The Encounter

One late night/early morning in 1981 or ’82, a man in his early 20’s, who gave his name as “PN” , was driving to work at a warehouse in Odense. At 02:10 AM, he drove away from home in his car through the village of Åsum, 4 kilometers east of Odense. The village surrounds a tiny beech forest framed by three roads, giving the forest a triangular shape with each side being 150 metres long. PN was driving up the street Snedkerstræde, which went along this forest area. When the car reached the small hill just before the T-junction at Åsum Bygade, the engine stopped working, but the car continued rolling down the hill. At the T-junction, PN stopped the car with the brake.

Then he saw something truly strange 60 metres away, further right down Åsum Bygade: A light phenomenon hovering somewhere between the road and the forest floor at a height of 1-2 metres. This light was shaped like a circle and was about 3 metres in diameter, illuminating the surroundings with a yellow colour.

PN then saw a ramp leading down from the round ball of light to the forest floor, and a door opening to the interior of the object. The object’s interior resembled ”an orange cloud”. PN also noticed two groups of beings standing near the UFO. The first group consisted of seven small beings who kept going up and down the ramp, seemingly collecting samples of vegetation and soil from the forest floor which they gave to “someone” inside the craft. The second group consisted of three bigger entities, two standing atop the ramp near the entrance to the craft and one standing at the ramp’s foot.

PN got the impression that the taller beings were a kind of ”guardians” and noticed them all standing completely still. The shorter beings were around 1 meter in height and light grey in colour, resembling two triangles stacked upon each other with the top triangle being somewhat smaller. PN assumed that the small top triangle was each being’s head. The ”guardians” were similar in appearance. PN did not see any arms, but he did see the “guardians” holding what appeared to be some kind of measuring instruments. The beings had small stubby legs but the legs did not appear to move. Instead, they seemed to glide or hover above the ground like hovercraft.

After having watched the UFO and the beings for a minute or so, the shocked PN noticed something else that was strange: In the opposite direction, he saw a taxi parked near the creek (Odense Å). The taxi’s driver was blinking repeatedly with his headlights, but PN didn’t get if they were meant as a signal to him or to the UFO and its crew. He then started the car’s engine, and noticed that it worked perfectly. At the same time, the beings noticed they were being watched and began moving towards PN’s car at a high velocity. The taxi then took a 180 degree turn and drove towards Odense. PN, now frightened, quickly turned left and followed the same direction. When PN had driven about 150 metres down Åsum Bygade, he looked in the rear view mirror and saw the UFO occupants standing in the middle of the bridge that goes over the creek. Shortly afterwards, the road turned and the beings vanished out of his sight.

When arriving at work in Odense, PN noticed that he was unusually early as a result of driving so fast. After his shift was over, he drove back to Åsum and looked at the area where he saw the UFO and the aliens. He found no physical traces whatsoever.

Aftermath and Investigation

PN did not report the encounter to anyone outside of his family until 1996. That year Scandinavian UFO Information received a tip from PN’s mother, who together with her husband had an unusual experience of their own a year or two earlier, where a UFO stopped their car.

The two SUFOI investigators that were put on the case, Erling Hegelund and Toke Haunstrup, interviewed PN and found that he was convinced that both his encounter and that of his parents were genuine cases of contact with extraterrestrial beings. PN also claimed to have developed precognitive psychic abilities after his close encounter. However, these abilities didn’t appear to have been bulletproof, since he had been involved in many serious traffic accidents during the years as well. He did not specify whether he thought these were connected to the UFO incident.

Hegelund and Haunstrup also paid a visit to the location itself, to see how it fit with PN’s story, but they didn’t become any wiser. During this time, they even tried to find people in the area who might have seen something back then that could help the investigation. They didn’t have any luck with this, in part because most nearby residents didn’t even live there in the early 1980’s. SUFOI also tried to find the taxi driver who blinked his lights from near the creek, through a personal ad in the local newspaper, but to no avail.

Commentary

At the outset, the Åsum case seems solid and quite rare for Denmark: A truly alien looking spaceship and crew, that might be robotic rather than flesh-and-blood creatures, who end up chasing the witness after he drives away in his car. To say nothing of the witness being permanently changed by his experience by apparently getting psychic powers from the aliens. This hits all the marks for an all time UFO classic. However, there are some things to consider.

First of all, when an observation is several years old before it is reported, it always raises some issues. Over such a long period of time, a witness’ original memory will have changed from what he or she originally saw (or think they saw) and be open to other influences – including, in this case, the previous experience of the witness’ own parents. Therefore, it is difficult to say how much of PN’s account describes what he actually saw back then and how much is his after-the-fact attempt at making sense of the experience. Details like engine failure on vehicles was already closely associated with UFO’s in the early 1980’s, and could in that sense have been confabulated into PN’s observation, however much of a wild coincidence it may seem to be. It is also strange that PN described the worker aliens digging up soil samples, yet when returning to the landing site the same day he could not find any physical marks whatsoever. This indicates that at least part of the observation may not have been a physical reality.

The final verdict from the SUFOI investigators was of a witness being honest to them, at least to the best of his knowledge and memory. In other words: PN really believed that he had experienced what he reported, and that it was something otherworldly. But the lack of physical evidence (even by admission of PN himself), made the investigators more inclined to believe that PN could have had an advanced hallucinatory experience, where pre-existing ideas about aliens and spaceships filled in the gaps in his mind when interpreting the experience into sense data. The question then becomes, what triggered this hallucination – and the engine failure of the car – to begin with?

Sources

• UFO-Nyt #1 (1997)
• SUFOI Newsletter #17 (1999)

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