When a Flying Saucer Landed at Lake Anten and other UFO Touchdowns in Sweden.
Sometimes when I look back at my writings I can see how I often focus on so-called inner experiences, or dreamlike events which might be or not be about material objects and beings, stuff one can touch and sense in a more physical way. Are these non-material visitors or something more tangible, maybe like seeing a car and its driver by the side of the road and not something from another world? Even famous Swedish UFO flaps like the one in Vallentuna 1974 have a touch of something from another realm, and not necessarily from another planet. So let’s take a look at another famous case, which gained a lot of attention at the beginning of the 70’s — and still is brought up as a highly interesting example of an alleged landing of a flying saucer… or UFO? May I suggest that we bring back Charles Fort’s acronym, OSF — Objects Seen Floating, instead? Let’s think about it, okay?
At Relsbo Gård, approximately 500 meters from Enebacken, where the morning after, 81 year old Rickard Johansson, would discover something very strange in his yard, the Karlsson family was just about to go to bed. It was just before midnight on the night between August 29 and 30, 1970, and their life — at least for the moment — was about to change. When Erik Karlsson, the husband, looked out the window, he noticed how a couple of cars on the road below stopped and turned off their headlights, “Then our son came running inside, telling us something bright red and glowing was flying above Enebacken’’. Erik and Ingeborg, his wife, got dressed and went outside to witness the strange sight, and yes, there was something brightly red moving back and forth above the treetops. “At first I thought it was an airplane, but it couldn’t br because of the way it moved. It was round and red”, Ingeborg stated to the investigators from GICOFF. (Göteborgs Informationscenter för Oidentifierade Flygande Föremål), Björn Högman, Siv Högman, Sven-Olof Fredrikson and photographer Gunnar Johansson.
The family stood and watched the object for almost two hours, studying its strange movements above the trees. Sometimes it disappeared behind them and then up again, and during one moment it was as close as 200 meters away, down at a field belonging to the farm. Erik and Ingeborg noticed something else, it was like beams were coming out from the red sphere, yellow and white in color. It was about half the size of the full moon from their distance. When they finally went to bed, at two in the morning, the mysterious visitor was still there doing its thing.
During this time three cars stopped, with its passengers reacting to the strange hovering light. Peter Nilsson and his friend were on their way from Alingsås when they, somewhere between 11.15 and 11.30 pm saw the red light on the left side of the road, above the forest. It moved back and forth a couple of times, stopping from time to time. They observed it for approximately ten minutes.
In another car was Marita Olsson and her husband on their way home from visiting friends in Degerbo, when they saw what reminded them the headlights of a car, yellow-red in color, up in the sky. They also thought it was an airplane at first, but the vertical movements made them change their mind. The observation lasted for three to four minutes, beginning at 12.25 pm.
On their way to Hyttan, Ellen Aronsson and her friend saw the light, “a brightly shining sphere”, on their right side. First mistaking it for the moon, but it looked too red in color. Ms Aronsson would later, the next morning, visit the elderly Rickard Johansson in her role as a domestic helper, and be a part of the sensational discovery imprinted in his lawn.
There were many more reports from that night, most of them describing it as a brightly shining sphere/ball, red in color and moving back and forth, up and down. One witness said it looked beautiful when reflecting its light over the still surface of a lake (possibly Hälsingen, a lake closer to the observation than the more well known Anten) But it’s what’s coming next that truly made the headlines the upcoming weeks that late summer, 1970.
The next morning Ms Aronsson visited Rickard Johansson’s small homestead, Enebacken, positioned around 500 meters into the forest on a narrow, desolate road and found that something seemed to have visited his home during the night. There, on the lawn, three prints were clearly visible, placed in a triangular shape with 2,6 meters in between. The word was spreading fast in the area, and already in the day after twenty something curious people had visited the spot, some of them taking souvenirs in the form of soil samples. The weeks after over 1000 people visited Rickard Johansson’s home, which of course made the place contaminated quickly by foot prints and other kinds of damage. However, the prints were still visible, clearly being circular in shape, 40 centimeters in diameter and roughly four centimeters deep. According to investigators the prints were charred and not burned. Surrounded by four trees, the object was calculated to be at the most 8,8 meter in diameter, or else the trees would have been damaged by the descent.
