Evald Maarup police-car encounter, Haderslev (1970)

13 August 1970. Evald Hansen Maarup, a Danish police officer, had been on highway patrol. He dropped a colleague off in Haderslev and drove the patrol car, a new 1970 Ford Zodiac, toward home in Knud. The road ran between Kabdrup and Fjelstrup, some 8 to 10 km north of Haderslev in South Jutland. About 22:30 by one account, 22:50 by another.

The light in the vehicle went out. The engine stalled. In his statement, translated from Danish, Maarup said: "I tried to restart the vehicle but could not succeed, and then I discovered there was a large cone of light over the vehicle. This cone of light followed the vehicle until I stopped it on the right roadside."

The cone was bluish-white, 4 to 5 m across, sharply defined as if cut off. Inside the car it grew very hot, like driving towards the sun on a midsummer day. He tried to call Haderslev Police Station. The radio was dead too.

Then he saw the source. Hovering 20 to 25 m above him was a silent, silvery-grey craft, elliptical and metallic, about 10 m across, with a dark opening in the centre of its underside. The light shrank, "as if the craft was swallowing the light into its body." After a few seconds the object disappeared vertically into the sky. The engine restarted by itself, but the bonnet remained hot.

The patrol car carried a fixed, built-in camera. Maarup used it. Three frames showed a bright spot of light against the dark sky, without any detail. Three more showed only the road and guardrail in the headlights.

The Danish Air Force took up the case. Major Helden of the Tactical Command concluded that Maarup had seen a T-33 jet landing. In November 1970 the Air Force closed the file, citing "a string of independent events": jet lights, a loose battery terminal and a meteor.

Maarup rejected it. None of the landing lights, he said, looked anything like the light he had photographed. A police psychiatrist found no mental disturbance. His colleagues said they were "sure that what he told is the truth." SUFOI, under Erling Jensen, investigated and in 1972 obtained the Air Force's internal documents.

Most accounts give 14 August 1973. Near Skoubølling, 6 km north of Haderslev, horses and cattle were panicking inside a cone of light. The object tipped at a 45 degree angle as it held the beam on him, then left with a whoosh like wind between trees.

"I cannot doubt what I saw," he said. "But why at exactly the same time? Why not any other day of the year? Why was it exactly the same craft?" Around 1975, with a fellow officer beside him, he saw something like "the full moon cut in half" over a forest between Kolding and Haderslev.

Maarup died in 1993. Former Air Force radar operator Nis Krog later said he had picked up "an unidentified solid object" that night. A six-year re-investigation by Ole Henningsen and Asger Poulsen, published as Danske X-filer, ruled out the battery, the landing lights and jet exhaust as physically impossible. Others had seen unusual things in the sky that evening, and several fireballs were reported; the authors also found that "a powerful beam of light directed upwards and viewed through a car windscreen at a particular angle can appear to point downwards." The case, they found, "is significantly more complicated and consists of far more elements than previously assumed," and it remains Denmark's best-known UFO case.