May 1946 — four cases: Gösta Carlsson's famous Ängelholm forest encounter, a 300-foot disc over Lafayette, New York, a cigar-shaped object over Landskrona, Sweden, and an elliptical object over LaGrange, Florida. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
1946: May UFO & Entity Sightings Archive
May 1946’s defining case is one this archive had, without realizing it, filed twice under two different town names: a 28-year-old Swedish railway worker named Gösta Carlsson, walking home through the Kronoskogen forest near Ängelholm on the evening of May 18, encountered a domed disc undergoing what looked like repairs, its eleven crew members in white coveralls gesturing him to keep his distance. It became Sweden’s single most famous UFO contact claim — famous enough that Carlsson built a concrete monument on the site himself in 1972, a monument tourists still visit today. The rest of the month reads like the opening notes of the Scandinavian “ghost rocket” wave proper: cigar-shaped objects over Denmark and Sweden through the month’s final week, right as the phenomenon that would generate roughly 2,000 reports that year was beginning to build.
Date: May, 1946
Location: Lafayette, New York
Time: Noon
Summary: A flying disc was observed. One disc, about 300 feet across, was observed by two witnesses for two minutes (Hill).
Source: Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Mysteries of the Skies: UFOs in Perspective, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1968
Date: May 18, 1946
Location: Kronoskogen forest, near Ängelholm, Skåne, Sweden
Time: Evening, approximately 18:00-22:00
Case Status: Disputed
Summary: Gösta Carlsson, then a 28-year-old railway worker walking home through the Kronoskogen forest, reported seeing a light and going to investigate. He described a changing-color, domed disc, roughly 80 feet across with a cupola and a 5-meter mast, resting on the ground about 40 feet away, emitting a whining sound. Around it, 11 beings roughly 6 feet tall, wearing white coveralls and transparent helmets, appeared to be conducting repair work; one gestured for Carlsson to keep his distance. Carlsson watched for approximately 30 minutes before the craft took off, emitting a bright red light. At the site, investigators later noted burned grass, ground imprints, and a fin mark forming a roughly 5-meter equilateral triangle pattern. [Full Report]
Source: Flying Saucer Review, March-April 1972; Clas Svahn and Gösta Carlsson, Mötet i gläntan (“The Meeting in the Clearing”), UFO-Sweden, 1995
Source Status: DISPUTED — Sweden’s best-known and most extensively investigated UFO contact claim; UFO-Sweden’s own decades-long investigation, led by researcher Clas Svahn, found no convincing evidence the event occurred as Carlsson described it.
Editorial note: This case previously appeared twice on this archive as separate entries — once under “Skjaldarvik, Sweden” and once under “Ängelholm, Sweden” — both citing the same witness (“Carlsson, G”) and the same source (Flying Saucer Review, March-April 1972). These are the same event; “Skjaldarvik” does not correspond to any location near Ängelholm and appears to be a transcription error somewhere in this archive’s source chain. Merged into one entry, corrected to the well-documented date of May 18, 1946, and given a full report given the case’s outsized cultural significance — Carlsson later built a monument on the site (1972), which remains a tourist destination and a Swedish National Heritage-adjacent landmark today.
Date: May 1946
Location: LaGrange, Florida
Time: Noon
Summary: A Navy gunnery and radar officer observed a dark elliptical object which moved slowly overhead, disappearing into a cloud bank.
Source: NICAP UFO Evidence, 1964, Hall
Date: May 24, 1946
Location: Landskrona, Sweden (see editorial note on location)
Time: 03:00
Summary: A cigar-shaped object was observed. One cigar-shaped object, about 5 feet across, was observed by more than three experienced male witnesses.
Source: Loren E. Gross, Mystery of the Ghost Rockets, self-published, Fremont, 1974
Editorial note: Previously listed as “Landskrona, Denmark.” Landskrona is a city in Skåne, Sweden, not Denmark (though it sits directly across the Öresund strait from Denmark); corrected here. This case, sourced to Loren Gross’s dedicated Ghost Rockets history, is among the earliest entries of the main 1946 Scandinavian wave proper.
Date: May 25, 1946
Location: Huddinge, Sweden
Time: Around midnight
Summary: A cigar-shaped object was observed by one experienced male witness. Chauffeur incident.
Source: AFU Sweden (Archives for the Unexplained)
Date: May 28, 1946
Location: Stora Mellösa, Sweden
Time: Daytime
Summary: A cigar-shaped object was observed.
Source: AFU Sweden (Archives for the Unexplained)
Date: May 29, 1946
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Time: 18:30
Summary: A daytime object was reported.
Source: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
May 1946 — Sweden’s Most Famous UFO Story Begins
The Gösta Carlsson case is, by a wide margin, the most culturally significant entry this archive has yet encountered for 1946 — not because it is the best-verified, but because of what it became. This revision merges what had been two separate entries for the same event, corrects the date to the well-documented May 18, 1946, and treats the case’s fame and its evidentiary weakness as two separate facts: UFO-Sweden’s own extensive investigation, led by researcher Clas Svahn working directly with Carlsson for decades, could not corroborate the story as told, even as the site became a genuine national landmark with its own monument.
The rest of the month traces the opening days of the Scandinavian “ghost rocket” wave that would dominate the second half of 1946 — cigar-shaped objects reported across Sweden’s final week of May, with one location correction (Landskrona sits in Sweden, not Denmark, as previously listed). A misplaced June-dated entry describing contactee Howard Menger’s first claimed encounter has been removed from this page and flagged for the June archive, where it belongs.
“Några övertygande bevis för att händelsen gått till som Gösta Karlsson beskrev den finns inte.” (“No convincing evidence exists that the event occurred as Gösta Carlsson described it.”)
UFO-Sweden, official case assessment of the May 18, 1946 Ängelholm encounter.
