We Will Be Back: The 1944 Alien Abduction at Klissberget.
In Sweden we call it dagsmeja, that time of the year when it’s below zero and still the snow and ice starts to melt during the day, to freeze again at night. A crust forms on top of the snow, and makes it ideal for skiing. This usually happens in March, when the sun is at its highest — until the ice and snow is gone, and it’s once again spring. It’s during one of those days, in 1944, a man claimed to have experienced something very strange. In a letter to Hemmets Journal in 1985, he shared his story to journalist Vera Norling.
The man, who chose to be anonymous, lived outside Sundsvall, in the north of Sweden. He woke up at six that morning, strapped on his skis and aimed at Klissberget, a forested mountain that was — and still is — a popular recreational area for outdoor activities. It was four kilometers up and then it was a nice downhill trip back. On his way down he passed an area called Tallberget he saw something that wasn’t there on his way up, a craft of some sort. It was spherical and stood on four legs. It was approximately seven to eight meters in diameter and now it stood there, 20 meters from him. It kinda looked transparent, but he still couldn’t see through it.
“I felt hypnotized and was drawn towards the craft, unstrapped by skis and got sucked up through an elevator”, he described what happened next in his letter. Inside he was greeted by three beings, all around 120–130 centimeters in height and very human-like. They were dressed in yellow-beige, baggy clothes and with glass domes over their heads, all adorned with small horns. While he couldn’t see any faces, he took a good look around him and saw technical equipment, dashboards, he’d never seen before. It didn’t look like any human technology. “Where is this from?”, he thought, and got an answer directly through telepathy, “From the outside”. The beings continued with explaining that he was in no danger, but they would like to take some samples from him.
Against his will, he found himself undressed and laid down on a bench. Tubes and wires were connected to his body, they scraped the inside of his throat and collected saliva. A metallic object was inserted into his groin. “It hurt terribly!”, he said and added that during the whole examination he tried to break loose, but his muscles wouldn’t react to his will. Powerless and terrified he felt how something was pumping and pulsating in his lower abdomen, and soon he became unconscious.
When he woke up again he was fully dressed and the paralysis was gone, but the pulsating pain in the groin was still there. The being helped him up, made him stand on the elevator floor and he was lowered through the floor and he found himself on the ground again. Once again, through telepathy, he was told he wouldn’t get any marks or scars after this experience. The spherical UFO then took off, silently up in the air and disappeared.
He had some health issues after this, contrary to what the beings had told him. Feeling nauseous, he had to leave work early the next day and collapsed outside his house. A high fever struck him the day after and it took two weeks until he was fully back to his old self. One doctor thought he had suffered from blood poisoning. Many years later, in 1970, he had an eye examination and found out he had a small defect on his left eye, a possible result of brain trauma after the fever.
In 1984 something happened that made him rethink the idea of not sharing his experience, and therefore writing a letter to Vera Norling at Hemmets Journal. It was on October 24, 9.14 AM, and he was sitting in the living room reading the morning newspaper. Suddenly the TV was turned on and he could see yellow-green images of a forest and snow, and soon himself on skis working himself downwards until he reached the sphere. A voice, in his head, told him “Look carefully, do you recognize this?”. From the perspective of an outside witness he was shown the whole examination again, which resulted in an x-ray of his whole body. Afterwards the beings had problems dressing him, not sure how to use his clothes on his body — which might be one reason he, outside the sphere, found that his ski boots were on the wrong feet.
“We want you on our side. Do you want to come over to us? We can multiply your life expectancy. There are more of your kind here, and no one shows any regrets”. He didn’t hesitate in his answer, “No”. The last thing he heard in his head was the ominous, “We will be back”. Those last words bothered him. Would he get abducted, taken against his will? In his letter to Vera Norling he added that he would call her in one week and that was a promise he held. The first call was short, where he explained he didn’t want his name in the magazine because he was afraid to be mocked and not taken seriously — and he didn’t want his family to suffer because of this. However, this was the first time he ever told anyone about the incident and wanted to share it with the readers. Suddenly the connection was interfered with by statics and was broken. A few moments later he called back, and managed to tell that this was something that he had forgotten over the years up until the strange incident with the TV in 1984. Then the connection broke again and that was the last thing Vera Norling thought she ever would hear from the man, until a letter arrived just days before the publication of her article, and too late to be included in that issue — instead it was published a little later.
