The Vänga Landing-Trace Case

Vänga lies in Västergötland, north of Borås. In June 1968, Åke Johansson of Fristad kept a summer cottage there. A later essay calls him a factory director and describes the cottage as his former family home, seven kilometres outside Fristad. The house was called Enebacken. The site was very remote, and cars rarely passed.

Saturday 1 June 1968. Whitsun Eve. Johansson drove out with his daughter's fiancé and the family dog to cut the grass. While mowing, they discovered a peculiar-shaped imprint in the grass.

It was dark and oily. It looked like two triangles laid one after the other. The front triangle partly overlapped the other and had rounded corners. In each of its three corners sat a round depression, about 15 cm in diameter. No one saw an object. No lights, no sound. Only the mark.

The next morning, the grass inside the imprint had withered. The spot smelled sharp, like ammonia, thinner or something similar. The dog reacted strongly to the smell and pulled away. After that it refused to come near the place.

Shortly afterwards Johansson had trouble with itching on his arms and hands. Friends had visited later that day. One woman's tongue swelled up. Johansson later had the same tongue irritation. It lasted a few days, and he went to see a doctor. The oily liquid eventually evaporated. In time the grass grew back over the mark.

Johansson got in touch with UFO-Göteborg. The investigation was led by Rune Rydebrandt, a former Swedish Air Force man who had founded the group in 1953. Samples went to three laboratories.

At Chalmers, the nuclear chemists found the soil was not radioactive. The grass, they said, appeared to have been exposed to heat effects. The organic chemists gave no clear answer. Lantmännens forskningsinstitut, an agricultural research institute, found no known fuel or lubricant and no known weedkiller. Statens institut för folkhälsan gave no clear answer either.

K. Gösta Rehn, the Swedish representative of APRO, concluded that a flying saucer had landed. According to a later essay, Rehn was reinforced by a report from an elderly couple in Ebbared, 16 kilometres from the site. They had seen a hovering, floating bright object moving in the direction of Vänga.

No hoax was ever alleged. No conventional explanation was put forward. The laboratory work ruled out the obvious candidates it tested for: radioactivity, known fuels, lubricants and weedkillers. Later writers read the three depressions as the marks of tripod landing gear. One later essay claims a KTH chemist found only sodium and calcium, both common in soil, but that account sits uneasily beside the Chalmers results. Johansson himself did not believe in UFOs. He had no explanation.

Vänga remains a case with no witness to a craft and a stubborn trace on the ground. UFO-Sverige keeps it in its encyclopedia as the Vänga case, and notes that many similar cases, in Sweden and abroad, involve released liquids with strong smells. Two years later, at Lake Anten, three depressions in a triangle turned up on the land of another Mr. Johansson. That house, too, was called Enebacken. The coincidence briefly caught some investigators' attention.