Alleged UFO Sighting on May 16, 1808 in Biskopsberga, Sweden

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For as far as written history permits us to remember, mankind has always witnessed strange things happen in the skies, which people, by the standards of that particular time, have not been able to explain adequately. The sighting of an unidentified flying object or UFO is not a rare phenomenon, and many of these occurrences over the years have been carefully studied and subsequently debunked, while others remain as mysteries that baffle even the best of us. Among those which are left unexplained, many of these UFO sightings are believed to be flying spaceships of extraterrestrial beings.

However, not all unidentified flying objects are potential alien spacecraft. Some are even stranger. One such remarkable and unexplained phenomenon took place in a small village in Sweden over 200 years ago.

UFO Sighting on May 16, 1808 in Biskopsberga, Sweden

On May 16, 1808, civilians living in the small village of Biskopsberga - which is located near Skanninge in Ostergotland, Sweden – witnessed a strange event which cannot be easily explained. At present, the village no longer exists, but at the time of the unusual phenomenon, it was the home of around 300 inhabitants.

The UFO sighting took place in a hot and cloudless afternoon. The wind was blowing from the west. People were still preoccupied with working on their farms when they noticed that the sun shining over their village suddenly dimmed, turning into a dull brick-red shade. The sunlight became so dark that villagers could stare right into the sun without feeling any kind of pain in their eyes.

At the same time that darkness engulfed the small village, a large number of spherical objects appeared from the western horizon. These unidentified objects appeared small, and they measured just several inches in diameter. They appeared dark brown in color and they seemed to be headed toward the sun. Then, as these strange figures got closer to the sun, they changed their colors from dark brown to black.

For some unknown reason, the spherical objects changed their course slightly, moving in a straight procession across the sky to the eastern horizon. When these small figures approached the sun, they reduced their speed, only to increase their pace again after passing in front of it. The strange phenomenon didn’t stop there. For a significant period of time, new spheres appeared from the west and subsequently disappeared when they reached the east.

That afternoon, the number of spheres flying across the village’s sky was so many that it became impossible to count them. In the eyes of the villagers, it seemed as if millions of small balls were, for reasons unknown to them, suddenly flying in the heavens.

According to the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1808, “the phenomenon lasted uninterruptedly, upwards of two hours, during which time millions of similar bodies continually rose in the west, one after the other irregularly, and continued their career in exactly the same manner.”

One of the witnesses of this unusual phenomenon in the skies over Biskopsberga was K.G. Wettermark, who was a respectable citizen and secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Not far from where Wettermark stood, one of the spheres fell down to the ground, and he managed to observe the ball’s behavior when it did. He noticed that just before these spheres touched the ground, they looked like air-bubbles which children used to play with and produce from soapsuds using a reed. Moreover, he immediately examined a spot where one of the balls had fallen, and he saw nothing but a scarcely perceptible gelatinous film which was as thin and fine as a cobweb. It was still changing colors, but it soon dried up entirely and vanished without a trace.

What were these weird bubbles? Why were there so many of them flying in the skies that afternoon? And why did it seem like they were capable of consciously changing the course of their movement?

The older the UFO sighting, the harder it is to investigate and explain. Most likely, the alleged UFO sighting in the skies of Biskopsberga, Sweden in 1808 was nothing more than a natural phenomenon that could not be explained by the scientific knowledge available at the time. And even if modern science is capable of resolving this mystery, a strange case like this one can be very difficult to study as such phenomena occur so rarely.

Similar Incident in Basel, Switzerland in 1566

A similar, although not entirely identical incident occurred in Basel, Switzerland on August 7, 1566. At the time, citizens of the city saw a large number of black spheres fill the skies. Not only did these objects appear to be flying towards the sun, they also looked like they were engaged in some sort of aerial battle.

The UFO sighting in Switzerland in 1566 took place at the time when the sun rose. People saw many large black balls that moved at great speed in the skies, flying toward the sun. These figures also made half-turns, with each one banging against the others as if they were engaged in fierce combat. Many of them turned red and igneous before they were consumed and died out. The strange phenomenon lasted for several hours that day before disappearing completely.

