At around 16:45 hours on the 7th January, 1970, an incident is said to have taken place at Imjarvi (near Heinola), Finland. I have had a small obsession with this report because of a number of fascinating aspects. I would like to thank Anders Liljegren of the AFU (Archives For the Unexplained) who has been very helpful on this and other matters.
On that day in 1970, forester Aarno Heinonen (36) and farmer Esko Viljo (38), both of whom were keen amateur athletes were out skiing and had halted in a small glade while descending a small hill to enjoy the few stars visible in the cold sunset. After a short time they heard a buzzing noise and saw a bright light moving through the sky towards them. What happened next took this from being a standard lights-in-the-sky (lits) report.
As the bright light neared them it was just above tree top height and they saw a red-grey mist swirling around it and puffs of smoke emanating from it (shades of Sonny Desvergers). Inside this cloud was a circular, saucer-shaped object that was metallic in appearance and some nine feet (2.74 m) wide. This object had a dome above and, beneath it, were three spheres around the rim, reminiscent of the Adamski flying saucer photographs. From the base of the object a tube suddenly shot out a sharp beam of light down towards the ground. The object had now descended to around 10 feet (3m) from the ground and was almost within touching distance of the men.
Heinonen stated that; “I was standing completely still. Suddenly I felt as if somebody has seized my waist from behind and pulled me backwards. I think I took a step backwards, and in the same second I caught sight of the creature. It was standing in the middle of the light beam with a black box in its hands. From around the opening in the box there came a yellow light, pulsating. The creature was about 35 inches (90 cm) tall, with very thin arms and legs. Its face was pale like wax. I didn’t notice the eyes, but the nose was very strange. It was a hook rather than a nose. The ears were very small and narrow towards the head. The creature wore some kind of overall in a light green material. On its feet were boots of a darker green colour, which stretched above the knee. There were also white gauntlets going up to the elbows, and the fingers were bent like claws around the black box.”
This was definitely not going to be just another UFO sighting.
Viljo described the entity as “luminous like phosphorus” and wearing a conical, metallic-like helmet and that it was less than three feet (91 cm) tall. As the two men stood and stared at the entity it turned a little toward Heinonen and pointed the box and pulsing, blinding light toward him. While the entity stood in the light beam a thick red-grey mist descended from the object and big sparks came from the illuminated circle above the snow. The sparks were estimated to be around 10 cms in length and were red, green and purple in colour. These sparks were slowly floating out in long curves and when they hit the men neither felt anything. The mist became so thick that the men could not see each other and eventually was so thick that they could not see the entity or object –up to this point they believe that 15-20 seconds had elapsed.
Viljo stated that; “Suddenly the circle above the snow decreased, the light-beam floated upwards like a trembling flame and went into the tube on the object. Then it was as if the mist was ‘thrown apart’, and above us the air was empty.” It seems that the men stood without saying anything for a couple of minutes.
Heinonen was paralyzed on his right side and Viljo had to almost carry his friend the two miles (3 km) back to their home. Heinonen had pain in his back and limbs and headache. After a while he vomited and when he urinated it was “black like coffee” and this continued for a couple of months. We know that at 20:00 hrs that evening he saw Dr Pauli Kajanoja at the Heinola clinic both men were examined and the doctor could only prescribe sleeping pills and sedatives as he believed that the symptoms of aching joints and headache would disappear within ten days (which seems a very specific time frame but he did believe that Heinonen’s very low blood pressure indicated shock) but for Heinonen they continued for a lot longer.
As a point of fact five months later he was still suffering from the same pains and although the paralysis of his right leg disappeared he could still not balance properly. His memory was also severely affected and it got so bad that whenever he left home he had to tell his family where he was going so that they could search for him and collect him if he didn’t return. Viljo himself was not unaffected by the event; he had a red and swollen face and had become incoherent and absent-minded.
This sounds unpleasant not just for the men but also their families considering their previous good health; and it was noted that Heinonen reported black or dark coloured urine for some time which is usually and indicator of blood being present.. Dr Pauli Kajanoja stated that “The symptoms he (Heinonen) described are like those after being exposed to radioactivity. Both men seem sincere; I don’t think they had made the thing up. I am sure they were in a state of shock when they came to me; something must have frightened them.”
Had there been one percipient then the natural answer to this encounter would be that the person involved had entered into an altered state. However, things are never that easy in these cases.
There seems to be coincidental confirmation of something unusual having been going on at the time of the encounter when two other people reported UFOs in the sky at the same time and in the same area as the Imjärvi encounter.
