Subject: UFO Sighting Reports (Various) Finland
Below is the result of your feedback form.
It was submitted by martin.rautjärvi@stab.siemens.se
on Tuesday, July 8, 1997 at 07:57:21
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name: Martin Rautjärvi
location: Finland, various places
date: please see text
time: please see text
sighting: This is not a sighting of my own but information I have got from an other person, which I consider
trust worthy.
My own sighting at April 19th 1995 in Västerhaninge, Sweden, got some public attention. I received phone calls
and mail from people, who had UFO-experiences of their own, which they wanted to share. One of the letters that
impressed me most came from a Mr. Ilmari Matinniemi in Kiuruvesi in Finland. What makes the story most interesting
is the fact, that Mr. Matinniemi is a retired Finnish Army officer with a long experience from the Frontier Guards´
skywatch. Unfortunately, he doesn´ speak any foreign language, so with his consent I´ve translated
from Finnish the following excerpts from correspondence dated 29.12.1995 and 24.01.1996:
"I can´t recall the the year, it must have been in the beginning of the 70´s. I was on duty as
an officer at the Finnish Frontier Guards. I was on an skywatching mission in a watchtower close to the east (Russian)
border together with an army pal of mine. It was an arctic cold winter night, and the air was clear, the sky cloudless.
We discovered a very bright set of lights approaching from the east at a very high altitude, at least 100-200 kms.
They were flying at a tremendous speed. When the lights were right over us, they could be seen clearly. Those really
bright objects were five. They flew in a formation like migratory birds. Two of them were at the both sides behind
each other, and one was leading. A sort of flying triangle. They were really flying at a breakneck speed. We estimated
their speed to hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometres per hour. The objects were in sight during a few minutes
and disappeared out of sight to the west. It sure wasn´t any satellite or space junk."
"An other bright object speeding across the sky was observed during the same circumstances. It was also in
the beginning of the 70´s. The thing could be seen during a few minutes and disappeared westbound. This also
wasn´t any meteorite, satellite or space junk."
"It was a sunny summer evening in 1964, I think. The sun was already low on the horizon. I was outdoor together
with my family, on the yard of our home, in the Northern Karelia. We were admiring the sunset, which really was
beautiful. At the eastern horizon, where the sun was, there suddenly appeared five objects in the shape of a saucer
and silver gray colour. Their distance must have been tens of kilometres. We watched the saucers dancing up and
down and sidewise. The things were visible during ten minutes, then they disappeared up in the space. These objects
were not cloud formations, satellites or that kind of stuff. Let´s mention, that the sky was entirely cloudless,
and there were no industrial plants, no airport or military establishments in that area."
"The following observation was made by four persons: except myself there were also my wife, my brother and
his wife. It was a cloudy night in March, in the middle of the 80´s I´d think. We went nightfishing
for burbots on the ice of the artificial lake Uljua in the central Finland. It was just past the midninght hours,
when I observed a bright lightball over the clouds, slowly descending and flying from south to north. The ball
flew across the lake, which is barely one kilometre wide, and landed north of it, among some pine trees, at a distance
of a couple of kilometres from us. We observed this event all four of us. The light was shining for hours at the
place of landing. We didn´t bring skis or any road map and the snow was half a metre deep, so we decided
to not exhaust ourselves by trying to go there. We thought it might have been a meteorological device... It was
pretty big, maybe a couple of metres across and it shone really bright. The object was noiseless and it´s
descend all the way to the ground was slow."
"I was in charge of a working squad of 6-7 men. We were moulding concrete at a place near the south coast.
It was a sunny summerday in 1978. Suddenly we got our eyes on a cigar-shaped thing which was speeding rapidly from
east to west at an altitude of approximately one kilometre. The object was bright green and the distance to us
might have been some 10-30 kilometres. It was visible about 2-3 minutes and disappeared to the west. It could have
been a Russian cruising missile... the speed was great. On the other hand, it could have been something else..."
"Now I´ll tell about an unexplained observation I had, when I was already retired. It must have been
well over 10 years ago. While being still on duty, I was active as a watchdog service officer, and also after my
retirement, I used to train dogs for several years.
It was an evening in February, the sky was cloudless and it was almost dark. I was training a duty-dog in the quiet
streets in the outskirts of my home town in central Finland. I stopped outside a house and ordered the dog to lie
down. I lit a cigarrette. From my previous work I still had the habit of inspecting the sky, especially in the
evening and when the sky was clear. That´s what I did now too. I was looking at the sky southwards, when
I discovered a light approaching at a low speed. I thought it might be some satellite or rocket junk re-entering
the atmosphere and glowning from the friction to the air. The thing was slowly approaching the place where I was,
and for a moment I thought it could be the passenger plane from Jyväskylä to Kajaani being in engine
trouble. I just decided to go into the nearest house and phone the hospital, the fireguards and the police, because
I thought the plane was going to try an emergency landing on the ice of the lake nearby.
The flying object was right at the east side of me when I realized: "Oh God, it´s not an aeroplane -
it´s tremendously huge". It was about 50-80 metres long and shaped as a cigar. Along the side facing
me there were 13 round lit portholes. I could see movement behind them. At the rear end of the thing there were
3 red lights shining with a bright steady light. The lights were arranged in a triangle with two down and one on
the top of them. I estimated the speed of the thing to 50-80 kms per hour, the flight altitude to 500 metres, the
colour of the body appeared to be dark and it was swaying slightly from one side to the other. It was completely
noiseless. I hurried back home and made a phone call to the radar station in Kuopio, but they didn´t find
anything unusual on their screen. Just a few minutes later I got a call from a friend of mine, (now deceased),
a captain, who was skywatch-educated. He told me, that he had made the same observation at the same time as I did.
For both of us, this observation remained unexplained. I can assure, that the thing, if you can call it that, sure
wasn´t anything from this world."
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