Ghost Rockets
Ghost rockets, also called Scandinavian ghost rockets, were rocket- or missile-shaped UFOs that were sighted in 1946 and mostly confined to Sweden and neighboring countries such as Finland.
The first reports were made by Finns on February 26, 1946. About 2,000 sightings were logged between May and December 1946. Two hundred of those sightings were verified using radar returns, and authorities were able to recover physical fragments associated with ghost rockets.
Investigations concluded that most of these sightings were simply meteors. The largest cluster of reported sightings occurred on the 9th and 11th of August, which is in the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.
However, most reports didn't happen during meteor shower activity, and had characteristics inconsistent with that of meteors, including moving in multiple directions.
Another theory was rockets originating from long-range Soviet missile tests, or another early form of a cruise missile. This explanation covered the maneuverability of the reports, but Swedish, British, and U.S. military investigators found no recognizable rocket fragments, and some sightings were also inconsistent with this explanation. No exhaust trails were seen; the objects were moving too slowly and/or in some kind of formation, flying horizontally, and made no sound.
By November 29, 1946, of the nearly 1,000 reports received by the Swedish Defense staff, 225 of them were confirmed to be observations of "real physical objects" and every single one occurred in broad daylight.
While the Swedish and U.S. military findings are still unclear, a November 1948 Top Secret U.S. Air Force document which was declassified in 1997 finds that at least some investigators thought not only that the ghost rockets existed, but that they were flying saucers with extraterrestrial origins.
The report reads, "When officers of this Directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that 'these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth'. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the earth."
