote it in a letter to me.
It was a UFO that is stated in a letter from I hope you've kept that letter.
Yeah, we keep everything in this archive we have.
So it's the world's largest archive, you know, so we are very keen on keeping stuff.
How many items have you got in it?
Millions and millions.
We cannot count them really.
But it's 550 square meters with everything from Alan Godfrey's police jacket to reports of UFOs from Britain, US, Germany, Sweden, every country in the world.
We've got loads of stuff, really, loads of stuff.
And people from all around the world are coming to us and digging into the archives, trying to make research.
And is that because, as you said at the beginning of this, you take a serious and scientific approach to it all, that people, you know, they come to you and they want to give you their stories and maybe give you items like Alan Godfrey, I've interviewed, and he tells a fascinating story about his encounter when he was on police duty at Todmoden in Lancashire, in the UK, and something appeared over his police car that could not be described.
You say that you've actually got his police jacket.
Yeah, we have the police jacket, and I will talk with Alan in one hour, really.
I will call him in the next hour here, because I'm writing a book about our archives, Archives for the Unexplained.
Really?
And one of the items I will write about is his police jacket.
So I want to listen to his story firsthand.
Well, please give Alan my best wishes.
He was a fantastic interviewee, and I'm glad that he's still around and still telling us his story, which I think dates back to 1979 or 1980, doesn't it?
1980.
You talk about people like Alan Godfrey.
Here in the UK, I have interviewed and spoken with, as you will have spoken with, police officers in the United Kingdom who say that they've experienced things.
Is that something that happens in Sweden?
Do police officers have encounters?
Do they have sightings?
Do they report them?
Yes, they have sightings.
And sometimes they are also on patrol, just happening to see something.
On other occasions, they may be called out to someone who sees something.
But that was more common before, in the early days, 70s and 80s, I should say.
I haven't heard about any police officer making an observation for quite a few years now.
So I think, of course, they must do.
But it was very, very many years ago I met with one.
I usually meet with John Hanson when I'm in the UK.
Old friend of this show, John Hanson.
What a great guy he is, yes.
Yeah, he's a good guy.
He helps our archives a lot with stuff.
And I usually meet with him in Alver Church when I have the time.
I will be back in September, probably meeting with him.
Well, I know Alve Church very well.
It's on the Worcestershire-Warwickshire border.
I used to drive through there.
One story that people still keep asking me about, and I haven't heard anything about it recently, and I wonder what you found out about it because it was on your doorstep.
The Norway lights spiral.
You remember this a few years ago?
There was a spiral of light reported, and I think the Russians, it was claimed that the Russians were test-firing a rocket, I think.
But there was a tremendous flap, as we say here about this.
Yeah, I mean, I could identify it within an hour because we saw the Russian messages before the observation.
They were writing on Russian websites, the Russian military, they were telling about this Beluga missile that we're going to launch.
So we knew when it was going to be launched, and it was.
But it went wrong, and it started to spiral around, and it made this fantastic pattern in the sky.
It was seen from Sweden as well.
There are pictures not only from Norway, but also from Sweden.
But it is 100% identified as the Beluga missile from a submarine.
But for a while, an awful lot of people all over the world wanted to believe that there was something anomalous, something strange, something unexplained about this.
Yeah, it's always like that, you know.
I mean, everything nowadays gets boasted by the internet and on the internet.
And people are not that prone to look for explanations.
They are more prone to believe in stuff.
And it is a problem for researchers, really, because when we can show positively that something is something else, many people don't believe us because they believe in other stuff, because they haven't done any research themselves.
So it was easier in the 1970s, much more easy than it is now.
It's a very, very swampy world out there when you get out on the internet with all these YouTube films and all the stuff that people are publishing.
You said, Klaus, and I agree with you, that there were many very interesting sightings in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
A lot of the prime sightings, the ones that we are still talking about, like Alan Godfrey's case, and there maybe are not so many of those now.
Now, we can assume maybe a couple of things about that.
Maybe the phenomena has changed.
Maybe the phenomena has gone away.
Or maybe we are now more able to explain those things that we would have been baffled by in the past.
What do you think about that?
That's interesting because I think we are much better equipped to find explanations today.
There is one thing.
But as I mentioned before, I also think that people that are experiencing those strange stuff, the strangest stuff, they carry it with them.