The main difference between the sighting in Sweden in the 19th century and the odd occurrence in Switzerland in the 16th century is that the black spheres in Switzerland were unable to survive the heat from the sun. The spherical objects seen in Sweden, on the other hand, changed direction when they approached the sun.

Without a doubt, the inhabitants of Biskopsberga were confused and puzzled by what they had seen happen in their skies. The Swedes didn’t succeed in solving the mystery, and not a single person got closer to the truth even after the UFO sighting in the village that day was published in the North American Review in 1816.

At present, there are several theories that have been presented, speculating on what the strange UFO phenomenon in Sweden in 1808 really was. However, just as when the eerie occurrence took place around 200 years ago, no one really knows the answer for sure until now.

And so, it is safe to say that this particular case of UFO sighting remains unsolved.

The Black Knight Alien Satellite

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    This black knight is not at all related to the bat-costumed dark knight that we know all too well. In fact, many people think it’s an alien satellite that has been kept secret by NASA and the government for more than a decade since it was first discovered. Over the decades, there have been many sightings of the strange object, but no one knows why it’s up there floating in space. All reports from US, Russia, And Europe in general say that the satellite is of “unknown origin”. So what is this curious object anyway? When was it discovered? What does it do? What is its purpose? Let’s start from the very beginning.

    Although there are varied opinions, it is generally believed that Nikola Tesla was the one who “discovered” the black knight when he set up a magnifying transmitter at his Colorado Springs facility in 1899 to investigate wireless distribution of electricity. What he didn’t expect were strange signals that were repeated periodically with number and order. They were timed pulses coming as ...1, ...2, ...3, that led him to believe that the signal was coming from an extraterrestrial source. Tesla originally thought that the signals were being sent from Mars, but he later restated that the signal was actually coming from another part of space. It’s not surprising that Tesla associated the signal with alien intervention, because a lot of people believe that Tesla has had contact with aliens. It is believed that he received information from aliens in a number of different cases. For example, once he was trying to find an equation/principle for the AC machine and suddenly, out of nowhere, he got the answer via telepathy or from an unknown source. Apparently he also invented many things for the government that were kept from the public, but that’s another story on it’s own.

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    Not long afterward Tesla’s discovery, Guglielmo Marconi, Italian inventor and electrical engineer, was also intercepted by a strange unknown artificial signal. He found that some of his morse code messages were being returned to him, which fascinated and frightened him at the same time.

     Following his discovery in 1927, another man named Jorgen Hals, a civil engineer in Oslo, was using a radio receiver to listen to shortwave transmissions and noticed something very peculiar was happening. His signals were being reflected back to him. He didn’t know what it was, but the echoes were being reflected back to him at strange intervals ranging from 3-15 seconds. These irregularly reflected intervals were later known to be LDES, or Long Delayed Echoes.

    After the occurrence of all of these events that might have been related to alien interaction (especially the LDES),  the press was majorly stirred up. From 1928 to 1930, a experiments were performed that tested the legitimacy of the reflected signals, and it turned out that they were very real indeed. The only problem was that no one had an explanation for the signals’ reflections. As a result, even more experiments were run in France and the UK in the 1930's, but at the end of the day scientists could do nothing but be confused and speechless. Even today, we don’t have an agreed upon explanation for the occurrence and location of these LDES.

    Of course, after the experiments were run, the black knight became an even hotter topic for many news outlets, and the first story of the alien shuttle appeared on May 14th, 1954 when St. Louis Dispatch and The SF Examiner wrote about it, explaining that the U.S had found a strange satellite in space and that it could possibly be a surveillance satellite launched by the Russians.

     Then, on August 23, 1954, another story was released about the Black Knight, this time by the tech mag Aviation Week and Space Technology. They basically told the world that the Pentagon found two satellites orbiting the earth, both of which were natural. The pentagon was furious when they heard about the release of the story because want the satellites to be known by the public. As a result, they lied to the public and told them that the satellites were asteroids (as if anyone would actually believe them). By then the public already knew that something was up, and that either the Russians had managed to put something into orbit or there was something more...supernatural at work.