We have a very brief, odd, CE3K but it had not been the last incident according to Heinonen as between the time of the encounter and August 1972 he reported some 23 other UFO contacts including occasionally meeting with an extremely beautiful space woman. Not just that but one entity very reminiscent of the Adamski ‘Venusian’ had progressed considerably beyond the use of mere telepathy (as per Adamski) and was able to speak fluent Finnish and that is no easy feat.
It was these later claims tended to create an atmosphere of disbelief even amongst many hardened Ufologists. We can delve into the alternative dimensions theory or even that of UFOs and fairy-lore (since the entity did look somewhat like a character from that) but I think that the problem here is the failure of Ufologists to understand what could be going on. One farmer, Matti Haapaniemi, a neighbour, stated; “Many people in this neighbourhood have laughed at this story. But I don’t think it’s anything to joke about. I have known both Aarno and Esko since they were little boys. Both are quiet, rational fellows and moreover they are abstainers. I am sure their story is true.”
Rather than simply dismiss what percipients report took place after their encounters I threw out my own hard-nosed approach to these cases. By the early 1980s it was quite clear that physiological and psychological symptoms being quite clearly reported were being dismissed as “kooky” or “weird claims” because Ufologists ten to be very limited in their reading material –some who cite some conditions as possible catalysts for cases such as hypnagogic or hypnopompic do so and yet other cases they deal with are quite clearly such but are labelled as genuine events.
Hypnagogic hallucinations are imagined sensations that seem very real and they occur as a person is falling asleep and are also referred to as sleep hallucinations. The term hypnopompic describes the period when a person wakes up –waking dreams. And this is why more psychologists need to be involved in these cases because this is a very complicated situation as a paper in the Schizophrenia Bulletin (September, 2016: 42(5): 1098–1109) titled “What Is the Link Between Hallucinations, Dreams, and Hypnagogic–Hypnopompic Experiences?” By Flavie Waters, Jan Dirk Blom, Thien Thanh Dang-Vu, Allan J. Cheyne, Ben Alderson-Day, Peter Woodruff and Daniel Collerton states:
“By definition, hallucinations occur only in the full waking state. Yet
similarities to sleep-related experiences such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic
hallucinations, dreams and parasomnias, have been noted since antiquity. These
observations have prompted researchers to suggest a common aetiology for these
phenomena based on the neurobiology of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
With our recent understanding of hallucinations in different population groups
and at the neurobiological, cognitive and interpersonal levels, it is now possible
to draw comparisons between the 2 sets of experiences as never before.”
Two people are not going to suffer the same hallucination so that explanation does not work although I noted a conversation once in which two Ufologists suggested that the Imjarvii encounter was a “shared hallucination”. I think that they were referring to Folie à deux -'madness for two'- which is also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD). This is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another. Heinonen and Vilja do not seem to fall into this category of case, however.
We also have to deal with the memory loss and absent mindedness note along with other possible psychological aspects. There is transient global amnesia is a sudden, temporary episode of memory loss that can't be attributed to a more common neurological condition (epilepsy or stroke). During an episode of transient global amnesia the person’s recall of recent events simply vanishes and they cannot remember where they are or how they got there.
Having read some of what Heinonen later reported and the situations around those claimed meetings I believe this was “all in the mind”. But here we come back to what is obviously the actual cause of the sudden change in Heinonen and Viljo: the UFO encounter itself. I noted similarities to the Desvergers case (see last chapter) but the “smoke”/ “mist” and all the other aspects can be found in a number of other reports on record. And I think that more concentration needs to be put into the encounter itself rather than the later claims.
The entity is described in a certain way and we have the percipient approved sketch –it is signed by both men as are some of the other illustrations made at the time. There are similarities with other cases but the problem is that each artist will interpret details in their own way so there can never be an exact match but entities carrying boxes, spheres and even rods are on record. The outfit described matches others and it could be that the “hat” also matches but witnesses remember it shorter or saw it from another angle. Thing here is sending up a red flag.
Above (percipient approved) sketch showing how the Imjarvi object was first observed and its course change and then the cloud/mist appearing as it got closer.
Then there is the confirmation of UFO activity that day independent of the men. At the same time as the skiers observed their UFO Elna Siitari, a farmer’s wife was heading for the cowshed in Paistjarvii a village located some 15 km from Imjarvi. Siitari looked up to see a strange bright light moving toward Imjarvi. At the same time in the village of Paaso which is 10 kms north of Imjarvi a man observed a light phenomenon at 16:45 hrs. This seems to indicate that the men probably did see the same object but up close.
