JOSEF MALISZEWSKI’S INITIAL EXPERIENCE
On June 19, 1951, at about 2AM, Polish-born mechanic Josef Maliszewski heard a mysterious whistling sound from outside his summer residence in Mønsterkolonien 166, Sønderborg. He went outside and saw a strange-looking vehicle landing in a nearby field to the east, in the direction of the village of Sundsmark. The vehicle somewhat resembled an aircraft, but was 100 meters long – longer than the biggest commercial aircraft manufactured even today — and bluish silver in colour. The vehicle had halfmoon-shaped wings that folded out when landing, a rotor in the middle, and stood on landing gear with horseshoe-like feet. The vehicle had round windows on the side, similar to those on a seagoing ship.
Maliszewski ran towards the vehicle, but approximately 50 meters from it a mysterious force stopped him. He could not walk any further, but could still hear and see as well as move his arms and hands. He noticed that not just had the birds stopped singing, the cattle and horses in the field had also stopped moving. Maliszewski assumed for some reason that the occupants of the mysterious vehicle had come to abduct the livestock in the field, but he then suddenly heard a voice saying: ”Do not be afraid, we will not take any of them.”
Sketch/model made by Maliszewski of the craft he encountered
Maliszewski then saw eight small flying saucers exiting the vehicle, four from each side. The small saucers ascended into the sky, where they stayed hovering over the bigger vehicle making a slight wobbling sound. A type of escalator descended from the main vehicle and six crewmen walked out the vehicle through the escalator. Two of the crewmen began repairing the right wing of the vehicle, two others inspecting the vehicle’s left wing while the remaining two stood guard at the escalator.
The crew were unusually tall, dark-skinned and extremely graceful in appearance but perfectly similar to Earth humans – Maliszewski would later describe the crew as South East Asian in appearance, reminding him of Indonesians. They wore glittery dark blue one-piece spacesuits with no apparent seams, and transparent bubble-shaped helmets. Their faces were covered by a type of oxygen mask with tubes connecting to 2 oxygen tanks on each of their backs, similar to those worn by navy divers. Maliszewski saw more crew members in the vehicle’s windows, wearing the same uniforms as those outside the craft.
While Maliszewski watched the strange vehicle and the crew, he said to himself ”oh how we people on Earth are stupid” only to immediately receive a telepathic reply from the vehicle, about Earth people not being any less intelligent than the spacefarers, but now that we had entered the atomic age the space people had arrived to warn us about the importance of taking control over our destiny. The telepathic message from the space people mentioned that they had also mastered nuclear energy, but we had not yet learned to use it in a safe, cheap and peaceful manner. After the crew had finished repairing the spaceship’s wings, the wings retracted back into the ship’s hull and folded back out again.
The crew went back into the spaceship and the escalator was retracted. Maliszewski then received a final telepathic message from the crew: ”Farewell, we will meet again.” The spaceship ascended into the sky with a whistling sound. When it reached an altitude of 100 meters, the small unmanned saucers retracted into the spaceship as well, disappearing into doors on the sides of it — four saucers on each side. The spaceship then ascended further into the sky and disappeared in a flash of light that illuminated the entire sky, with sparks of light visible afterwards.
Maliszewski could suddenly move again, and the livestock in the field now began running away. The birds even resumed singing. He also noticed that the spaceship had left landing traces on the field with two clear marks from the supporting landing legs’ horseshoe-like feet. Each landing mark’s surface was 4 x 2 meters, and 35 footsteps were visible between the traces. Maliszewski later asked the neighbours, who told him that a lot of people had walked over to the field afterwards to get a good look at the mysterious traces.
Maliszewski also noted that his pocketwatch had stopped at 2:30. When he arrived back at his summer residence, he saw that the clock in his bedroom had also stopped at 2:30. A few days later, Maliszewski attempted to repair both his pocket watch and the stationary clock in his bedroom. He succeeded in getting the pocket watch to function as before, but not the clock.
In the days following his experience, Maliszewski had a weird acidic taste in his mouth and was constantly thirsty. He also had problems with falling asleep at night as well as diarrhea.
