The Encounter

Thursday afternoon the 21st of November 1957, a grocer named Hans Haugaard Hansen drove from his grocery store in Gesten to pick up supplies in the nearest town Egholt. When driving towards Gesten forest, he saw a strange device 150-200 meters away over a nearby turnip field owned by the parish council chairman Robert Andersen.

At first, Haugaard Hansen thought the device was a tractor with a transparent glass cabin. When he got closer, however, he saw the object was a 3m tall pyramid shaped flying vehicle emitting a slight reddish-orange glow. He stopped the car and idled the engine, noticing that he heard no sound whatsoever connected to the UFO observation. The object was made of a material that reminded Haugaard Hansen of semi-transparent glass and had a crew of two human-like beings sitting still inside. The UFO flew at a speed he estimated to be around 60-70 km/h towards a hill near the field where it seemed to land, but Haugaard Hansen was not 100% certain as it could just as well have hovered a meter above the hilltop for a minute. Afterwards, the UFO flew away to the bog near Gesten and disappeared out of view. After work, Hans Haugaard Hansen returned to the site of the observation and searched the field for physical evidence of the UFO but he could not find anything.

Meanwhile at the exact same time, in the nearby town Jordrup, two people who had just exited a barn on their farm saw a similar object 100 meters away, hovering over the ground. When a local newspaper interviewed the two witnesses about the sighting later that week, they described the UFO as sailing gently over the ground and lifting up to pass over a fence but also lowering itself when passing over a depression in the ground. This UFO made no sound other than a slight hum, and emitted a searing light from its bottom.

In yet another South Jutland town, Vorbasse, three people also saw a UFO at 4PM on the 21st of November 1957. The office manager Niels Poder, his wife and a woman named Amalie Nielsen saw a glowing object shaped like a T or a cross flying at a very low altitude. This sighting lasted roughly 10 minutes. The three witnesses described the UFO’s vertical bar as glowing but the horizontal bar being dark.

On the 22nd of November, the local newspaper Vestkysten (The West Coast) interviewed Hans Hausgaard Hansen about his UFO sighting along with the two witnesses in Jordrup and the three witnesses in Vorbasse. Haugaard Hansen contacted the local police afterwards about the sighting. The police tracked down two other people who had been in the same area at the time. One reported nothing unusual, the other reporting hearing a sound similar to that made by a loaded cargo airplane but not seeing anything odd. The police forwarded the report to the nearest Danish Air Force base in Karup, the air force answering that there were no aircraft or helicopters airborne in the area at the time. On February 13th in 1958, the magazine Dansk Familieblad (Danish Family Magazine) ran an article about the three sightings written by Kjeld Hjorth Christiansen.

Commentary

It is interesting that we have three independent UFO sightings in the same geographical area, all taking place at the exact same time and that those sightings report similar but still distinct vehicles. Notice that the Jordrup witnesses describe a searing bright light on the bottom of the vehicle, whereas Hans Haugaard Hansen described a much vaguer glow a dark reddish orange in colour. The Vorbasse sighting described a cross-shaped object, different from the pyramid-like craft seen just outside Gesten. This makes it unlikely that it actually was the same individual phenomenon seen by people in Gesten, Jordrup and Vorbasse.

As far as the vehicle seen by Hans Haugaard Hansen goes, it bears a striking resemblance to that seen by military personnel several decades later in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1981. The semi-transparent pyramid-shaped craft hovering above the ground, with mysterious glowing lights on it, closely matches the description given by the Rendlesham witnesses.

Haugaard Hansen himself was uncertain exactly what he had seen, contrary to the Danish Family Magazine writing about his UFO encounter in a story explicitly about visitation by spaceships from other planets. Notice that he described the crew of the pyramid UFO as looking perfectly human. In the 1940s the most popular theory about UFOs was that they were secret experimental aircraft test flown by humans from this planet, not extraterrestrial spaceships, and even though the extraterrestrial hypothesis became more popular in the 1950s it was still not the only theory for UFOs that people subscribed to in that decade.

It is noteworthy as well that when the police tracked down two other witnesses who were in the same area as Hans Haugaard Hansen during his sighting, one remembers nothing unusual and the other remembers hearing an aircraft’s engine noises but not seeing anything – the polar opposite of Haugaard Hansen seeing a mysterious airborne vehicle that made no sound at all. In the Eskildsgade UFO case of 1987, the witness tried to alert his friends to a UFO they would not notice and he walked away with the impression that the UFO was visible only to him. This points towards at least some UFO sightings being more akin to mystical religious experiences than something as mundane as secret military aircraft, exotic weather phenomena or even extraterrestrial spaceships.

Select sources

• Dansk Familieblad #7 (1958)
• Willy Wegner – UFO’er Over Danmark
• Willy Wegner – UFO-Landinger i Danmark

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