Script

For nearly 75 years, rumors and newspaper articles have recounted a crashed flying saucer on Spitsbergen, an island 400 miles north of Norway. This episode traces how the incident surfaced, gained attention in the 1950s, and was ultimately then labeled a hoax. Yet, is the hoax explanation itself a diversion—covering up remnants of Nazi weapons, Soviet technology, or even an alien craft? The truth remains unclear even to this day.

Stay with me tonight as we delve deeper into the fascinating story of the Spitsbergen UFO crash, exploring every twist and revelation.

I’m MF Thomas, and this is My Dark Path through the unexplained.

To show how this legend began, let’s start with the first mention of the saucer crash: the report in the German newspaper Saarbrücker Zeitung on June 28, 1952.

The headline read: FLYING SAUCER LANDED ON SPITSBERGEN. And here’s what the

article recounted.

In June 1952, six Norwegian fighter pilots tore across the frozen Arctic wastes of Spitsbergen on what should have been a routine summer maneuver. The jets had barely crossed the Hinlopen Straits when, without warning, every earphone and radio receiver exploded with violent crackling and an eerie, unnatural rustling. Radio contact between the planes died instantly. All means of communication were gone. The pilot’s radar screens, which had shown clear during the entire flight, suddenly flashed red. It was the urgent signal for an approaching metallic object.

Yet these highly experienced pilots refused to panic. They managed to stay in formation despite losing radio communication. Every man scanned the frozen horizon with desperate intensity. For long minutes they searched… and found nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, by pure chance, Air Captain Olaf Larsen glanced straight down.

What he saw hit him like a thunderbolt. On the white, glittering snow below lay a massive, metallic, perfectly circular disc—between forty and fifty meters across. It shone with a blinding brilliance, brighter than the ice itself. In the center, tangled wires and supporting struts protruded from what looked like the shattered remains of a cockpit. 

For an adrenaline-drenched hour, the six jets circled the impossible object at low altitude— but there was no movement, no sign of life, nothing to explain its origin or reason for its presence. Finally, low on fuel and answers, they broke off and raced back to Narvik to report the discovery.

Almost immediately, the Norwegian air force formed an investigation team. Hours later, five large flying boats from the Norwegian government, equipped with landing skis, thundered north through the Arctic sky. After landing safely beside the bluish steel disc, buried in a meter of snow and ice, Norwegian military personnel and scientists quickly swarmed the object.

The German article quotes Dr. Norsel, a Norwegian rocket scientist who insisted on joining the flight. “Undoubtedly one of the infamous flying saucers.”

Norsel determined the reason all communication between the fighter planes failed upon entering the area. Inside the crashed spaceship, he found an undamaged radio direction finder with a plutonium core. It was still transmitting on all wavelengths at 934 Hertz—a frequency not typically used by any country.

The German newspaper article further described the findings of the expedition:

• The round aircraft body, measuring 48.88 meters in diameter with sides sloping outward, was unmanned.

• The circular body is an unknown alloy. Forty-six automatic jets were evenly spaced around the rim.

• A central plexiglass dome housed remote-measuring and control devices.

• The disc's operational radius appeared to exceed 30,000 km, with a maximum altitude exceeding 160 km.

Then the article disclosed two odd addenda: First, the controls were labeled in Russian. Second, the craft had enough payload space for large high-explosive or possibly atomic bombs.

After investigating on-site, the Norwegians transported the craft by ship to Narvik for further examination. 

The German newspaper noted one last surprise. A designer of German weapons from World War II, an engineer by the name of Riedel, saw the craft and stated bluntly: “That’s a typical V-7 on whose serial production I have worked myself.”

This astonishing story was then reprinted verbatim about 6 weeks later in another German publication, Der Flieger, at which point the French news agency, AFP, picked it up and distributed it worldwide. And then the story went quiet for nearly two years.

The story began to reemerge in a few books published in 1953 and 1954, each of which briefly mentioned the Spitsbergen story. For example, Donald Keyhoe included it in Flying Saucers from Outer Space, Harold Wilkins reported it in Flying Saucers on the Moon, and Jimmy Guieu featured it in Flying Saucers Come from Another World.