Maliszewski later told co-workers at the gas station where he was employed, about the incident. None of them believed him and replied that he probably had been hallucinating or dreaming, or gotten drunk and seen an aircraft that he mistook for an advanced spaceship. Maliszewski replied that he had never been intoxicated in his life. After work, Maliszewski made a sketch of the spaceship and contacted the local newspaper Sønderjyden (”the South Jutlandian”) about his experience.
MALISZEWSKI’S SECOND EXPERIENCE
On May 18, 1954, Maliszewski went on a fishing trip at around 2 AM to his favorite spot, halfways between Høruphav and Sønderskov. There, Maliszewski saw a small and elegant-looking saucer-shaped craft flying towards him, over the water at a low altitude. The spaceship made a buzzing sound that Maliszewski later compared to that of a sewing machine. The flying saucer stopped close to him and a hatch popped open, with the pilot disembarking from the ship. He held a silver-coloured pitcher containing a blue liquid and poured it into a glass for Maliszewski, who at first hesitated to drink it. Maliszewski found his anxiety disappearing and drank the glass of blue liquid, which tasted similar to red wine.
The pilot then invited Maliszewski aboard the spaceship. When the spaceship had flown out over the ocean, the pilot played a tape recording of a message spoken in fluent Danish by a feminine voice. The saucer pilot also gave Maliszewski a piece of bread he had. The voice from the tape recorder told Maliszewski to eat the bread aboard the ship.
The saucer’s pilot played more tape recordings that described in fine detail how the spaceship’s engines functioned, and showed Maliszewski the machinery on board: Their nuclear reactors functioned according to different operating principles than the primitive ones on Earth, making them safer and less wasteful as well as cheaper to maintain, with the flying saucer being powered by a nuclear reactor located beneath its floor; their anti-gravity engines that used electromagnetic fields to compress air and create an air cushion, as well as how their spaceships could turn invisible.
Maliszewski asked the pilot where he came from, and the pilot played a new tape recording. This message revealed that the spacefarers came from a planet named Suton or Zutorn, in another solar system. (Different articles about Maliszewski’s UFO encounters use different spellings — Maliszewski never specified which spelling he preferred) Maliszewski would later clarify that Zutorn was not to be confused with Saturn in our own solar system, and had 4 moons and orbited a sun similar to our own.
The pilot also disclosed to Maliszewski that the Zutornians had a mothership in orbit around Earth where it would stay for a 15-year mission, and the saucer could not fly further away from the mothership than 50,000 kilometers. In the upper reaches of our atmosphere, the Zutornian vehicles flew on magnetic waves and not air cushions like they used closer to the surface.
Before the Zutornian pilot dropped Maliszewski off at the fishing spot, he told Maliszewski that they would return to pick him up again exactly 14 days later.
Maliszewski’s Final Experience
On May 30, 1954 Maliszewski indeed met the same saucer pilot as a couple weeks before, again at his favourite fishing spot. Once more, Maliszewski was invited aboard the small saucer-shaped ship by the pilot, who smiled but did not utter a word, instead communicating by telepathy. The Zutornian pilot offered Maliszewski to show him how beautiful outer space was. This time, the saucer pilot took him up through the atmosphere to the kilometer-long Zutornian mothership in orbit around Earth.
From the saucer, Maliszewski could see the Earth and observe the aurora borealis near the poles, which Maliszewski described as a fire slinging up from the surface and shining as bright as the sun. Maliszewski saw this from a television screen aboard the saucer, not through its windows. He was also shown video recordings that the Zutornians had taken of other planets of our solar system, including Saturn and its moons.
The saucer eventually arrived at the mothership and entered through a circular airlock on its side, where the pilot and Maliszewski waited a minute before they could leave the saucer and take a walk aboard the mothership.
Aboard the mothership, Maliszewski met an extremely beautiful and extremely tall (approximately 2 meters) slender woman who wore a glittering suit, a miniskirt and a cloak. She was accompanied by similar-looking individuals who said nothing. The woman spoke fluent Danish and gave him three kisses – one on each cheek and one on the forehead. She then told him: ”You are my brother, and I am your sister. You should not believe that you are alone in this mighty universe”.
