Hessdalen Lights

Hessdalen, Norway — observed since at least the 1930s

A 12-kilometre valley in central Norway, rural and quiet. Since the 1930s, people have watched lights float through it. White, yellow, red. Sometimes they hover for minutes. Sometimes they move at speeds that don't make sense. Sometimes they last over an hour.

Peak activity: December 1981 to mid-1984. The lights appeared 15–20 times per week. Tourists came to watch. Then it mostly stopped. Now there are 10–20 sightings a year.

In 1983, a project called Project Hessdalen started investigating. It was a collaboration between UFO-Norge and UFO-Sverige — the Norwegian and Swedish UFO associations. As you'd expect. But the project outgrew its origins. By 1998, an automatic measurement station was set up in the valley, running continuously, recording data.

valley at dusk

The EMBLA project followed, bringing together Østfold University College and the Italian National Research Council. Actual scientists, not ufologists. They proposed several hypotheses. There is still no consensus.

One hypothesis: Radon decay ionizes dust or aerosols in the valley air, allowing plasma-like structures to form and glow. It's an interesting physical model, not a settled answer; Hessdalen is still unresolved.

A simpler explanation: the lights are a combustion of airborne dust from mining in the area. Analysis identified hydrogen, oxygen, and titanium in the emissions. Norwegian press ran with this: "The Mystery in Hessdalen is Solved." But it wasn't solved. The lights still appear, and the phenomenon still resists a single explanation.

Some sightings have been identified as misperceptions of aircraft, car headlights, astronomical bodies, mirages. Not all. The ones that remain — the ones the automatic station records — are still unidentified.

Source: Wikipedia. Automatic measurement station data at hessdalen.org.