Interesting is the fact that a year before Matti Kontulainen (16) and from Imjarvi observed an object approximately 100 m from the glade where the skiers had their encounter:
“It was about 11:00 p.m. in the evening. It was in February, and no stars were visible. I came skiing through the forest after having been to a friend’s. I was on my way home. It was dark, but suddenly the forest was lit up by a very bright light going above the tree-tops. It was like a gigantic welding-flame. It disappeared very fast…” there is the possibility that Kontulainen saw a meteorite but there is not much to go on.
We have entity and object details from the main encounter and even a step-by-step illustrated guide to the sighting. That the object was seen to make a dramatic turn and head directly toward the two men cannot be seen as coincidence. No “Oh, we always pop down here for a quick fuel check –we never expected people to be here!” It seemed quite deliberate and what happened when the object got closer also seems to have been deliberate but we have to consider this an “opportunistic” event since the entity/entities could not have known that the men would stop at that spot. The farmer’s wife at Paistjarvii was in a village so an object descending there might be seen and the same applies to the witness at Paaso.
The entity appeared and points the box device at Heinonen who feels himself “pulled back” but then the cloud/mist gets dense and the entity and Viljo cannot be seen –Viljo experiences the same. Suddenly the cloud/mist and object are gone. We know that the incident began at “around 16:45 hrs –we have the farmer’s wife’s report- and that the visit to the doctor was at 20:00 hrs and the men viewed the entity 15-20 seconds then stood motionless for around 3 minutes or so not talking but feeling calm and it then took an (estimated) hour for Viljo to help Heinonen home. The problem is that there are only two known times in this chronology –start of the encounter and trip to the clinic. No time-checking on watches (if they had any).
Mist engulfing the duo then -“suddenly”- it was going back up into the object then the object was gone. There is a great deal here to suggest that there was missing time because there are indicators that this was more than just an illogical CE3K incident. What happened during the incident we will never know and GICOFF and its team did the best they could but the idea of missing time back in 1970 was almost science fiction to Ufologists – I tried repeatedly to introduce “Time Lapse” back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and no one was interested. Unless the witnesses reported a UFO, an entity or entities and recalled something that indicated a “Hills scenario” as some called it then it was just a landing case. It must have struck those involved that there was something wrong. However, the two men with their memory and other problems would not have been good candidates for regression hypnosis, though it might have helped them in some way.
I asked Liljegren if anything new had been going on with the report since the AFU newsletter updates in 1980. He told me: “I believe I asked Lasse Ahonen when he was here about the current status but I got the impression no follow-up had been done in more recent years (after what we wrote up in our newsletters). I would doubt that any of the two (Aarno and Esko) are still alive. There is also the problem of the language barrier to Finland. We do have a big file (a standard file folder) crammed with materials on the case but some of it is inaccessible to us "normal" Swedes. We inherited the file from GICOFF (the Gothenburg group) that investigated (which also my Finnish colleague Jorma Heinonen - not a relative of Aarno) tried to do through letter-writing.”
The encounter was fifty years ago so if the men were in their 30s back then and still alive today they would be in their late 80s. Considering their health and other problems it seems unlikely both are still alive and even if they were I doubt that they could add or make sense to what we know about the 1970 event.
It is somewhat sad that we have no idea about the two men after 1980 –it may all be in those GICOFF files. UFOs encounters can be classed as “bizarre” or “borderline reality” but so often it is forgotten that the people in these cases are human beings and need any support they can get and, sadly, Ufology cannot offer that.
Above: the caption says it all.
Above: The illustration of the encounter by Hogman of GICOFF used for the cover of FSR 16/5, 1970
Full case details in Beyond UFOs
References
1. Sven-Olof Frederikson, “Strange Events In The Snow”, Flying Saucer Review (FSR) v. 16 no. 3, 1970
2. Sven-Olof Frederikson, “Finnish Encounter In The Snow”, FSR v.16 no. 4, 1970
3. ditto : “A Humanoid Was Seen At Imjarvi”, FSR v.16 no. 5, 1970
4. Anders Liljegren “The Continuing Story of the Imjarvi Skiers –part 1”, FSR v. 26 no. 3, 1980
5. Anders Liljegren “The Continuing Story of the Imjarvi Skiers –part 2”, FSR v. 26 no. 5, 1980
6. Anders Liljegren “The Continuing Story of the Imjarvi Skiers –part 1”, AFU Newsletter no. 18, Jan-Mar, 1980
7. Anders Liljegren “The Continuing Story of the Imjarvi Skiers –part 2”, AFU Newsletter no. 19, Apr/Sept, 1980
8. Personal correspondence Terry Hooper-Scharf and Anders Liljegren
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