Maliszewski then asked her about how the society of the Zutornians was organised, as well as whether they had any type of religion and believed in a God or Devil like those of Christianity. The Zutornian woman told Maliszewski that they knew of an entity they called the Supreme Being, and that the only thing the Supreme Being requested was that you love your neighbor. The Earth was the Supreme Being’s colony, which he had used similar races to colonize who might have had different skin colors, but were the same underneath. She then said that the Supreme Being wished no evil upon his creations, but there existed also a being of envy who wanted to destroy everything, and who might be the same entity that humans called The Devil.
Maliszewski had a lengthy discussion with the Zutornian woman about the state of affairs on Planet Earth. She told him that the people of Earth ought to abolish militaries and the money-based economy, work less, as well as give independence to all our colonies, to bring our society closer in line to that of the Zutornians. The Zutornians had no use for passports, wandering freely between planets, and viewed life on Earth as similar to a prison since we kept restricting our lives for no reason.
Maliszewski was also told that space people similar to those on Zutorn and on Earth lived on many planets throughout the cosmos, all of which were ruled by the Supreme Being mentioned earlier, and that these space people did not age like we Earth humans did. Their planet also had plant and animal life similar to that on Earth. The reason that these space people had not yet officially contacted us on Earth, was that we were still not intelligent enough to avoid using nuclear power for
war, and if a third world war was to happen, then human life on Earth would not survive. The Zutornians had come to Earth to warn us against exactly that scenario. The Zutornian woman told Maliszewski, that on her planet “the small was as the great and the great as the small”, meaning that nobody had a position above anyone else. He was also told that Venus was inhabited by space humans.
The woman took Maliszewski on a tour around the mothership, which was 1 kilometer long and had a crew of 300 men and women, as well as 100 dwarves (!). Maliszewski saw gardens with flowers around the mothership, and was told that the inner machinery of the ship was made from steel and silver, whereas its exterior hull was made from a plastic-like material derived from the coffee plant. Maliszewski had no problems communicating with the crew, as the Zutornians had followed radio transmissions from Earth for long enough to perfectly understand every Earth language. In particular, they took great interest in listening to our church services.
When Maliszewski had been given a guided tour of the mothership, they took him back to the fishing spot where they dropped him off at half an hour past 5 AM. The trip aboard the Zutornian mothership, Maliszewski calculated, had lasted 3 and a half hours.
FURTHER EVENTS
1958, December: The Danish magazine UFO-Nyt printed an article about Maliszewski’s sighting, containing an illustration he made of the spaceship he saw near Sønderborg, complete with details of its construction and equipment. The article reported that Maliszewski’s clock, which stopped working after the encounter and he could not get repaired himself, was later sent to a laboratory for analysis.
1959: Maliszewski became one of the main speakers at SUFOI’s annual conference.
1963, March: Maliszewski revealed in an interview with a local newspaper that he was working on a spaceship model and on his 80th birthday would gather the Danish press to invite them on a space trip to the Moon.
1963, October 26: Maliszewski died. His son, who lived in the town of Varde at the time, inherited the spaceship model.
Maliszewski with his spaceship model
Commentary
The name Josef Maliszewski is virtually unknown today, and very little has been written about his experiences outside of Denmark. Even the many older Danish articles about Maliszewski only mention his first encounter in 1951 and not the following two encounters in May 1954 – perhaps
because of all the elements of ”high strangeness” such as the aliens gifting Maliszewski with bread and wine on the second encounter, or the third encounter revealing that the aliens believe in a Supreme Being and a Being of Envy similar to God and Satan in Christianity. That was probably a bit too much for largely non-religious danes to swallow. Today, his story will seem even more absurd and naive, but it has some interesting details that should make us hesitate rejecting it outright. That does not not mean, however, that we should just accept it at face value.
The Maliszewski case is the first in Denmark, where the witness actually identified the vehicle they saw as an extra-terrestrial spaceship and its crew as extraterrestrials: The Aarslev Enge case of the year 1600 happened before air travel was on the mind of most people — let alone space travel — hence the witnesses talking about ”a wagon with no horses” and ”strangely dressed people”; even the witness to the Kgs. Thisted case of 1944 interpreted what he saw as an experimental German military aircraft and its human pilots.
Maliszewski’s 1951 encounter was also one of the first classic contactee cases anywhere on the planet and, as far as we know, the first in Denmark. Maliszewski’s encounters with graceful, human-looking aliens in glittery jumpsuits who had come to our planet to warn us Earth people about our warlike ways, even predate his countryman George Adamski’s similar encounter with Orthon from Venus, which did not happen until November 20 of 1952. It should be mentioned that this scenario of human aliens travelling to Earth to warn us humans to get our own civilization in order, is the exact plot premise of the 1951 Hollywood science-fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still… yet this film did not premiere in Denmark until November 6 of 1952, more than a year after Maliszewski’s first encounter.
Some of Maliszewski’s later encounters follow the lead of other contactees, however – the encounter with the beautiful woman astronaut on May 30 of 1954 happened a year after the American contactee Truman Bethurum in 1953 wrote about his encounter with the female space captain Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion.
Like many other UFO sightings, Maliszewski’s first encounter contains a perfect example of the “Oz Factor”, where time seems to stand still as the encounter happens as well as the witness feeling like in a bubble, with all sounds disappearing. Maliszewski getting physically ill after the encounter is also a common feature of close encounter cases and suggests that something tangible and physical happened to him. The same is the case for his pocket watch and the stationary clock that stopped working, something we have heard time again, yet at the time was not an established effect of UFO encounters. On a side note, it is curious that he had success repairing the pocket watch but not the clock inside his house. Also, the encounter did not just impact him but also the cattle and horses outside, as the neighbors even visited afterwards to investigate the mysterious markings in the field.
To 21st century readers, the small saucers discharged by the spaceship in the 1951 sighting sound very similar to drones. As far as the appearance of the spaceship itself goes, it is interesting that it looked very little like either the flying saucers or the cigar-shaped motherships that, according to George Adamski, functioned as flying aircraft carriers for the saucers. What the spaceship that Maliszewski encountered in 1951 instead resembled, more than anything else, was the Sänger Silbervogel (”Silver bird”) — a concept for a rocket-powered bomber aircraft that engineer Eugen Sänger drew during World War 2 for the German air force.
The Silbervogel bomber. Compare to the illustration in the beginning of this article and you will notice the similarities.
Later on, however, Maliszewski would encounter manned small saucer-shaped scout ships and long thin motherships orbiting the planet, similar to those described by Adamski. The small surveillance drone saucers being operated from a larger spaceship also sound similar to Adamski’s Telemeter Discs.
It is notable that Maliszewski described the Zutornians as looking perfectly human with their physical appearance being similar to that of people from Java in Indonesia. This was a pretty common description in early CE3 cases, but not something that came into focus until years later.
Another strange aspect of the Maliszewski case that is surprisingly common to UFO encounters across the planet, is part of the second encounter, where the flying saucer pilot gave Maliszewski a glass of wine and a piece of bread. A well known similar case is that of Joe Simonton, who in Northwoods, Wisconsin back in 1961 encountered aliens that gifted him with three small pancakes. It also has clear parallels to the fairy tale tradition of Europe (themselves built on a broader folk tradition stretching far back in time), but it was not until years after Maliszewski’s death that ufologists would start to explore these similar traits.
Ultimately, we do not know whether Josef Maliszewski was a complete fraud, a person with a very vivid imagination, or actually experienced what he said he did. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between those three options. What we can say for sure, however, is that his story plays an important role in a ufological-historical context, and therefore deserves to be shared with a wider audience than it has so far.
Private photo of Josef Maliszewski near the end of his life
Sources
- FUFOS — Josef Matiszewski [sic] – En dansk kontaktperson. (17 page pamphlet published in 1970) + audio recording of interview
- John Keel — Visitors from Space
- UFO-Nyt, December 1958
- Willy Wegner — Ufoer over Danmark
- Willy Wegner — Ufo-landinger i Danmark
