Hans and Stig Meet the Monsters
A pair of young-adult Swedish hoaxers, Hans Gustafsson and Stig Rydberg, insisted that they witnessed the landing of a disc some sixteen feet in diameter in woods near Helsinborg on December 20, 1958. The day really got interesting when jellylike creatures that apparently intended to drag the pair into the ship pursued them. Rydberg struggled back to his car and scared the aliens away with blasts from the auto’s horn.
Swedish military investigators took a hard look at the physical evidence in January 1959 and pronounced the whole story nonsense. Granted, military pronouncements dismiss UFOs with metronomic regularity, but the Swedish military got this one right. Not long before his death in November 1960, twenty- seven-year-old Hans Gustafsson (who got drunk, fell from a boat, and drowned) confessed to his brother that he and Rydberg had cooked up the UFO/near- abduction tale themselves. The brother, perhaps feeling the weight of history’s judgment after nearly thirty years, went public with Hans’s confession around 1988.
Despite the military’s refutation of the adventure, Hans and Stig took to the lecture circuit while their story was hot, enjoying the notoriety, and eventually revealing that aliens invited them aboard another ship and gave them a ride.
Hans died young, but he had fun while he could. As for Stig Rydberg, he was the victim of a street beating in February or early March 1984, and died in his apartment, of pneumonia, on March 4. He was fifty-six.