Brief Encounters, Episode 18, the Ghost Rockets of Sweden, in the summer of 1946, something began falling from the sky over Sweden. It wasn't enemy aircraft or meteor

fragments. Witnesses described long cylindrical objects, some with wings, some without, flying

silently at high speed before crashing into lakes, fields and even mountain slopes.

Military personnel were dispatched. Search teams were sent into the wilderness. But no wreckage

was ever recovered. The Swedish government kept the reports quiet at first.

Then the sightings spread across Scandinavia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, even

parts of Greece. Over 2,000 reports flooded in over the course of just a few months. The press

gave them a name. They called them Ghost Rockets and nearly 80 years later, no one has ever figured out what they were.

World War II had ended only a year earlier.

Europe was still recovering. Cities were in ruins.

Military intelligence networks were scrambling to adapt to a new geopolitical map.

Sweden had remained neutral during the war, but its proximity

to the Soviet Union meant it was suddenly caught in the middle of rising Cold War tensions.

In May of 1946, reports began to surface about unidentified objects, flying over Swedish airspace. At first they were dismissed as meteors.

The skies had been active in the spring and the occasional bright streak wasn't unusual.

But these weren't just flashes of light.

Eyewitnesses began describing objects that maintained a horizontal trajectory,

sometimes making sharp turns or even appearing to level off. Before impact, some flew low

over towns and then shot off into the distance. Others were said to disintegrate in the air

before reaching the ground. Most unusual of all,

many of the reported crashes, especially the ones involving lakes, left no debris. Teams searched

the water. Nothing was found, no wreckage, no engines, no metal fragments, just ripples on the

...