The Ängelholm Landing (Gösta Carlsson)

Saturday, 18 May 1946. Gösta Carlsson was walking back from the beach through Kronoskogen. It is a pine forest planted in sandy soil south of Ängelholm to protect the coast. About 22:45.

At the edge of a clearing he saw a light. From a distance it looked like a crew setting up a carousel.

A disc stood on a keel-like fin and two telescopic landing legs. A hatch was lowered, with a ladder. Strong light came from the windows of a streamlined cabin. A telescopic mast rose about 5 m from the top, like a periscope. "A strange violet light, coming from a lamp on the mast, covers the whole craft like a cheese dome," Carlsson later said.

Six men and three women, all human-looking and dressed in tight-fitting white flight suits with dark boots, belts, hoods and earplugs, were working around it. They seemed to be repairing the craft until they all turned to face him. "It was as if I was expected, but not wanted." One acted as a guard, raising a hand in warning and keeping Carlsson back with a chest device that looked like a bellows camera. One woman laughed.

The craft lifted with a red light and a faint whining sound. At about 400 to 500 metres it slowed slightly. It swayed from side to side like a pendulum. Then it accelerated violently. It was gone.

The next morning Carlsson found burned circular marks in the grass. On 19 May he drew a dimensioned sketch of them. He said the crew had left things behind. Two mugs. A gold ring. A transparent rod, burned at one end.

Carlsson said nothing in public. That year he dreamed that the pilot spoke to him. "I don't know if it's words or thoughts I perceive." The dreams led him to try pollen as a remedy. He had been a railway dispatcher for SJ.

Now he founded Cernelle and its pollen product, Cernitol, and later financed the hockey club Rögle BK. In autumn 1971 he finally told the journalist Eugen Semitjov. The two visited the clearing and found a circular mark about 15 m across and 30 cm wide, but no marks from a keel or legs. Semitjov sent the rod to Stockholm University's mineralogy department without saying where it came from. The department found it "completely mundane."

Clas Svahn of UFO-Sverige first contacted Carlsson on 6 August 1987. He went on to record more than 100 hours of interviews, and in 1995 the two men published Mötet i gläntan. Svahn concluded that the encounter was not factual, but that Carlsson sincerely believed it and the story had become part of his reality. Carlsson would not let anyone examine the other objects, and his claims about radiation changed over time. Reviewing the book in Folkvett, Sven Ove Hansson pointed to its parallels with George Adamski's contactee stories, published in Swedish in 1958, while historian Dick Harrison called the encounter "alleged but not proven."

In September 1972 Carlsson and the landowner Erik von Geijer of Vegeholm Castle built a memorial in the clearing. It has a 1:8 scale concrete saucer with a metal periscope on top, concrete tracks marking the landing and copper plaques that carry the testimony. Ängelholm Municipality has looked after it since 2015. Guide Ingrid Persson Skog calls it "Scandinavia's only monument over an extraterrestrial visit and possibly unique in the world." Svahn's book calls the case Sweden's best known close encounter with a UFO.