They don't tell it right away.
So it may be in 10 or 20 years from now, we will hear the stories from 2019 that are similar to the ones in the 1970s.
That's a possibility.
Is your government interested in UFOs?
No, no, I wouldn't say they are.
Not at all, really.
And not the military either.
They are not very interested.
I'm working as a journalist, and we are now making a series on web TV about UFOs and other mysteries.
And I asked the military for this series if they had any unknown reports nowadays.
And they really didn't know what the UFO was.
The guy I talked with, they didn't understand it.
They didn't understand what it meant.
And all their files have been turned over to UFO Sweden.
They scanned everything for us when I asked them to do that.
We have thousands and thousands of military reports and very few people reporting for the military nowadays.
Do you ever get reports of the Black Knight satellite, so-called?
No, I'm out on the internet discussing that with people from time to time.
One of my good friends in the US, James Auberg, identified that many, many years ago.
It's not a satellite at all, and it's one of the internet things.
I spend so much time with this crap, if I'm sorry to say that, but so much time with all those stuff that are just hindering us to make proper research.
If people were not that gullible, if they were really interested, they would put those things away and see behind it.
Because there are so many very, very good observations that never get the publicity.
But people are out there on the internet to get entertained.
It's good enough for them, they think.
You just said there are so many good cases and observations that don't get publicity.
Can you think of one or two?
I mean, the one I mentioned with us, the family in the car, it was not published anywhere before.
We did it in Eupho Sweden's magazine.
And lots of the stuff that are coming into Euro for Sweden are only published in our magazine, not in ordinary newspapers.
I'm right now working on several old cases, which is typical, of course, where there have been interactions with vehicles and those objects.
And there are lots of reports about ball lightning, which is not completely understood either.
And you can go both ways.
You can say ball lightning may be a natural phenomenon that can explain all the UFO stuff.
It can also be the other way around, of course, that there is something unique about the UFOs that also looks like ball lightning.
And that's a very, very interesting topic, I think.
It is, and it is something that is on the fringes of science.
You talked about you have reports, rather like the family you told me about, of interactions with vehicles.
Yeah, yeah.
What about those?
Can you think of any of those?
Yeah, I want to mention another interaction first, because I'm now writing about a story from also the early 1980s, where a family were woken up in the nighttime of something outside.
They were disturbing.
Their animals were disturbed.
They were very, very running in and out from the house, cat and the dog.
So the lady went out.
And when she went out, she saw this enormous, like a balloon, but it was a light with flashes coming down from the bottom of it.
And she was standing there and she was frozen.
She couldn't move.
The dog was frozen as well.
He couldn't move at all.
And she was standing there for a couple of minutes.
And then this object vanished.
And afterwards, she found that she was burnt with her jacket, a burn mark.
Almost like radiation.
Yes, something had hit her.
And she also found, and we found, when we were there, that the curtain in one of her rooms also were hit by something that burnt through the curtain.
I have never heard a story like that.
Where did that happen?
Whereabouts?
It happened in Dalekarlia, which is in the central of Sweden.
And it was the day before New Year's Eve.
So it was no firecrackers or anything like that that night.
It was the next night they did that stuff.
And she was very, very, very good witnesses.
And her husband didn't see anything.
He only experienced the smell, which was like sulfur coming from this object.
And that smell could be smelled for a couple of days afterwards.
And she got sick as well.
And she never really got well after that, for many, many years at least.
That is a truly astonishing story of somebody who sees, but her husband didn't see, but she saw and experienced, and apparently was burned by, a light hanging in the sky of unidentified origin.
Absolutely.
We have several stories where people have went out to look at something and they have been frozen, just paralyzed.
Another such case, the husband was away, a couple of hundred meters away when the lady came home from work and she was just to take a walk and she walked just 100 meters or something like that.
She saw an object coming through the trees in the nearby forest.
And when she saw that, she was paralyzed, standing there.
And the object stopped and looked like it was expanding, and then it was shrinking again and went away.
And then she lost this frozenness and she could walk.
But the interesting thing was that their neighbor, a couple of days later, when they talked about this, told this lady that he experienced nearly the same thing, but just an hour before.
And he was out, something was shining into his window, looking if it was a car that had accidentally driven in the ditch.
