Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth – A Festival of Absurdities – FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS
The foregoing account was given by Gösta Carlsson to Eugen Semitjov, a prominent space-science journalist who wrote an article about the incident in a Swedish magazine. Semitjov believed the witness was telling the truth as well as he could remember it, 25 years after the event. Alerted to the case, further investigations were carried out by the Göteborg Information Centre on UFOs (GICOFF). At the alleged landing site about 30 to 40 metres in diameter — the investigators noted a large outer ring, a smaller ring, two small circles (presumably from the landing legs) and a straight line, almost half the diameter of the larger ring (perhaps from the ‘fin’).
But something was wrong, explained investigator SvenOlof Fredrickson: What was strange, however, was that the marks had been made recently: someone had dug a circle 10 centimetres deep, 10 centimetres wide and 16 metres in diameter, and then filled it in with sand. The same had happened with the marks of the supposed ‘landing legs’ and ‘fin’‘. Mr Semitjov assured us that this had not been done by him, and that there were no signs of digging when he was there two months earlier. The original marks were still visible without digging them up, he said, so who had done it and why?
Who and why, indeed? The GICOFF investigators learned from a reliable witness, who had been at the landing site a day after the Swedish magazine article was published, that the marks had already been dug up, by person or persons unknown. Had Carlsson wanted to fabricate any evidence, he surely would have done so prior to the interview with Semitjov. In any event, GICOFF discovered that some of the original marks (the outer and the inner rings) appear in aerial photographs taken in 1947 and 1963. Photos taken in 1939 do not show any such marks, which gives at least a modicum of support for Carlsson’s claims.
By extraterrestrial standards, Carlsson’s contraption seems relatively primitive. We are told of ‘holes around the edge of the disc, like those of a turbine [from which red] jet-beams came which burned the grass’; a ‘mast’; the occupants ‘repairing a window’; and what looked like ‘an old black camera’ suspended by a chain around the guard’s neck. One could argue that the craft was a post-war Russian variant of Germany’s V-7 jetturbine-powered helicopter, reportedly developed towards the end of the war and described by the pioneering astrophysicist Dr Hermann Oberth as having ‘rotating tubes which released an “exhaust” of flame . . . When it hovered, the flame was dark-red’. It is a tempting argument, but I believe it to be a specious one, for the following reasons:
First, though Oberth claimed in 1955 that ‘Russia has now obtained the plans and a model of the V-7, and has built some models of her own which could account for some UFO reports’, he implies not only that this was a relatively recent development (that is, after the date of the Angelholm landing) but also that models, rather than full-scale craft, were test-flown. Secondly, I find it impossible to believe that the Soviets, presumably building the hypothetical V-7 variant with the aid of captured German aeronautical engineers, could by 1946 have perfected the design to such an extent that it would have been able to fly with a crew of eleven, rather than a test-pilot or two. Thirdly, conventional jet- engines would leave a smell of kerosene, not ozone. Fourthly, Carlsson’s account refers to several peculiarities of design and performance which are not consistent with what we know about the V-7 and which simply do not correspond with contemporaneous technology. Finally, Bill Gunston, one of the world’s leading aviation authorities, told me: ‘I have asked two men who would have known, and I think I am on good ground in stating that nothing like the V- 7 was ever tested in the Soviet Union.’
The most likely hypothesis, therefore, is that the craft came from somewhere else. As Oberth himself put it: My own explanation of the unsolved percentage of UFOs is that they are machines built in some place other than Russia and countries on the Earth . . .I do not, in fact, think that Russia is building any UFOs at all; on the contrary, I believe they originate exclusively from outside the Earth.
Interestingly, according to Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso, the former head of the US Army staff’s Foreign Technology desk at the Pentagon who claims to have stewarded an Army project that seeded alien technology at various American companies (see p. 5), both Dr Oberth and Dr Wernher von Braun were consulted on the nature of the recovered alien materials.
So, presumably, both men were convinced of extraterrestrial visitation. And in an early 1960s report, Corso noted that: ‘Dr Hermann Oberth suggests we consider the Roswell craft from the New Mexico desert not a spacecraft but a time machine . . .’