The Encounter

Friday evening on the 29th of September, 1995, a 24-year old man named Claus Lundholm was driving south from Brande to Vejle to visit his parents. He drove a 1981 BMW 320 with no other companions in the car but his black labrador, lying on the backseat. The weather outside was dry and stars were visible. Lundholm passed by the town of Give and approached a left turn between two forest areas called Smidstrup Krat and Tykhøje Krat. Here he slowed the car down and took a turn right down Bredsted Landevej towards Billund. His dog was now beginning to act very nervously in the back, something it had never done before, and Lundholm tried to calm it down.

When taking the turn, the car’s speed was 60 km/h while the clock showed 21.30 (9:30 PM) The speedometer needle and every other instrument on the dashboard suddenly maxed out and started going haywire. The windshield wipers also started running at highest speed, despite Lundholm not even having turned them on! He tried to turn the wipers off and on again, but the wipers did not work. The dog on the backseat now became even more distressed.

The car approached a lay-by place on the right side of the road, and Lundholm noticed that the headlights started wavering in strength and the engine began stalling. He attempted to keep the engine alive, the engine now sounding as if it was “drowning”, but to no avail. It eventually went completely dead and the car came to a stop in the middle of the road. He looked around to see if there were other vehicles coming, not seeing any, before attempting to restart the engine. Suddenly, he noticed that one display was online – the digital clock, showing ‘88.888.88’. Assuming that some electricity was still on in the car, he tried several times to start the engine, with no success. Lundholm suddenly felt a weird sense of pressure from above and a sense of “something” near him. He looked around one more time before once again trying to restart the car.

With no warning whatsoever, a colossal bright light then exploded over the car.  The dog became very frightened, whimpering and attempting to hide by “digging” itself under the car’s front seat. Lundholm could see through the front window that the light came from a ”mighty disc” hovering over the car. He then opened the door and leaned out to get a better look . The light from the flying disc was absolutely blinding, and he had to squint his eyes in order to get a good look at it. He estimated the disc to have a diameter of somewhere between 12 and 15 meters, hovering at an altitude of 3 to 4 meters above the car. The lights were arranged in concentric circles that narrowed as they got closer to the center of the disc, each pulsating at their own frequency. Each light consisted of two circles, like a bulb inside a reflector, the glow and intensity of the lights reminding Lundholm of halogen lamps. They had an odd shade of white with an odd bluish-violet tinge, like a welding flame, but with a more neon-like quality. At the center of the disc was an extremely bright light so intense that he could not see whether it had any type of structure. He then noticed that the light had very sharply defined edges, and was intensely focused, not spreading outside its target area. No sound could be heard during this time, other than that of the dog.

After getting a good look at the disc, Lundholm got back in the car. The light from the UFO then started getting weaker until it was about as intense as a car’s position lights. Looking up at the disc, Lundholm now saw it flying away over the nearby forest, doing a 20 degree angle swerve to avoid collision with a tree. As the disc flew away, Lundholm got a good look at the disc from the side. He noticed that it was not completely flat, but had a formation of triangular spikes on the top side. Each spike was around 3 meters high. The center of the disc, however, was flat with a thickness of one meter. The edge of the disc was rounded ”like an umbrella”. The dog was still distressed and Lundholm tried to calm it down. Roughly 3-4 minutes after the flying disc had disappeared, Lundholm tried turning on the car’s engine again. To his surprise, everything on the car now worked as normal – even the digital clock, which showed 21:31. When he arrived at his parents’ house, he told them about the experience. They advised him to contact some UFO investigators, but he was too shocked to do so.

Aftermath And Investigation

A few weeks after the incident, Lundholm saw a TV documentary about UFO investigators in Denmark. This motivated him to finally contact SUFOI, who sent him a reporting formula where he could fill in the technical details about his sighting. SUFOI investigator Torben Birkeholm later interviewed Claus Lundholm about the incident, recording the interview on tape. The local newspaper Vejle Amt Folkeblad, as well as the local radio station Channel 94, both ran stories about the incident during November of 1995.

Several interesting details about the case surfaced during the interview with Claus Lundholm. Lundholm tried to specify the duration of the incident and its individual elements, but SUFOI did a ”blind test” where Lundholm put on a blindfold and was asked to recall the event as it happened while the SUFOI investigator took the time with a timer. He did this test twice, and both results were very close to each other. From this it was concluded that the duration of the incident was somewhere between 40 and 60 seconds.

Lundholm revealed that while surprised and startled during the incident, he did not at any point feel threatened. He reported that it seemed like time stood still, or went much slower during the encounter, and that he was kind of expecting that either entities would appear or that he would be taken up into the craft. He also felt like he was being filmed or photographed, since the NMR scanner at the local hospital where he worked had a similar light as the UFO.

Claus Lundholm also disclosed during the interview that several of his friends already had an interest in UFOs prior to the incident. He revealed that he had watched the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and several TV documentaries about UFOs – but not read any books about the subject. It should be noted that Close Encounters of the Third Kind features a UFO car stop scene very similar to Lundholm’s encounter, and that this scene was modelled on authentic UFO encounters that had preceded it. SUFOI later requested help from any readers of their quarterly magazine, who might have the appropriate technical knowledge of electromagnetic disturbances that could produce the exact malfunctions in a car’s electrical systems that Claus Lundholm described.  However, nothing ever came of this.

Another interesting detail was that shortly after the case made the news, a young couple living on a nearby farm reported having a sighting earlier the same evening, at about 19:20 (7:20 PM). From their kitchen window they had seen a strange, sharply defined cone of light about 1 metre in diameter, shining down on the cobblestones in their courtyard. This sighting lasted for about 10 seconds. The farm was surrounded by trees on all sides, so the light could not have come from any of the neighboring farms. It is hard to make any direct connection to Lundholm’s experience, but it is a curious coincidence for sure.

Initially Claus Lundholm kept his identity private, to avoid negative attention, but in 2007 he finally revealed his name to the public in connection with a SUFOI anniversary conference, where he appeared to speak about his experience. Investigator Torben Birkenholm, who also interviewed Claus Lundholm, drew the conclusion that Lundholm had a genuine unexplainable experience and was telling the truth as he remembered it.

No further witnesses have ever come forward that might shed light on Lundholm’s experience. As such, the case remains unexplained to this day.

Commentary

The Claus Lundholm incident is an example of a typical UFO car stop or vehicle interference case, involving some form of electromagnetic disruption, perhaps from microwaves. There are hundreds of such cases on the record worldwide, a handful of them from Denmark. This particular case, complete with the car’s electrical systems going amok before shutting down and the witness being caught in a bright cone of seemingly solid light (an anomaly that has only started to become possible in recent years), is extremely similar to police officer Evald Maarup’s encounter from 1970. One could say it is almost a near replication of the same events, with only minor differences. In 1994 there was also a UFO car stop case from Jutland near the town Ravnstrup, of a different variant.

It should be pointed out that the mid 1990s saw a spike in public interest in UFOs thanks to the TV series The X-Files, which made a lot of people more willing to report UFO incidents to the mainstream news and to UFO organizations like SUFOI. Something similar happened in the mid/late-1970s after the premiere of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Knowing that even Claus Lundholm was hesitant to come forward to share his story, despite the “climate” being ripe for it, makes you wonder how many of these types of incidents actually exist, but go unreported.

Sources

• Kim Møller Hansen – Projekt UFO
• Per Andersen – SUFOI’s Historie
• SUFOI Intern #5 & #12 (1996)
• SUFOI – Mødet i Mørket II
• UFO-Nyt #1 & #2 (1996)

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