And he came out from his house and saw this ball of light hanging there, maybe 20 meters from him.
And he was frozen.
He couldn't move.
And then this object vanished.
And he walked inside again.
And his TV has changed every channel.
He got channels he never had any idea he had before.
So there were electrical effects to this as well.
But hopefully he wasn't burned by it.
No, he wasn't.
And neither was the lady.
But in an hour or two, they experienced this without knowing of each other, just kilometers away from each other.
Which indicates something.
I mean, I have to say, I haven't heard reports of that kind here.
That sounds to me as if it is a particularly Scandinavian phenomenon.
Yeah, maybe.
We are not sure, really.
I haven't seen so many reports either, I must say.
It's very hard because many countries have no reports at all because they have no Eurof organizations.
They don't deal in matters like this or they explain them as a religious phenomenon or something like that.
Do you have any contact with the Russians?
You know, I mean, back in the Cold War days, it was very difficult.
It's much easier now, of course.
Do you have any contact with people who do what you do there?
Because there are many strange and bizarre stories constantly coming out from there.
Yes, we have very many contacts in Russia and all around the world, I should say, because AFU is very international and we have contacts in nearly every country.
I traveled to Russia in the 90s and copied the KGB UFO files and we met as well with UFO researchers and got hundreds and hundreds of UFO cases with us back to Sweden.
And when we looked through them, I think we have 1,000 plus something like that, Russian UFO cases, original cases.
It was quite the same as we see here in Sweden.
The same misinterpretations, the same UFOs, and lots of Russian rocket launches that they didn't understand themselves what it was.
How many cases have you yourself directly gone out and investigated over the years?
Just give me an estimate, an idea.
I think around 1,500 or something like that.
That's a lot of cases.
In all of that time and in all of those cases, is there one that stands out as being truly shakingly bizarre and unusual to you?
I met with a family man and his wife.
He wrote to me after I read one of my books and he wrote to me and said, I have been experiencing something very, very strange.
And come down and meet with me, he said.
So I went there.
It's far away from where I live.
I knocked the door and sadly, he hadn't told his wife that I was coming and she wasn't at all that amused.
But in an hour or two, we were sitting there in the sofa, and both of them were talking to me.
And she said that when I go to bed, I usually lay on my back and I fell asleep quite fast.
And then when I wake up in the morning, I usually wakes up exactly the way that I fell asleep.
But this night, she said, I woke up and I was with my face down to the pillow, but one decimeter over the pillow, over the bed.
I was floating.
And it was an eerie greenish glow within the room.
And she was floating out from the bed.
And she was very frightened.
She could see her husband in this light.
You could see her husband sleeping.
So she tried to yell something, but she couldn't.
She couldn't speak.
So instead, she took his arm and he woke up.
And he tells me that he woke up and he saw his wife floating in the air and behind her three typical Wiki Streeber aliens were standing.
And he thought, what shall I do?
So he tried to kick.
He tried to kick against them.
And when he did that, when he tried to do this, everything went black.
And he heard a bounce.
And it was his wife falling to the floor because at that time she had floated out from the bed.
So they levitated her.
And when he started to struggle with them or remonstrate with them, they dropped her.
Yeah.
Yeah, they dropped her.
And they went away or they just vanished.
But the strangest thing is that when she crawled up into bed again, they just said one thing to each other.
What the hell was that?
and fell asleep again.
Well, that's...
How credible do you think they were?
I usually follow people for years.
I don't just meet them once.
And those two I follow for many, many years.
And now they are divorced.
And I talk with them after the divorce as well.
And they never change their story.
They don't have anyone to protect anymore.
They could say that my husband is crazy.
You shouldn't believe him.
But they don't say that.
They tell me the same story now, 15 years later, that they did at that time.
They're credible for me, but what really happened to them is really a mystery.
But it's very interesting because it's a shared experience.
Even though she didn't see Them.
She didn't see those creatures because her back were pointing to their direction.
And you could have said if it was only her who'd had an experience, you could say this was sleep paralysis and she was hallucinating in a sort of paralyzed, sleepy state.
But he woke up and saw this from his perspective.
Yeah, it's a very strange story.
It's very, very strange.
One of the most, yeah, I cannot get, I cannot point in any direction here, really.
They did experience this.
Something happened to them.