    A few years later, in March of 1960, another satellite was found orbiting earth. This satellite was a spectacular discovery because it wasn’t like the previously discovered satellites at all. It was a large black object weighing about 15 tons that was in POLAR orbit around earth, which means that it passes over polar regions and has a plane that contains the polar axis. This is amazing because first of all, the US and soviets didn’t even KNOW how to put an object in polar orbit. Second of all, neither country was capable of putting an object that weighs so much into space either. Third of all, the satellite was twice as fast as any known satellite at the time. As a result, the strange polar-orbiting satellites acquired a name: the Black Knight. No one knows for sure the origins of the name, but it’s believed that the name is based on a rocket the British had developed, which was also called Black Knight. After the amazing discovery, astronomers across the country conducted research on the satellite and realized that it had one of the strangest patterns of appearance and disappearance, because it would disappear for long periods of time before reappearing again YEARS later. 

   Robert L. Johnson, director of the Adler Planetarium, said that "‘THE OBJECT ‘DOESN’T EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO MAINTAIN A REGULAR SCHEDULE,LIKE ANY OTHER HEAVENLY OR MAN MADE OBJECT...‘WE DON’T KNOW WHEN TO WATCH FOR IT.’" What was it trying to do?

      Stanford space scientist Ronald Bracewell had an explanation for the phenomenon and believed that the satellite was a way for a distant alien civilization to communicate with earth. He said that the aliens might have sent out a probe, or ‘Bracewell probe’ as it’s we now call it, into the universe to look for other planets that seemed promising and contained intelligent lifeforms. He said that the satellite would remain dormant until humans found a way to send signals to it, in which it would send signals back.

     Duncan Lunan, a Scottish science writer was so intrigued by Bracewell’s theory that he decided to test it out for himself. He reexamined the data from the LDE experiments of 1928 and was absolutely and completely baffled. He mapped out the delays from the echos he recorded in 1928, and found that they formed the pattern of the  Boötes constellation, a constellation the in the northern sky. Not only that, Lunan was also able to decode the message that was being conveyed from the LDE Data at a stable point between the orbits of Earth and Moon called L5. the message read:

“  START HERE.OUR HOME IS EPSILON BOOTIS. WHICH IS A DOUBLE STAR. WE LIVE ON THE 6th PLANET OF 7 — CHECK THAT, 6th OF 7 — COUNTING OUTWARDS FROM THE SUN WHICH IS THE LARGER OF THE TWO.OUR 6th PLANET HAS ONE MOON,OUR 4th PLANET HAS THREE,OUR FIRST AND THIRD PLANETS EACH HAVE ONE.OUR PROBE IS IN THE ORBIT OF YOUR MOON THIS UPDATES THE POSITION OF ARCTURUS SHOWN ON OUR MAPS.”

If this doesn’t send chills down your spine, I don’t know what does.

     What’s even more amazing is that, along with the decoded message, Lunan also realized something else. Although he made his discovery in 1972, he realized that the star system he saw from the LDE data was not like the star system he saw in the skies at all. He concluded that if the black knight really was an alien probe, it must have taken ages to reach earth. He was right. By looking back in time, Lunan realized that the map he created matched how Epsilon Bootis looked like the Epsilon Bootis that was in the skies 13,000 years ago. This means that the satellite, possibly sent from a distant alien civilization, could have been orbiting the planet since pre-history.

     By then, Lunan was pretty much convinced that an alien civilization living near the Bootes constellation was trying to contact earth. It’s possible that the the same signal was also intercepted by Tesla and Macroni as well, but we will never know for sure. Sadly, since there wasn’t solid proof regarding the existence of such a supernatural satellite, people started believing the Pentagon’s excuse that the Black Knight was just some “space debris”.

     Thankfully, visual evidence of the satellite was found in 1998 when the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor was able to take high-resolution pictures of the strange black object while they were in space. The old stories of Tesla, LDES, and Lunan’s constellation map once again resurfaced in the minds of people across the country. Until today, we are still not sure what the Black Knight is, what it does, or where it comes from, but we DO know for a fact that it’s no regular satellite.