Image (c)2024 respective copyright ownerThe 1970 Imjarvi skiers encounter (see previous post/video is one that has fascinated me since I first heard about it in the 1970s. Flying Saucer Review published what it wanted and that was that the case was purely a possible extraterrestrial encounter. Anything after that first reporting was ignored.
It never fit in with the what FSR wanted.
To be honest, when I got the old AFU Newsletters back in 1980 I read them. Read them again. Then again and I just thought to myself "Was all this psychological?" Well, no it was not. The physiological effects, etc., were quite real and at the time I wondered whether there was any time loss involved because there was something missing. . Just reading the account once had me scratching my head as it was similar to watching a 30 minutes long TV show with 10 minutes cut half way through.
As the AFU state; much more information may be in the archive file which is large but everything is in Finnish and Finnish is known as one of the most difficult languages to learn and I have tried over the last couple decades!
The English language information we have from the AFU Newsletter seems strange and bizarre and only came from one of the percipients -Heinonen. This creates problems in that the rather conservative and narrow-minded Ufologists cannot accept the case at all. If they did then they would have to accept Heinonen's later claims. Well, yes but it is not all black and white.
I have written extensively on the psychological impact on percipients of these encounters. I am quite sure in that large Finnish language file there is more information and here we may have one explanation for Heinonen's claims.
The first is that more happened than can be recalled or than is reported in English language sources. If -and this is only speculation as there is no known evidence of this- there was an abduction experience with suppressed memory then what Heinonen later reported could be confused recollections.
The second possible explanation, since Heinonen was the most physically and psychologically affected by what happened and he appears to have tried everything to get help and even later when he hit hard times he was trying to find answers. Society in the 1970s/1980s was certainly not willing or even wanting to help someone injured in a UFO incident. Contacting the Swedish Ufologists he was certainly not being paid for his story.
The way he was affected was Heinonen having some type of post traumatic Stress disorder experiences. Something triggering "flash-back" and creating the new events in his mind. Certainly Charles Hickson after the 1973 Pascagoula, Mississippi encounter began to make other claims and also began -if true- to drink more heavily.
When it comes to encounters we are dealing with normal human beings, some who previously joked about and mocked others who had a CE3K experience and these events would be shattering their entire world view and all they thought that they knew. That in itself would have a major psychological impact. Ufologists are mainly getting the money/publicity earning "abduction" story and very rarely even keep in touch with percipients unless to see if "more has happened" ($$$).
The lack of ethics and any type of ethical treatment of percipients I have written on before. The lack of interest in helping percipients with physiological and seeming PTSD after events getting help is commonplace.
I think that any Ufologist who speaks Finnish willing to contact the AFU might find more information but as it stands this is a high strangeness report but as with a lot of such reports Ufology has failed to fully investigate and report on (oh, and American Ufologists need to understand that these events take place around the world not just in the United States).
