Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: A BENIGN ENCOUNTER IN NORWAY
On 20 August 1954, two well-educated sisters, 24-year-old Edith Jacobsen and 32-year-old Asta Solvang, claimed to have met an extraordinary man and his flying machine near their home town of Mosjøen in northern Norway.
It was a sunny afternoon and the women were picking berries. Suddenly they saw a man in the distance whom they assumed at first to be another berry picker. ‘We walked towards him and wondered who he was,’ recounted Edith Jacobsen.
As we got near him he smiled and stretched out his hand. I, too, smiled and held out my hand, but he only brushed my palm with his. Then he began to talk, but we didn’t understand a word. It didn’t resemble any language I had heard [or] studied. The stranger’s language was very soft and melodious. It seemed to have few consonants and no gutturals at all.
When we gathered that the man must be a foreigner from some distant country we took a closer look at him. He was of medium height, had pleasant, regular features and long hair with a natural wave. He was rather dark. We didn’t notice the colour of his eyes, but I believe they were slightly oblique. His hands were beautiful and expressive, with fine long fingers; rather like the hands I imagined a fine pianist would have. He wore no rings.
He was clothed in a kind of overall, but as he wore a broad belt it could have been trousers and a blouse. The blouse fitted closely at the neck, but was otherwise loose. I could not see any buttons, zippers or fastenings. We didn’t notice how he was shod.
What impressed the women particularly was the genuine friendliness the stranger emanated, giving them a sense of security. When it became evident that they did not understand each other, the man produced what they ‘took for granted’ to be paper and pencil and drew some circles, pointing out over the moor and then at the sisters, then pointing at himself and another drawn circle. ‘I had at once the impression that he wanted to tell us something about the solar system,’ said Jacobsen, ‘but perhaps I was mistaken.’
The man then motioned to the sisters to follow him and turned and walked out along the fen. They followed, and not far away saw a curious contraption parked on the ground.
It was grey-blue and looked like two giant pot-lids placed together. It was about 10 feet in diameter and about 4 1/2 feet in height. Because the man was still so calm and convincingly friendly we were still not afraid, even though we thought this a very curious thing to find in the wilds. We approached the thing, but he made a sign that we were not to come too close. He then opened a kind of hatch on the top of the ‘rim’ which encircled the thing, crawled in and shut himself in.
Presently, we heard a faint humming, like the droning of a large bumblebee, and the curious vessel rose slowly while rotating on its own axis. Then, and only then, did all I had read about flying saucers come to my mind. When the saucer reached about 100 feet it hovered for a moment and then started rotating very fast. Finally it rose at tremendous speed and disappeared.
The sisters agreed not to discuss the incident with anyone, but eventually Asta told her husband and the story spread around the community. A reporter asked to be taken to the site of the landing. No traces were found. Subsequently, the women were ridiculed and harassed. ‘The whole thing is so fantastic that I can readily understand why people who have known me all my life refuse to believe me,’ said Edith Jacobsen. Finn Norstrom, who interviewed the sisters, found no discrepancies in their accounts.
Other journalists confirmed that all the people they spoke with in the town of Mosjøen found it difficult to believe that the sisters would have invented such a story.
It is of course possible that, owing to its remarkable similarity to George Adamski’s description of his ‘Venusian’ in Flying Saucers Have Landed, the sisters could have invented their story; however, as Gordon Creighton pointed out, although many features in their account of the pilot are identical with those described by Adamski, ‘when they come to describe the UFO it is not Adamski’s [but] a contraption “like two giant pot-lids placed together”‘