The Jarnołtówek UFO Landing

Jarnołtówek is a small village in gmina Głuchołazy, Prudnik County, in Poland's Opole Voivodeship, close to the Czech border. Adam Maksymów, a local businessman, runs the "MAX" holiday resort there. By his own account, he had always dismissed UFOs. Then came the night of 18 to 19 January 2009. Frost. Snow on the ground.

About 1 am. Maksymów went outside to connect his car battery to a charger. He heard a roar "like someone launching rockets." Then silence. Then another roar, and a loud buzzing "like someone closed a swarm of bees in a jar."

He woke his wife. The sky lit up so brightly that "you could see every twig on the bare trees." Beyond a line of trees, on the meadow, "a dark object rose above the ground with a blue, triangular beam of light at the bottom." It climbed slowly to some 30 to 40 metres, throwing up huge amounts of snow. Then it vanished at a speed "that no earthly machine can achieve." Six to seven seconds, by his estimate. "We stood as if enchanted," he said.

His first thought was a Harrier vertical-take-off jet making an emergency landing. He rejected it. He is now certain it was a UFO.

Resident Henryk Darowski described "a terrible boom, then blinding brightness" and "a large disc with beautiful rainbow colours." It "rocked slightly above the trees, tilted and flew away like lightning into the sky." He watched for about 15 seconds. Another resident saw it cross in an arc and head towards Nysa.

Grzegorz Kukułka heard a huge sound and looked out of his window after the lights went out along the whole street. Danuta Diakowska, at a holiday centre, felt a very strong, sudden wind from about 1 am. It calmed after a few minutes.

No police, military or aviation inquiry has come to light. Janusz Zagórski, a ufologist and journalist from Wrocław, interviewed Maksymów, examined the site and judged the account credible. Maksymów's security cameras reportedly stopped recording for about five minutes. The electricity company confirmed an outage, though only in one nearby village. No photograph or film of the object exists.

The Harrier was the witness's own idea. Fireworks were also raised. Later commentators tied the case to an unidentified object on radar in Germany and Czechia the same day. But the Stuttgart airport case unfolded around 20:18 that evening, some 19 hours later, and no authority linked the two.

The resort's website hosts the case pages, and the meadow is now promoted to tourists. No source accuses Maksymów of invention. In 2013 he asked a reporter: "Do I look like a madman?"

In 2009 the story reached media in the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Peru. TVP2's Panorama covered it. The village has logged nine similar reports over about 40 years, and Polish retrospectives compare it to Emilcin, the country's benchmark close encounter. A geocache now marks the "UFO landing site." The case remains unexplained.