Then, on July 26, 1954, the German newspaper Hessische Nachrichten published a startling new account. It revealed new details about the event, including the head of the Norwegian investigative team that had examined the remains of the Spitsbergen flying saucer. The chairman of the board, Colonel Gernod Darnhyl, stated

"The Spitsbergen crash was very rewarding. True enough, our science still faces many riddles. I am sure, however, that they can soon be solved by these remains from Spitsbergen. A misunderstanding developed, some time ago, when it was stated that the flying disc was probably of Soviet origin. It has - this we must state emphatically - not been built by any country on earth. The materials are completely unknown to all experts, either not to be found on Earth, or processed by physical or chemical processes unknown to us."

According to Darnhyl, the board of inquiry was not going to publish an extensive report until some sensational facts had been discussed with experts from the USA and Great Britain. “We must tell the public what we know about the unknown flying objects. A misplaced secrecy may well one day lead to panic!

This new German article went on to introduce two Norwegian fighter pilots, Lieutenant Brobs and Lieutenant Tyllensen, who had been assigned to monitor the polar area after the discovery of the Spitsbergen UFO. They claimed that, contrary to American and other sources, the flying discs had already landed repeatedly in the polar zone. Furthermore, Tyllensen said he believed the polar area was an air base for the UFOs. Especially during snow and ice storms, when the Norwegian fighters had to retreat to base, the flying objects took advantage of the situation to make landings. He had seen them land and take off three times shortly after such bad weather. He also noted that the saucers were almost always cloaked by brilliant light, which prevented any human from seeing the craft or its occupants during flight or while on the ground.

This is an interesting observation, as the Scandinavian countries were beset with a rash of UFO sightings, commonly known as the Scandinavian Ghost Fliers, in the early 1930s. You can watch my episode on them here.

The German article concluded with Darnhyl’s belief that the recovery of the Spitsbergen craft would quickly yield new scientific breakthroughs. It also held hope for disclosure of the alien sources of many UFO sightings. "We now have material at hand on which we can start. That means laboratories can start the work right away. They might give us preliminary results shortly. Norwegian scientists think that the material from Spitsbergen can only give away its secrets by nuclear crushing. This is because it does not change at absolute zero, when air is liquefied, or at the highest temperatures technically possible with our technology. Also, every chemical treatment has been tried. Scientific results will only be released after a UFO conference in London or Washington."

Then, a further twist to the Spitsbergen story appeared just months later, in the September 1954 issue of Sir!, a pulpy Men’s magazine. The author, EW Grenfell, introduced the famed Norwegian physicist, Dr. Hans Larsen Løberg.

Loberg confirmed the earlier estimate of the saucer's size: it measured about 91 feet in diameter and about 70 feet thick at its center. The outer surface, shiny and transparent, drew his attention. As light as aluminum, the material was nonetheless much harder and highly heat-resistant. With its tripod-style landing gear deployed, investigators believed the craft had landed somewhat under control.

Still, the Norwegian scientists found nothing that they could recognize as an engine. Nor could they easily determine how the spacecraft had been assembled. There were no rivets, fuses, or bolts.

The spaceship's doors were open when it was discovered. Just inside, investigators found seven bodies, burned beyond recognition. Scientists believe they were young males, about 1.65 m (5’ 5”) tall, all with perfect teeth.

Advancing to the spaceship’s control room, they found a number of controls and buttons. It was deduced that it could travel aided by the magnetic forces that “hold the planets in their position in space, and these forces were controlled by those very buttons.”

Within the ship, the investigators found water that was three times as heavy as normal water, and pills that were taken to be food. They also discovered a communication device. It was quite small and had no antenna. Løberg also corrected the first story that the saucer carried Russian writing. Instead, the article quoted him as saying the language was completely aligned. They also found some books, seemingly navigational instructions, written in an unknown script. 

Lastly, Løberg also described an astonishing weapon—a beam gun that used magnetic rays. This weapon, he believed, explained a number of strange incidents in the USA. In Wyoming, Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh, and New York, thousands of cars had their windows broken for unexplained reasons. Additionally, Loberg is reported as saying that the young pilot Mantell, who during a flight reported on the radio that he had encountered a flying saucer and shortly thereafter crashed in pursuit of it, must have been shot down by this beam gun.

