The Skåne Disc: Transair Captain Ulf Christiernsson's Sighting

In December 1953, Ulf Christiernsson was chief pilot of the Swedish airline Transair. Born in Helsingborg in 1913, he had flown for the Swedish Air Force, volunteered with the RAF during the war and flown 30 missions against enemy territory from North Africa and Italy. He had also served as a major in the Israeli Air Force. Over his career he logged about 28,000 flight hours.

Thursday, December 17, 1953. Christiernsson was flying a Transair DC-3 from Malmö-Bulltofta to Stockholm-Bromma, with flight engineer Olof "Olle" Johansson on the flight deck. They were at 2,150 meters, above a cloud ceiling of about 1,500 meters. The sky was clear. It was 14:57, in the vicinity of Hässleholm.

Christiernsson saw it first. He thought it was a jet fighter. "Its silhouette was very slim and it came closer to us with terrifying speed." It was coming from the north, head-on, at about 1,200 kilometers per hour by Johansson's estimate.

Then the shape resolved. "What I saw was a completely unorthodox, metallic, symmetric, round object which was unlike anything I have seen before," Christiernsson said. It looked like a flying lozenge, while Johansson saw an ellipse with sharp outlines, something between silver and white. They put it at about 10 meters in diameter. "It left no exhaust or condensation trail."

It slipped below them on a south-southwest course. "When it passed under the wing, I could no longer see it," Johansson said. Christiernsson had it in view for four to five seconds. Johansson, for about ten. The captain believed it was a robot, a machine with no crew.

The crew reported to the Swedish Defence Staff, which phoned both men with questions. Its statement confirmed the clear weather and said no Swedish aircraft was in the area. An investigation was under way. Dagens Nyheter followed the story from December 18 to 20, and in France Var-Matin ran it on December 19. The coverage was later translated by the CIA as "Veteran Swedish Airmen Observe, Describe Disk-Shaped Aircraft over Skaane" and distributed in April 1954, but the file contains no CIA conclusion.

Answers came fast. Astronomer Bertil Lindblad linked the sighting to the December Geminid meteors, noting that their direction "seems to agree with the observations made." Director Bertil Dahlström said more than 300 advertising balloons, 15 to 30 centimeters across, had been released for a Skåne perfume firm. "With all certainty, it is one of our balloons which the flyers saw." Dagens Nyheter was cautious, saying that whether such balloons could look the way the captain reported could not be answered until detailed calculations were made. A radio technician named Lundblad had released three weather balloons the day before.

The Defence Staff suggested a balloon. Christiernsson and Johansson did not accept it. Later Swedish sources settled on a radiosonde balloon released by mistake by two conscripts at F5 Ljungbyhed, about 35 kilometers west-southwest of Hässleholm. When and by whom that was established is unclear.

No one ever accused the two airmen of a hoax. K. Gösta Rehn included the case in his 1966 book De flygande tefaten: Dokument och teori, one of only three Swedish cases in its pages. Today the CIA file remains its sober record. Two seasoned airmen saw the object in a clear sky above Skåne. They said the metallic shape passed beneath their wing in seconds.