The Finnish Air Force Sighting: The Seven Balloons of Pori

Spring 1969. Pori airfield sits near the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, in Satakunta, western Finland. On Saturday, 12 April, Finnish Air Force pilots were flying training sorties. Tarmo Tukeva was in the air in a Fouga Magister, on a bombing or dive run. On the runway, Jouko Kuronen was preparing a navigation flight to Kuopio with another pilot.

Then the radio came alive. A flight controller had spotted something over the airfield and called the objects "ilmapallot". Balloons. The name stuck. Tukeva was told to break off his run and look, while Kuronen heard the exchange and saw them too.

Seven objects. Yellow and round, or ball-shaped. They hung in a loose, disorganised group, somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 metres above the field. To Kuronen they looked stationary, "as if observing". He later described them as "seven round, yellowish formations resembling segments cut from the moon."

Tukeva got them in view. He found them generally round in shape, but somewhat indistinct in outline. He could not determine his distance to them.

As the Fouga closed in, the objects suddenly formed a formation and accelerated northward. Tukeva said they pulled away from him "at great speed". Winds aloft that day were 100 knots. The objects travelled against them. By comparison, the jet seemed to stand still as they vanished toward the north.

Within the same minute, the objects were reportedly detected at Vaasa, about 200 km to the north. Radar at the airfield and at Vaasa is said to have registered them. No radar data has ever been published.

Kuronen counted 20 to 25 observers, watching from different positions. In a 1982 interview for the Yle radio series Mystillistä, he was firm. "We certainly observed objects that were clearly defined physical entities," he said. A visual hallucination, in his view, was impossible with so many people watching.

He went on to head Lappeenranta airport. Around 2009 he confirmed the account to Yle once more. "I can't explain the sighting in any way, and hardly anyone ever will." Tukeva told his own story on camera in Juhan af Grann's 1992 documentary Visitors from Space.

The case holds an unusual place. It is the only UFO sighting the Finnish Air Force has acknowledged as genuine. In May 2012, Ruotuväki, the magazine of the Finnish Defence Forces, revisited it. The article compared it to other sightings over bodies of water during military exercises, and suggested transnational spy planes or aircraft. A year earlier, the Air Force had told Yle that its own pilots had not seen any UFOs.

The controller's first word still names the case. The witnesses reject it. Balloons, they point out, do not travel into a 100-knot wind. No hoax has ever been alleged. The Defence Forces' explanations of UFO reports from 1933 to 1979 are kept in the War Archives, but no Pori file has surfaced. The same year, in September, the Pudasjärvi lights began the Finnish UFO boom of the early 1970s. The seven balloons of Pori came first.