The Norwegian Spiral Anomaly

Wednesday, 9 December 2009. Northern Norway, just before dawn. The sky was very clear and cold. The next day, President Obama would accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

Jan Petter Jørgensen was on his way to work at a salmon-processing plant. In Tromsø, Totto Eriksen was driving his daughter to school. In Harstad, Nick Banbury was under the same sky.

A blue light came from behind a mountain. It stopped in mid-air. Then it started to spiral outwards. Banbury described "a green beam of light similar in colour to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end." The spiral "got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth." In Sortland, Morten Kristiansen saw the same thing. "A large ring appeared, and then spread out, sending a green beam down to earth."

Eriksen watched from the Inner Harbor in Tromsø. "It spun and exploded in the sky," he said. "It almost looked like a rocket that spun around and around, and then went diagonally down the heavens." In Alta, Axel Rose Berg found it "like a giant spiral" and at first took it for a projector.

Jørgensen photographed it. "I was quite shaken when I saw it," he said. "It was unbelievable." A black disk seemed to open in the centre of the white spiral. Then the whole display faded.

Hundreds of calls poured into the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. VG called it a "Telefonstorm", a phone storm. Astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard said: "My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor, but it has lasted far too long." Erik Tandberg of the Norwegian Space Centre was "totally amazed." Online, the theories came fast. A new kind of aurora. A black hole. A wormhole. HAARP, or the EISCAT radar. Aliens welcoming Obama. Moscow's first word was no help: "On this matter we do not confirm, we do not deny, we do not comment."

Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian named a suspect before Russia did. A missile. "Probably what happened is that stages 1 and 2 did just fine and were discarded in turn, and then stage 3 started burning and almost immediately went wrong." He proposed that a damaged third-stage nozzle sent the exhaust out sideways and set the missile spinning.

On 10 December, Russia's Defence Ministry confirmed a failed test of an RSM-56 Bulava missile, fired from the submarine Dmitry Donskoy in the White Sea. "The first two stages functioned smoothly, but the flight faltered at the third stage." According to the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, the display had played out above the Kola Peninsula, lit by the sunrise, not over Norway at all. William Dimpfl of the Aerospace Corporation put it above 100 km. The blue beam, he said, was aluminium-oxide exhaust, like "sunlight scattering off lots of tiny sapphires."

James Oberg later called it "yet another in a long series of failed tests." Pavel Felgenhauer was blunter: "At least this failed test made some nice fireworks for the Norwegians." Ten years on, Oberg noted that the ordinary explanation "has been vehemently rejected in favor of more exciting theories" in internet culture. As a VG meteorologist said on the morning itself, no one had seen anything like it before.