The Ghost Rockets of Sweden
The account
Rocket-shaped objects streaked across the Scandinavian sky, and one of them supposedly plunged into a lake without a trace.
What investigators found
The Swedish military investigation concluded that most reports were meteors and misidentifications, with no proof of foreign rockets.
The story
In 1946, just after the war, Sweden received hundreds of reports of fast, elongated, glowing objects streaking across the sky. The press called them ghost rockets. The most famous episode came in July, when witnesses said they saw an object fall into Lake Kölmjärv, in the north of the country. The military searched the lake bed but found no wreckage.
There were fears that the Soviet Union was testing rockets captured from the Germans, since World War II had just demonstrated the V flying bombs. The Swedish commission that studied the cases concluded that most had ordinary explanations, such as meteors and celestial phenomena, but left a portion unsolved. Many researchers note that 1946 saw intense meteor showers, which helps explain the wave.