The Imjärvi Skiers' Encounter

Wednesday, 7 January 1970. Near the village of Imjärvi, about 15 km northwest of Heinola in southern Finland, two men set out on an ordinary cross-country ski trip. Aarno Heinonen was a 36-year-old forestry worker. Esko Viljo was a 38-year-old farmer. Both were experienced skiers. It was 17 degrees below zero.

Late in the afternoon they stopped in a forest clearing and heard a faint buzzing. Viljo saw it first. A light in the sky. In the account later published by Flying Saucer Review, it "approached from the north, made a wide sweep, and came at them from the south, descending as it came. The faint buzzing sound became louder. The light halted, and then they could see that a luminous red-grey mist was swirling round it."

It hung three or four metres above the snow. A metallic disc about 3 m across, domed on top, flat underneath, with three spheres on the rim and a tube projecting from the centre. "The round craft hovered awhile completely motionless above us while the buzzing sound could still be heard, quite low," Heinonen said.

From the tube came an intense white beam. It lit a sharp circle on the snow about one metre wide, bordered by a coal-black ring. Heinonen felt himself pulled hard backwards at the waist. Coloured sparks floated up. Then a figure stood in the light. "The creature stood in the middle of the bright light and was luminous like phosphorus," Viljo said. It was about 90 cm tall, with a pale waxy face, a hooked nose and thin limbs, dressed in a light-green coverall and a cone-shaped metallic helmet. It held a black box that pulsed yellow and pointed it at Heinonen. "The pulsating light was very bright, almost blinding."

The beam drew back upward "like a flickering flame, and was sucked into the gap in the craft." The mist thickened. "After that it was as if the fog curtain was torn to pieces," Viljo said. "The air above us was empty!"

That evening both men took a taxi to a doctor. Heinonen's right leg was numb and stiff. He had headaches, vomiting and pain, and his urine ran dark, "like pouring black coffee onto the snow." Viljo's face swelled and turned dark red. Dr Pauli Kajanoja said the symptoms resembled "those after being exposed to radioactivity," but he had no instrument to measure it. Heinonen was off work for months.

No official investigation followed. Researcher Tapani Kuningas documented the case in his 1970 book Ufoja Suomen taivaalla and put the whole event at about 10 seconds. Flying Saucer Review featured it that summer. Prof. Matti Tuuri of Helsinki University suggested shortwave radiation, X-rays or "an abnormal electrical phenomenon."

Then Heinonen claimed about 23 more encounters between 1970 and 1972. Among them was a woman in a yellow suit who spoke Finnish and said she was 180 years old. Swedish ufologist Anders Liljegren found these stories closer to sagas and myths, and he noted that the men never produced concrete evidence. Critics point out that the three spheres echo George Adamski's "scoutship" and that the witnesses disagreed on details. Yet there is no evidence Heinonen ever made money from his fame, and no one has claimed a hoax.

In 1971 Heinonen gave Yle a four-minute interview, which was republished on Yle Areena in 2015. Podcasts still retell the story as the Imjärvi elf, or the Imjärvi imp. No conventional explanation has ever settled it. Two skiers. A few seconds of light. Months of illness.