Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency FDD Note, dated 17 March 1960, translates two Dagens Nyheter articles from 7 and 8 March 1960 about Swedish sightings on 6 March. A Linjeflyg crew flying from Stockholm to Sundsvall and an observer at the Saltsjoebaden observatory saw a luminous object that experts believed was an unidentified satellite. Photographer Esse Jansson photographed two objects that turned back the way they came. Another observer reported the so-called phantom satellite 1960 Alpha moving strangely.
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to pass the Stockholm latitude in a southerly direction about 0525 hours. Between 0515 and 0527 hours he observed two objects which came from the north and were moving in a southeasterly direction. Their movement was slow but otherwise initially was not entirely unlike that of the satellites he had seen before. Suddenly, however, the direction of movement changed, and the objects turned such that they were going back in the same direction they came from. On one of his plates he even caught a third luminous object of the same kind. "It has not been possible to determine whether the observation is purely an optical illusion or not. It can be added, however, that a resident of Bromna, Thorsten Haakansson, reports that between 0528 and 0543 hours on 6 March he saw the so-called phantom satellite, 1960 Alpha, with binoculars through a window facing on the west. But in his case also the satellite moved a little peculiarly as seen from the observer's location: 'I observed the satellite in the north-northwest and it was moving in a horizontal direction . . . (but) then it went straight down at a right angle and disappeared.'" The sighting by the crew of the Sundsvall-bound airplane mentioned above was originally reported in Dagens Nyheter of 7 March, page 9, under the title "Moving Light Phenomenon Is Believed to Be Satellite". The full text of that article follows. "According to a radio report to Midlanda Airport outside
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 4 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.