The Breiset Mountain-Farm Film, Torpo, Hallingdal (1986)

Breiset is a mountain farm near Torpo, a village in Ål municipality in the Hallingdal valley of southern Norway. On the night of Saturday 12 July 1986, Torfinn Tonning was there with his wife Tove, their son Christer and several friends. Tonning lived in Skien. He was in his forties, held a seat on the City Council and was "considered generally as a very reliable person."

0:50 am. Tove Tonning saw it first. "Look at the light up there!" She said it had risen from the horizon.

Through binoculars the object was "oval at the top and bottom", with three clearly separable circular lights in the middle, blue-white. Flashes shot downward in bursts. "10 to 12 flashes can be seen in each burst, evenly distributed in time." Rapid sparks came off its sides.

It tilted about 45 degrees, one way and then the other. It came down toward a nearby hill. Then it climbed suddenly, at a rate "no helicopter would be able to ascend." Opposite, to the west southwest, a fainter second light showed a stronger "red-white hue."

The camera batteries were dead. Torfinn Tonning powered his video camera from the car's cigarette lighter and filmed for about 10 minutes through a 6x zoom lens. The sighting lasted more than two hours. Near the end, "the main object became smaller and smaller, thus indicating a gradual withdrawal along the line of sight." Then "Both objects disappeared at a great speed in a skewed angle to the horizon."

2:20 am. At Krækkja, a remote mountain site about 80 km WSW of Torpo, a camping woman "caught sight of a powerful light in the sky, which she at first believed to be the moon." It lay to the ENE and moved. She watched for 5 minutes, woke her boyfriend, and they watched for "another 5 minutes" before the cold drove them inside. The Nordic UFO Newsletter matched her direction to the Tonnings' second object.

After NRK presented the case, Tonning's telephone "was never silent." UFO-Norge representatives visited him in Skien and were "highly impressed by the movie together with the accompanying report." The Oslo advertising firm Ted Bates offered funding, then withdrew it. The Norwegian Industry Research Institute reviewed the tape. On 17 October 1986 the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment examined it, with Tonning and investigator Erling Strand present.

In early 1987 Paul Norman sent copies to Ground Saucer Watch in the United States. Its analysis found "considerable camera movement" and blamed the motion on the photographer "laying on the roof of his car." A light streak was "evaluated as a video artifact." Yet GSW also wrote: "There is no evidence of a hoax being attributable to the source of the UI."

Other experts identified the main object as Jupiter and the second as Arcturus. Bright planets and stars low in the sky, filmed through a zoom lens, are a familiar trap. But the Norwegian Meteorological Institute recorded a "cloud base of some 1500-2500 meters," and the newsletter concluded the lights "very probably were seen underneath the clouds." The witnesses also described a descent, a sudden climb and a fast departure.

Odd-Gunnar Røed and Mentz Kaarbø told the story as "Fantastic UFO-Movie From Hallingdal" in the Nordic UFO Newsletter in 1988. It later appeared in Norway in UFO Photographs: The First Catalog. Erling Strand went on to be best known for Project Hessdalen.