Stigsjö flying saucer (1959)

Sweden had watched strange skies before. The ghost rockets wave of 1946 became the backdrop to American interest in Swedish reports. A 1948 USAFE memo set down the views of Swedish Air Intelligence. In December 1953, veteran airmen near Hässleholm in Skåne reported a disc. The CIA read the Stockholm papers and translated what it found.

Stigsjö is a parish west of Härnösand, in Västernorrland County. Shortly before 20 January 1959, eight people there saw something approach. In the words of the translation, "No less than eight reliable persons observed a 'flying saucer' over Stigsjoe, near Haernoesand." It came from the south. "The object approached the observers slowly from the south over [Lake] Langsjoen at a height of about 300 meters."

Then the shape. "The object was round, 6 to 8 meters in diameter, and surrounded by a luminous ring about two meters vide." Beneath it, a second glow. "The under side of the object emitted a reddish yellow light." And then the length of it. "It was visible for about three minutes." That is all the record holds. No sound is mentioned. Nothing is said of where it went, or how it left.

The witnesses took their account to the military authorities. On 20 January 1959, Stockholms-Tidningen carried the story on page 1 under the headline "Eight Persons Saw Flying Saucer." No names, ages or occupations of the eight survive in the material found so far. Even the lake is uncertain. Transcriptions read Langsjoen or Laargsjoen, and Swedish Wikipedia names Långsjön as the lake the parish probably took its name from.

Across the Atlantic, the CIA's Foreign Documents Division translated the article as FDD Note No. 887, in March 1959. It joined the agency's UFO Special Collection as FOIA document 0005516087 and was approved for release in 2010. The memo is a single page. It translates the press report. It adds no analysis and no follow up. What the Swedish military concluded, if anything, has not been found.

Decades later, the case resurfaced under the wrong year. Wikipedia's list of UFO sightings in Sweden places it in 2015. That is when the scanned file was posted. The PDF was created on 24 June 2015, and the CIA index also lists 31 January 2011. Some online summaries stray further and put the sighting over Stockholm.

No hoax allegation has surfaced, and no explanation was offered at the time. Swedish UFO groups say many modern reports turn out to be Chinese lanterns or optical effects. One online summary suggests the CIA's interest in Sweden was mainly about ruling out Soviet surveillance. Neither point has been tied to Stigsjö.

The case lives on in a CIA scan and in Cristina Gomez's 2025 article on Nordic UFO encounters. The Swedish text of the original article, the exact date, the names of the eight and the military's file all remain to be found. Nearby, in the Sundsvall area, a separate set of reports reached Dagens Nyheter in March 1960.