The Scandinavian Ghost Fliers, 1933-34 and 1936-37

Autumn, 1933. Across the far north of Norway, Sweden and Finland, people began to hear engines in the dark. Over areas with no airbases. Over the wilderness plains.

The machines came mainly at night. Some flew low. Many were reported in snowstorms. None carried markings. The newspapers gave them a name: the ghost fliers.

Lakes, fjords and inlets lit up as if under searchlights, while the drone of an engine passed overhead. On 29 January 1934 the newspaper Tromsø declared that "the mysterious plane is a fact." One aircraft, it reported, was so brightly lit that the pilot could be seen. The flier wore a windbreaker and was dressed in dark clothes.

Monday, 5 February 1934. Evening at Fagerfjellet, in Målselv, Troms. A party of horsemen came to the bends at Rabben with the mountain straight ahead. A light flared up for a moment. Shortly after, they heard a crash. Magna Berntsen in Fuglelia, Jentoft Østvoll and Bora in Myrlia and Hans Grimstad from Målsnes were among the witnesses. From his home at Rønningen, Hans Jørgensen watched through binoculars. He said one or two men were making a runway on the mountain, so the plane could take off.

The fliers returned. In the autumn of 1936, two workers at Byske saw an object like a biplane come in over land from the sea, make a turn over the wood-pulp mill and disappear back toward the sea. They heard no engine. They saw no lights. At Boden fortress, a major, a captain, an ensign, fortress police and ordinary police reported a mysterious light moving in the air, and engine hum.

On 26 January 1934 Norway appointed First Lieutenant Erling Kjær as its expert investigator. The next day, in the Swedish Riksdag, Arvid Lindman asked whether the government would find out the aircraft's nationality and stop the flights. On 2 February Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson replied that it had not yet been fully established that such flights had taken place. In Finland, Defence Minister Arvi Oksala reportedly said an unknown aircraft had been confirmed moving in the north. The Swedish Air Force sent a fighter unit to Norrbotten. Searches found no aircraft and no airfield.

July 1936. A Swedish General Staff report concluded that flights by aircraft whose nationality could not be determined had taken place over northern Scandinavia during the winter of 1933-34.

At Fagerfjellet no wreckage was found. The flash and bang were put down to a rockslide or lightning strike. The ghost plane, it was decided, must have been a large stone, 6 metres long and 4 metres high, looming on top of a plateau. Finland's General Oesch said most lights had been stars or car headlights, and the sounds car or boat engines. In the Riksdag, Brädefors called it "a fabricated ghost flier," suggesting the right-wing press had built it up to justify more defence spending.

Others looked east. German naval attaché Steffan concluded that if the aircraft existed at all, they were Soviet. British consul Wale in Riga judged 99% of the reports "pure fantasy." Smugglers and German or Japanese spies were also proposed, and the Norwegian Navy suspected a foreign exercise. In 2007 Finnish historian Erkki Hautamäki argued that Soviet bombers from the Kola Peninsula had practised attack runs over Norrbotten.

Norwegian researcher Per Brøyn linked the second wave to interest in the iron-ore route through Narvik, and Brøyn described a third cluster over Narvik in 1940. In 1977 Anders Liljegren of AFU was allowed to study the Swedish military files. No archival smoking gun has been found. The ghost fliers remain the main pre-war forerunner of the 1946 Ghost Rockets.