Finally, the article addresses why the spacecraft crashed. Loberg hypothesized that the American hydrogen-bomb test in the Pacific Ocean must have caused the crash half a world away. He surmised that the spacecraft must have been monitoring the test and had been caught up in it, causing the crew to burn even as the spaceship resisted the enormous heat. 

Then again, a few months later after the article in the United States, On December 19, 1954, Norway’s own newspaper Verdens Gang published a headline that continued to reshape the entire legend:

The headline read:

SOUTH-AMERICAN REPORT OF FLYING SAUCER IN NORWAY!

It said that the Uruguayan newspaper El Nacional of Montevideo had just broken the story – noting the previously mentioned Norwegian scientist Hans Løberg had discovered a flying saucer.  But this article claimed it had occurred on Heligoland – replacing the Spitsbergen as the site of the crash.

What are we to make of these two very different locations? Some researchers have proposed the idea that there were two distinct stories – one in Spitsbergen and another in Heligoland and that these two distinct legends somehow fused into one with each retelling. And from there, in 1966, Frank Edwards’ international bestseller Flying Saucers—Serious Business breathed new life into the Spitsbergen legend. Edwards claimed he had corresponded with a member of the Norwegian board of inquiry. He wrote: “In 1954 when I wrote to a member of the Norwegian Board of Inquiry which had investigated the Spitsbergen case, I received, after four months, a cryptic reply: ‘I regret that it is impossible for me to respond to your questions at this time.’ Could he, then, answer my questions at some other time? To that inquiry I received no reply. I am recovering from the shock.”

Edwards’ account must be judged suspect. He never named his alleged contact, and the letters he described — letters one would expect him to reproduce in the book — never appeared and have never surfaced anywhere.

In 1968, Arthur Shuttlewood’s Warnings from Flying Friends added yet another layer. It recounted an article by Bruce Sandham titled “Invasion from Space,” where he claimed a Catalina flying boat — not six Norwegian air force jets — discovered the object, and he placed the event in May 1952 instead of June. He cited no sources.

Through the years, the Spitsbergen story continued to surface in books and magazine articles — so many that we can only touch on the most important ones, those that added new information… or still more confusion.

For example, in the May 1954 issue of Fate magazine, an article recaps the original story that “a flying saucer had been found in the inhospitable snow and ice of northeast Spitzbergen, a Norwegian island north of Russia. The object looked like a silver disk, make of unknown metal with jet motors that make the disk turn around.”

The story became even more convoluted when, in 1986, William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens, authors of UFO Crash at Aztec, combined the Spitsbergen and Heligoland stories. Steinman, the primary author, claimed seven dead beings were found near the Spitsbergen saucer and added new “data” asserting that the pilot who first discovered the object and reported his find never came back.

The most recent article of note was “New Information on the Spitzbergen Saucer Crash” by William Moore in Focus, published in December 1990. Moore described a Swiss government report published on flying saucers, detailing World War II Nazi saucer experiments. Moore stated that the Spitsbergen wreckage, from one of these aircraft, was “recovered by Canadian commandos.” 

This is, basically, the Spitsbergen UFO crash/retrieval story as it stood when serious UFO investigators began evaluating the many shifting stories.

What makes it a hoax?

1. There was no V-7 

2. None of the names in the articles could be traced to real people.

3. The available Norwegian fighter aircraft couldn’t have reached Spitsbergen and returned, much less loitered in the area for an hour.

The V-7 was an entirely fictional flourish in the Spitsbergen hoax. In the original 1952 Saarbrücker Zeitung article, the German V-weapon designer Riedel was quoted as looking at the crashed silver disc and declaring that the craft was a V-7. No such weapon had ever existed in the real German wartime program. The only official V-series rockets were the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile. While there were dozens of other wonder weapon projects, everything beyond the V1 and V2 were entirely experimental or just pure invention. So the V-7 flying disc was manufactured out of thin air and then eagerly repeated by later writers. It gave the hoax a seductive veneer of Nazi wonder-weapon authenticity.

Second, none of the people mentioned or quoted in the series of articles existed. 

For example, Air Captain Olaf Larsen — the pilot who allegedly first spotted the silver disc and led the squadron of six jets — does not exist. Dr. Norsel, the rocket specialist who examined the craft and declared it a genuine flying saucer, has no record in any Norwegian scientific or military directory. Colonel Gernod Darnhyl, the chairman of the General Staff board of inquiry and claimed the disc was extraterrestrial, never served in the Norwegian military. Lieutenants Brobs and Tyllensen, the polar observers who claimed they’d seen UFOs repeatedly landing during snowstorms, are likewise fictitious.

