The Ghost Rockets: rocket-shaped objects over Sweden at the peak of the 1946 wave (1946)
Sweden logged about a thousand reports of rocket-shaped objects between May and the end of 1946, peaking on 11 August. The Defence Staff attributed roughly 80 per cent to meteors and other luminous phenomena, recovered no debris, and left a handful of cases unexplained.
- Case number
- TU-1946-900001
- Date
- 11 August 1946
- Location
- Sweden (peak day of the 1946 wave; reports from across Scandinavia)
- Coordinates
- 59.329° N, 18.069° E
- Shape
- cigar
- Colour
- Unknown
- Witnesses
- 1000
- Status
- likely explained
Case summary
From late May 1946 Swedish authorities were flooded with reports of rocket- or cigar-shaped objects crossing the sky by day and night, sometimes hissing, sometimes apparently crashing into a lake. The Defence Staff ordered military units on 12 June to use a standard reporting form, and on 6 July convened the committee of officers and engineers known as the ghost rocket committee. Finnish observers had reported similar objects from 26 February.
The wave peaked on 9 and 11 August, with more than 300 reports logged on 11 August alone; roughly a thousand reports had been collected within a few months, and later counts put the year's total near 2,000. Material said to have fallen was examined by the National Defence Research Institute and found to be coke, slag or probable meteorite matter, and searches of reported impact sites, including Lake Koelmjaerv in July, recovered no wreckage.
In its communiqué of 10 October 1946 the Defence Staff said most observations were vague and should be treated sceptically, but that in individual cases clear observations could not be explained as natural phenomena, Swedish aircraft or imagination, and that radar gave 'no clue as to the nature of the objects'. The suspicion at the time was Soviet testing of captured German V-weapons from Peenemunde — a Central Intelligence Group memorandum to President Truman of 22 August 1946 leaned that way — but no launches were recorded there after February 1945 and no identifiable fragments were found.
Nearby strategic sites
- RAF Fylingdales — 1261 km away