The Oskar Linke Landing at Haselbach

June 1950. Thuringia, in the Soviet Zone of Germany. In the early hours of 17 June, German researchers say, Gleimershausen mayor Oskar Linke was riding his motorcycle home from a lecture in a neighbouring village, his daughter Gabriele with him. She was 11. Near Haselbach, at about 02:30, a tyre blew out.

Gabriele pointed to something about 140 meters away. Linke left his motorcycle near a tree and walked toward the spot. At about 40 meters he saw two men "dressed in some shiny metallic clothing." They were stooped, apparently examining something on the ground. One wore a lamp on the front of his body.

Behind them sat the object. Linke put its diameter at between 13 and 15 meters. "It looked like a huge frying pan." Two rows of holes ran around its edge. On top stood "a black conical tower about 3 meters high."

Then Gabriele called out. The two men "immediately jumped on the conical tower and disappeared inside." The side with the holes began to glitter, green at first, then red. A slight hum grew louder as the tower slid down into the centre and the craft rose slowly, beginning to "rotate like a top" inside a ring of flames. With a whistling sound "similar to that heard when a bomb falls," the craft turned toward a neighbouring town, gained altitude and disappeared over the forests in the direction of Stockheim.

Where it had stood, Linke found "a circular opening in the ground," clearly freshly dug and matching the shape of the tower. For him, that settled it. He had not dreamed it. A shepherd thought he was watching a comet moving away at low altitude. Other residents said the same.

Linke did not think of flying saucers. He said he had never heard the term until he reached West Berlin. He believed he had seen "a new Soviet military machine."

Linke fled to the West in 1951. On 1 July 1952 he swore to his account before a notary in West Berlin. Le Figaro discussed the claim on 7 July, and Kathimerini printed it on 9 July, the publication date that later stuck to the case as the sighting date. The CIA translated the article as report 00-W-23682, "Flying Saucers in East Germany," stamped "THIS IS UNEVALUATED INFORMATION." Project Blue Book listed it only as an additional reported sighting under "Hasselback, Saxony," and J. Allen Hynek later retold it in The Hynek UFO Report.

George Edwards, chief engineer at Vickers, told Le Figaro it sounded like an observation machine with a circular wing and vertical jet take-off. In 2023 the German group GWUP argued that Linke's description "corresponded to the stereotypes of the time." Kevin Randle has pointed to tangles in the paper trail: conflicting dates, two different clipping texts, Saxony instead of Thuringia. He does not call it a hoax.

In October 2014 researcher Ralf Bülow interviewed Gabriele, then 75. She described the object at takeoff and in flight as round, bright and loud. She keeps "an almost ironic distance" from the topic, which Bülow felt gave her "a certain credibility." The Linkes appear in the 1952 Telenews short The Flying Saucer Mystery, and in 2016 the CIA promoted the file as one of its "real-life X-Files." Author Mattis Lühmann calls it Germany's best known close encounter with UFO occupants.