Mr Johansson himself hadn’t heard or noticed anything during the night. His bedroom was on the opposite side of the alleged landing site, on the far end of the house. He went to bed at 9 pm that evening and slept well. On the contrary of what one might believe, Mr Johansson actually enjoyed the ruckus surrounding the incident and appreciated people coming around looking at the prints, making him feel less lonely. He wasn’t that bothered by possible otherworldly visitors either, “Whoever it is that has landed here, they’ve been kind and haven’t destroyed anything”, and added that he only read about flying saucers in the newspapers, but now he had changed his mind about and would never doubt their existence again.
The landing was soon declared a hoax, both by the police and media. Göteborgposten proclaimed to have the solution with the headline “The Flying Saucer came from Magra, not Mars”. It was, according to them, two teenagers from Magra, around 20 kilometers away, out playing with their hot air balloon, who were the culprits behind it all. They had used a construction with three jars filled with ethanol, set them on fire and the result would be the balloon rising up into the air. Both boys denied being involved in any mischievous activity, and one of them actually had a solid alibi for that particular night.
Not long after Lektyr, a “gentleman” magazine, published their article on the subject, titled “The Hoax of the Year” (possibly as a response to a more positive article in their rival FIB-Aktuellt) introducing two new chess pieces to the game; a couple of young men from Göteborg, armed with a gas burner, weather balloons, gas tubes, a truck battery, ropes and cables and everything else they needed to make their hoax work. On GICOFF this caused some confusion and their investigators decided to recreate the experiment, but felt it didn’t live up to what the witnesses saw and the prints left on Rickard Johansson’s lawn.
Looking at it with critical eyes, it can be quite easy to dismiss this case — especially since the sensational article published by Lektyr. One need to keep in mind that the magazine was known to invent news and was a populist publication produced only for the sake of selling as many copies as possible, with an audience that craved entertainment before facts. Did they actually construct this story and paid off the boys? No one knows for sure, but the fact is that no one has ever confessed to being involved in a possible hoax. It’s also easy to connect things to create a larger picture; an unusually colorful moon, the movement of the eyes against a bright spot on the sky will create movements that seemingly come from the object itself. A mass sighting of such an event might cause speculation, gossip and lead to exaggerations — the memory fills in what’s not there. The thing is that the memory drastically drops in quality after a few hours, and by the end of the day as much as 50% is gone, and a week later it’s only 10–20% that’s still there. And where there’s a void, there’s room to fill with information. One can say that our brain edits our memories constantly, and what you thought you experienced last week is not what you remember today.
That brings us to the prints on Rickard Johansson’s lawn. Maybe they have always been there? Maybe they were such a common sight everyday that neither Johansson and his friends noticed them anymore? The word about a mysterious light could have made Ms Aronsson more attentive to anomalies in her nearest surroundings. Could they have remained after something else, fires or construction? That could be the case, of course, but the addition of a mass observation during the night and what seemed like fresh prints, charred and black, the day after just outside his house might seem a bit too much to be a coincidence? The hoax theory is of course an important one, but one has to count in the quality of the witnesses and sources, the technical reconstruction by the investigations — even if they might have had a bias towards aliens and flying saucers. I’m not ruling out anything here, everything is possible.
This was the era of mysterious prints in Sweden, and let’s take a look at a couple of oddities, a lot less famous than the one above and the story I will end this text with. The first one happened — or at least discovered — on February 2, 1971 by Börje Bergqvist, who was working on his farm, in Lillpite, when he noticed an odd pattern in the snow behind the building. “I’d just moved the hay from the barn and onto the wagon when I saw the rings in the snow outside. I thought it was weird and have never seen anything like it before. I didn’t think much more about it, but when I was getting hay again on Wednesday, the rings were still there”. It was three circles, the biggest measured around 60 centimeters across, and truly looks like an out of place pattern which left both Börje and his friends perplexed.
Two weeks later, something oddly similar was found 110 Swedish miles away, in Skoghem, Remmenedal. This time it was farm owner Josef Johansson who found three similar marks, all consisting of three circles inside each other, on the snow covered barn roof. “I don’t believe it was elves or gnomes, they moved north out a long time ago. Whatever has left the marks on my barn roof must have come through the air. Moreover, they must have done so since the storm and snowfall subsided on Thursday morning. The marks were not there on Wednesday evening and would have been obliterated by the storm, by the way”. The police sent out inspector Holm, who did a thorough investigation and concluded that the marks couldn’t have been done by anyone climbing up on the roof, as there was no sign of intruders around and on the barn. Like the mysterious circle mark in Lillpite, these also had around the same width across, 56 centimeters. In Alingsås Tidning, March 12, 1971, the 75 year old Johansson speculates that someone might have bounced against the roof, three times and then disappeared.
A case of snow circles instead of crop circles? Investigators from GICOFF had a theory the first circle was a natural phenomenon, made from the movement of the grass underneath the snow, something they’d seen during the summer. But it’s unlikely the same phenomenon would happen during wintertime. Let’s get back to a few cases without the dreaded snow, and start with one not far from Skirsjön, a small lake in the province of Östergötland, in 1972.
Lennart Engström was out hunting on October 30, when he encountered an mysterious mark in the ground. It was located at a very remote location, far from traffic and people, on an abandoned field. The mark itself had a diameter of between 80 to 90 centimeters and the grass was charred, but not burned to the ground. Around the burn mark Engström found red and white substances. The red was sticky and fat, the white sticky and viscous. In a diamond shape around the burned circle four imprints were found, around one decimeter in depth. In each of these a tiny hole was visible on the ground, like puncture marks. Vegetation had been uprooted and it seemed like some kind of vacuum had done this. On a curious note; the area was known since 1967 as a hotspot for all sorts of weirdness, including observations of flying saucers, unexplained engine failures - but also several observations of little people: gnomes etc. Two boys had witnessed a small figure running into the forest in connection to a mire they visited to pick cloudberries. The little man, as he disappeared from sight, had let out a yodeling.
On August 4, 1979, are two boys - Patrik Wegelius and Pierre Stenberg, both 14 years old - awake in their beds late into the night, chatting and trying to stay awake as long as possible, as often happens with energetic kids. They’re alone in the house belonging to the grandparents of Pierre, and when a strong light burst through the windows of the second floor they first thought the grandparents were coming home. When not hearing anyone entering the house they get up and look out. What they see, about 150 meters away from the house, out on a field, is an intense bright light - so strong it paralyzes them with fear! After a minute or so they're brave enough to run down to the first floor to get a better look at what is going on outside. The light starts to move sideways, and for a moment it seems to move towards the house. Pierre gets scared and calls the police, but when the light moves in another direction and then upwards and disappears he becomes calmer.
The next morning the boys venture out on the field and find five marks in the ground, four in a square pattern with one burned mark in the middle - and a sixth mark, which reminds them more of a hole someone has dug up, not far away.
These examples of mysterious marks might seem far-fetched in their connection to the one by lake Anten, but one case that came up — and caused quite a lot of attention at the time when it happened, was factory director Åke Johansson’s strange find outside his summer cabin, and former family home, in Vänga, seven kilometers outside Fristad, Borås Municipality, June 1, 1968. What’s odd, which for a short while caused some attention among certain investigators, was that the name of the owner in Vänga also was Johansson and the name of his house Enebacken, exactly like the at lake Anten case. A third incident involving the same names, never happened — as some suggested it would. Though, as you probably noticed, owner of the barn mentioned earlier also was named Johansson. This is a very common name in Sweden. Okay, but what happened in Vänga?
One day Åke Johansson found a big, oily spot on his lawn — he first thought a motorist had car trouble and dumped oil outside the house — and kinda accepted that thought, even though it was unlikely considering the place of the spot. Åke, his daughter and her fiancé had arrived in the afternoon and decided to move the lawn, when they found the odd mark underneath the grass. The next day the liquid had disappeared, the grass had started to wither on the spot, and a strong, intense and disgusting smell was spreading. Johansson started to get red spots on his face and hands, and the same thing happened to those who visited him. However, what was really peculiar was that a geometrical shape was beginning to take form on the lawn, where the oily substance had been. It consisted of a triangular shape, with another triangle attached. The first triangle had three circular marks in their corners, and the whole shape had a diameter of 3,1 x 1,6 meters.
With the help Archives for the Unexplained I was able to locate one photo of the alleged landing mark, as seen here first enlarged and enhanced. For transparency, I’ve edited the photo to remove a child that was present in it on the left side of the mark, for privacy reasons.
Samples of soil and liquid were sent to Lantmännens Forskningsinstitute, the Agricultural Cooperative’s research institute and according to their report, it was neither pesticide, propellant or motor lubricant. Chemist Kaj Klarin at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) could only find natrium and calcium, common chemicals in soil and nature. Curiously enough he also ended up with getting small wounds and rashes on his fingers and hands after handling the samples AND was one of those who experienced high strangeness at Skirsjön, as told earlier.
According to the Johansson family official WikiTree page, Åke Johansson was some kind of prepper, and one might wonder if the mark was generated from his work on the site? “The Cold War and Sweden’s proximity to the Soviet Union made Åke nervous about the chance of nuclear disaster. He made additions to the property to get it “off-the-grid”, including the installation of one of the first wind-turbine-powered generators in the area. He kept several enormous tanks of diesel as backup for the imminent disaster. One tank filled a whole shed and the other was kept in the barn. The barn was Åke’s workshop where he’d store and repair old things, tinkering with appliances and other fixtures. One day, the diesel tank or perhaps the fumes in the barn caught fire and the building was destroyed.”
However, for investigator, author and APRO’s Swedish representative K. Gösta Rehn it was clear: it was a flying saucer that landed on Åke Johansson’s lawn, something that he felt was even more convincing after learning that an elderly couple in Ebbared, 16 kilometers from the landing site, had seen a hovering, floating bright object moving towards the Vänga direction. “One conceivable explanation is that the liquid release is a product of the nuclear operating method, in which liquid metallic elements were precipitated upon landing”, was the conclusion he gave the mystery in his second book, UFO! Nya Fakta om de Flygande Tefaten from 1969.
One has to keep in mind that this was during a time when basically all mysterious UFO events in Sweden were alleged flying saucers, and all of these investigations and texts have strong alien and UFO bias, which in all fairness was the thing in this country during the sixties and seventies. That was the culture, even if it was slowly changing over the next ten years or so. What I love and adore with these is the love for the weird, that aliens might have landed on homesteads around Sweden and left strange, unexplained marks in lawns of surprised home owners. Will we ever find out what’s behind these incidents? Probably not, and we’re left with stories and legends, written down by dreamers and believers. I’m not saying that these marks have a natural, rational explanation — oh no, don’t misunderstand me. They might have, but maybe something really landed, or crawled up from the depths of the Swedish soil, to leave a final imprint before heading back into the unknown realms of our reality.
For more Swedish high strangeness, please read the following texts:
Hoaxers and Experiencers: Men in Black in Sweden.
We Will Be Back: The 1944 Alien Abduction at Klissberget.
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.
I huge thanks to Archives for the Unexplained for their help with this text.
Sources:
“UFO-landing vid Anten?” (Editorial department and Lloyd Simu, UFO-Information, no 10, 1970)
“Uppföljning av Anten-fallet” (Alf Tollhag, GICOFF-Information, no 4, 1971)
“Märkena vid Enebacken” (Editorial department, GICOFF-Information, no 1, 1971)
“Tre runda hål förbryllar…” (Philip Mauritzson, Alingsås Tidning, January 3, 2017)
“Cirklar i Snön” (GICOFF-Information, no 4, 1971)
“En Landning vid Skirsjön” (Håkan Blomqvist, UFO-Bladet, no 1, 1972)
“Skirenfallet — kommentarer och tillägg” (Anders Liljegren, Ufologen, no 11, 1973)
“UFO över Dalabygd” (Christer Dahlstedt & Niels Nielsen, UFO-Information, no 11, 1979)
“1968 Landade ett Okänt Föremål i Vänga?” (Jörgen Granlie, UFO-Sverige, ufo.se)
UFO! Nya Fakta om de Flygande Tefaten (K. Gösta Rehn, p. 33–34, Zindermans, 1969)
The Johansson Family and Enebacken on WikiTree.