It was very physical.
And what's the biggest thing you're working on at the moment?
I guess it's the expedition, isn't it, later this year to the lake?
Right now I'm working on two things beside that.
I'm writing a book about the archives for the unexplained, and I'm also working on a crowdfunding project for the archives.
I'm also in contact with lots of people around the world when it comes to both of those projects.
And hopefully they will be ready in a month or so.
The book will be published in September, but I have a deadline in a month or so to leave the full script to my publisher.
So that takes a lot of my time.
I'm doing this seven hours a day right now.
And also a lot of other stuff.
People are calling me and sending me emails and things are happening.
So you're never really free.
But the one thing that's impressed me about you most of all is the overall impression that in Sweden, and I never, I've been to Sweden once, I loved it there, I want to come back.
I didn't actually talk to anybody about UFOs or any phenomena of any kind.
But it strikes me that people take you and the work that you do perhaps more seriously than they might take somebody doing what you do in the United Kingdom.
That's a broad statement.
But I think it's right.
I mean, I travel to Great Britain once a year, and I know nearly every ufologist in Britain, I think.
And they are telling other stories to me because they have more problems than I have.
I don't experience any problems at all.
And UFO Sweden is very, very well seen by the public.
So I think we are in a very good position, which is nice.
It makes it much easier to The media is printing good reports afterwards.
And I'm often expert in radio or TV about astronomy, space, or UFOs, or unusual natural phenomenon, which I also sort of an expert of.
And so people know about me, and they know me as a journalist at the largest morning newspaper in Sweden, which is also credible.
And I have to be very, very aware of that, that what I do, people are judging me from.
Well, I know exactly how you feel about that, because I made most of my career in mainstream news on radio in the UK.
And people knew that I also had this interest.
And sometimes, you know, I think even now some of my colleagues will say, oh, this is all crazy stuff.
And why do you do that loopy mad thing as well?
But, you know, I've tried to, as you have tried, I have tried to bring a journalistic approach to the work that I do.
Otherwise, what is the point of researching these things if you cannot do it in a systematic way?
That's a very good approach.
I mean, if you're a journalist, you know how to do this.
And it's a tremendous advantage to be a journalist, I should say.
Are young people interested in these things in Sweden?
Are young people joining your group?
Absolutely.
We have, since the middle of the 1970s, we are holding a field trainee course every year.
And there is always field.
It's 45 people, which is maximum.
They're always full house when we are giving this course.
And many of the new ones that are coming are young people.
So it's a very good, very big interest.
And people are calling and emailing and Facebooking us all the time.
Young people, most of them.
I didn't know there was such a thing as a course where you could learn these skills.
What sorts of things do you teach people?
Very much about what you can misinterpret.
You must be very, very skilled in that before you can do a UFO research.
We have around six or seven hours just about what you can see and what you can misinterpret in the sky.
We have loads of films and audios and pictures from all of the years we have been around about this.
So it's very, very, it makes a very good impact.
We also try to learn Euro for history, talk about interesting cases.
We have build a case that they are going to solve.
It's me and another guy who are playing in different, quite a few roles in that, and they must do the research.
They will interview us and we are getting them the answers.
And it is a very good course.
People are coming back and some are there for tenth time because they love it.
I can quite see why.
You're very, very dedicated to your work.
Listen, I had no idea before a listener suggested that I speak with you about research in Sweden that there was any research being done there.
So you've certainly opened my eyes class.
And I'm sure we'll talk again.
If people want to see your archives and read about your work, where online do they go?
AFU.se.
That's the archives, archives for the unexplained, AFU.
Or UFO.se.
That's UFO Sweden.
AFU is all in English.
UFOSweden is in Swedish.
Right.
Okay.
So UFO.se, did you say?
Yeah, and AFU.se.
Well, Klaas, a delight to speak with you.
I'm sure we'll speak again, and thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
You've been hearing Klaas Vahn, leading UFO investigator in Sweden, and a man with a lot of interesting stories and many more that he can come back and tell another time.
He will be very, very welcome here.
Your thoughts on this guest or any of the guests we've had here, gratefully received, please go to the website theunexplained.tv and if you can leave a donation for the show as you're passing through, that will be great.
More fantastic guests in the pipeline here as we cruise through 2019 on The Unexplained, so until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection