The Encounter

At 04:45 AM on a July morning in 1982, a 15-year old boy was bicycling towards a gardening company in the town of Broby, where he was working as a substitute. When turning a corner on the road, he suddenly saw a glowing light over a field 50-60 meters away. The boy stopped, got off the bicycle, and walked towards the field to inspect the light closer. Here he saw an object, 2 meters in height and 2 meters in diameter, shaped like two saucers joined together. The spaceship was a bright glowing white in color, with no visible details on the surface except a hatch on one side.

He then noticed five humanoid beings standing nearby, all of them 10-15 meters away. They were no taller than 1 meter in height, with pointy ears, big heads and broad chests, but very short hips and legs. Four of the humanoids were walking around in the field “on top of the grass” and appeared to be taking samples of the soil, which they were putting in bags. The fifth, who was observing the others as if it was a commanding officer, then suddenly noticed the witness. Immediately, they rushed back into the flying saucer through the hatch and the saucer took off with what the witness described as a whooshing or a growling sound. As it took flight, it began to glow so brightly that the observer had to cover his eyes with his hands. The saucer disappeared over some high tension wires in a flight direction towards the city of Odense.

After the sighting was over, the observer noticed a depression in the grass where the flying saucer had been. He then resumed the bicycle ride to his workplace, and upon arrival told the boss about the experience. The boss explained the sighting away, suggesting that the boy probably had not completely awakened yet. Following that dismissive reaction from his boss, the witness hesitated in telling anyone else about his sighting, until attending a lecture by the Funen UFO Society (FUFOS) a few months later. Here he filled out a formula which FUFOS forwards to Scandinavian UFO Information (SUFOI).

Investigation

Following the report, SUFOI’s local UFO Study Group in Aabenraa took over investigation of the case and sent four of its members to visit the witness on the 1st of May, 1983. They were welcomed warmly by the boy and his parents, whom they subsequently began to interview. Among other things, the investigators now learned that the field in which the encounter had taken place, then consisted of 30-40 cm high Lollium grass. This meant that the humanoids in effect would have been floating or levitating above it!

After the interview, the investigators went with the witness to the landing site, which in the meantime had been seeded with grains, making it impossible to determine any possible markings from the UFO. However, the witness was sure of the exact place where the saucer had landed, as he had taken note of a nearby water post. From this the investigators then took some measures and were able to determine the following: The distance from the road to the landing site was 52 meters and at his closest, the witness was about 1-2 meters from the object. The object itself must have been 9 meters in circumference and 2,86 meters in diameter. The direction the flying saucer flew away towards, was eventually pinpointed to 180 degrees south on a compass.

In trying to narrow in on an exact date of the sighting, the witness’ parents suggested to the investigators that it had to have taken place between the 15th and the 25th of July 1982. A heatwave had hit Funen in those days, which made it necessary for the gardeners (working in greenhouses all day) to go to work much earlier than usual. This explained the unusually early hour of the morning at which their son had left home. Another important clue was that it had rained that morning. After contacting the Danish Meteorological Institute, the investigators learned that the only day with morning rain during the July ’82 heatwave was on the 16th of July, so this is the most likely date. The investigators also contacted the local police, who said that they had not received any UFO reports in July 1982.

Overall, the witness came across as a mature and very trustworthy person, who could promptly recount his observation several times without significant changes in detail. Both parents also believed their son’s explanation, as he was not the kind of person who was known for daydreaming and fantasizing.

However, the investigators did notice some slight inconsistencies and irregularities compared to the witness’ original report. For example, he was uncertain about compass directions, which he indicated wrongly several times. Upon visiting the landing site, he had no such problems, though. The witness had also originally written that while the patch of grass on which the spaceship had landed was burnt, but later he said that he had only meant to say that it was depressed, and maybe slightly darker than the rest of the field. They also found it slightly odd he could not remember the date – not even whether it happened in July or June. The most notable detail was that the witness was reluctant to give the name and number of his employer at the time, arguing that he found it unlikely they would get any information out of him. The investigators were not unsympathetic to him not wanting to involve others, but still the motive was  not completely completely clear.

Nevertheless, the final verdict from SUFOI was that any speculation of a hoax was out of the question, and the sighting was filed as genuinely unexplained, a status which it has kept to this day and which is unlikely to change.

Commentary

Upon closer investigation, most of the details of the witness ended up being true, showing that if a hoax, it was a very detailed one, without any real discernible purpose. The slight inconsistencies in the witness’ earlier and later accounts, his inability to determine a date, and his reluctance to refer to his former employer are certainly things to consider when weighing the case for and against, but on the whole they do not really appear that damning.

It also seems prescient to take note of the more obscure details that connect the Broby encounter with similar ones on record. While we do not have any indication that the witness experienced the same kind of “sensory bubble”, Oz factor effect as f.x. in the Gyldenholm Landing case, we get an indication that something similar could have been going on. One thing to notice is that it was raining that morning, hinting at a potential thunderstorm and thereby a possible large electrical event. Since we know that such factors can play a role in the change of human perception, it is not an unimportant detail. Another point is the strange sound of the UFO taking off, which could be an indication that some kind of external phenomenon affecting the senses had been present. But this is pure speculation, and it would have been just as easy to simply glean such details from the available UFO literature at the time and incorporate them into a more successful hoax narrative.

All we can really say is that the Broby case fits really well into the pattern of “landing and soil sampling” type cases we know from all over the world. These naivistic, almost theatrical encounters had by 1982 long since reached their peak and had started to fade into the background of the growing amount of alien abduction reports. Indeed, this is the last of the “classic” CE3 landing cases that we have from Denmark. The only one that comes close was the Åsum encounter, which allegedly happened on Funen around the same time, but wasn’t reported until the mid 1990s.

Sources

• SUFOI Pressemeddelse (1984)
• UFO-Nyt #1 (1984)

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