Ghost Rockets over Sweden

It all started in Finland on February 26, 1946 — today in aviation history — when several Finnish citizens looked up into the sky during the short winter day, and there, startling as it sounds, they saw what they described as some sort of a rocket flying by. Perhaps what had been seen as a modification of a captured Nazi V-1 “Buzz Bomb.”

The Americans, French, English, and others in the Western Alliance knew only one thing — they hadn’t launched it. Their best guess was that it was a Soviet rocket test. In the months that followed, an increasing number of sightings were reported from across Finland and Sweden, then expanding into Denmark and Norway — and it was not just a few rockets, but hundreds. Ultimately, over 2,000 rocket sightings would be reported from across Scandinavia before, by the late 1940s, they ceased almost completely.

This is the story of the “Ghost Rockets” of 1946 and 1947. To this day, however, nobody knows just what they were. Theories abound claiming everything from early Cold War rocket tests to alien invasions — but who knows? And will we ever know just what began on a cold winter day in Finland all those years ago?