“I’ve written down my statement (a bit more detailed) and put it in a brown envelope with the writing TO BE OPENED AFTER MY DEATH. It is in my bank deposit box. Sooner or later my eventual living relatives will take part in my experiences. In consideration to my family I feel I must continue to be anonymous. I don’t want to expose them to profanity and harassment. I don’t expect anyone to believe in my story, but I will repeat it one more time: all of this is the truth. (Signed), Still Mr Anonymous”.
We will probably never learn if the beings ever returned, in- or outside his television set, if not one day, one of his relatives comes out in the open with more details about Mr Anonymous’ incredible story.
In my research I’ve been trying to find any other kinds of experiences on or around Klissberget, but the only thing I’ve dug up is a very anecdotal one, with no exact year or spot. This was at the end of the sixties and the witness, who heard the story from another family. The event took place at a path made out for electrical wires, on poles, which makes it as a wide pathway through the forest. The witnesses had been out driving and suddenly saw a very bright glow above the opening in the forest. The glow belonged to some kind of craft, hovering above the electrical wires. Some kind of appendix was hanging from the craft, seemingly touching the electrical equipment. This went on for a couple of minutes, and in addition to this there had been a power failure in the area. Not much more is known about this incident.
Like with all anonymous letters and telephone calls about older incidents, it’s virtually impossible to verify the credibility of them. Are these dreams or imagination? Did the event in 1944 really happen or was planted in him as a reality while falling asleep in front of his TV? I’m diving deeper into one of these stories in my text What About That Dead Alien Humanoid in Sweden?, and in my upcoming book Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden I’m writing a bit about another letter, where an old man recounts an experience he had with his father in Niilijänkänmaa, 1927. I don’t doubt the subjective experiences these men had, as I’m sure something happened — even if it’s an inner experience rather than something on the outside, something physical and tangible. It’s my personal belief that these stories are as of as much importance as the alleged physical experiences out there, maybe even more so.
In the text Which Filters Do You Experience The World Through?, Peter Burns describes an installation by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, where the goal is to challenge the visitor’s sense of reality. He describes our subjective reality very well: “The lesson here is that reality is in the eye of the beholder. Your brain serves as one giant filter for the world beyond you. Stimuli from the outside pass through a series of gates inside your head. The result is an interpretation, your personal perspective.”
The otherworldly experiences described by experiencers often have a connection to nature, to our world — and foremost, to our inner universe of strangeness. A reality on the inside might be as much as a reality of the outside, with their own sane or insane logic. Like the little people, the fairies and gnomes of the best, these experiences connect us to a land beyond our wildest imagination. Call it Magonia, call it dreamland or mirrored reality as real as our own.
For more Swedish high strangeness, please read the following texts:
Hoaxers and Experiencers: Men in Black in Sweden.
The Jawbone of Axala: From Giants in Norse Mythology, Observations in Modern Times to Bloody Murder.
Amongst Trolls and Bigfoot in Sweden.
Owls, UFOs and Sweden.
Fred Andersson is a Swedish story producer, researcher and writer with over twenty years of experience in commercial television and the author of three books. He lives in Märsta, outside Stockholm, with his photographer husband Grzegorz and two overly active cats. Join him on Twitter and Instagram.
Sources:
Tellus, Newsletter for Malmö Interplantariska Sällskap, April 1985
“Möte med det Okända: Vad vill de mig, varelserna i den lysande kulan?”, Hemmets Journal, issue 4, 1985, Vera Norling.