The same is true of Hans Larsen Løberg, the scientist featured in the Heligoland version who described the seven burned bodies, the magnetic beam gun, and heavy water.  In the 1990s, Norwegian researchers checked every available source: full Air Force personnel rosters, the Defense Ministry archives, the Defense Museum in Oslo, the Press and Information Division of the High Command.  Every person directly tied to the discovery, the investigation, or the official statements was fabricated.

And one last fact check makes the original story suspect: the aircraft themselves. According to every version of the story except Bruce Sandham’s, the wreckage was discovered by jet pilots. In 1951–52, the only jet fighters in the entire Norwegian Air Force were the De Havilland DH 100 Vampire in three versions and the Republic F-84 Thunderjet in two versions.

The Vampire jets were stationed at Gardermoen Air Force Base, roughly fifty kilometers north of Oslo, and had an action radius of only 980 kilometers — far too short to reach Spitsbergen and return.

That left the F-84 Thunderjets. Six F-84Es had been delivered in September 1951 and twenty-four F-84Gs arrived during the spring of 1952.  The later had an operational radius of 1,610 kilometers. So, initially, it looks possible that the Norwegian fighters could have found the craft. In reality, it was not. All F-84s were based in southern Norway. The airfields in northern Norway were either too short or still undergoing extensive upgrades to meet the new NATO standard. Even if the jets had reached the crash site, the story claimed they circled the wreckage for nearly an hour—an impossible luxury that would have left them with no fuel for the long flight home. The flight described in the legend was simply beyond the capability of any Norwegian jet in 1952.

Even the U.S. government treated the tale as fiction from the beginning. Declassified Blue Book documents show the case was marked a hoax almost as soon as the newspaper story appeared. A retired Air Force officer later claimed he had seen a classified message about the Spitsbergen crash while on duty in a communications center. That claim was used for years to suggest a government cover-up — until researchers discovered the “classified message” was simply the Air Attaché’s teletype summarizing the very same newspaper article.

So, if the story were a fabrication, what might have caused it? Well, the most obvious reason was that in the early 1950s, the world was gripped by an unprecedented wave of UFO hysteria. The summer of 1952 alone saw thousands of sightings reported across the United States, Europe, South America, and Australia.  It’s very reasonable that the story was created out of whole cloth to satisfy the demand for UFO stories.

Could the story have been made up by a government or intelligence agency to redirect public attention? One chilling possibility is that something actually did crash on the remote Arctic island.  At the time, two possible flying objects could have crashed there - either a top-secret American high-altitude reconnaissance balloon or a piece of Soviet rocket technology.  The UFO crash story then deliberately planted to bury the truth under layers of ridicule.  Top secret debris recovery on Norwegian territory would have been an explosive intelligence disaster. 

If something had crashed on Spitsbergen, the parallels with Roswell are striking. In both cases, the public was fed a dramatic extraterrestrial story that quickly collapsed under scrutiny, leaving behind only confusion and laughter. If a Soviet test rocket or an American balloon had come down on Spitsbergen, fabricating the tale of a crashed UFO would have been the perfect misdirection. 

Some have wondered whether this could be one of the twelve crash/retrieval cases David Grusch referenced in 2023. After all, the story has appeared in Blue Book files and countless UFO books. But the documentation that we’ve just covered points in only one direction: Spitsbergen was well-crafted hoax that was never more than ink on paper.

Even as we close the book on the Spitsbergen hoax, a touch of unease remains.  John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There? — brought to terrifying life in John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing — still haunts us for a reason. In both works, a group of Norwegians discovers something ancient and malevolent frozen in the polar ice… something that can perfectly imitate human form. The Arctic and Antarctic remain among the most remote and least explored places on Earth. Perhaps, somewhere beneath the ice, real extraterrestrial secrets still wait in frozen silence. And if they ever thaw and reveal themselves… we can only hope we are better prepared than the men who first found The Thing.

Thank you, my friends for joining me in my dark path through the unexplained.  Until next time, good night.