They were UFOs, meteorites or V1 and V2 missiles fallen into the hands of the Soviets at the end of the II World War the “ghost rockets” that between May and December 1946 were repeatedly sighted over the Scandinavia, but even over South Europe and North Africe? 70 years after no one still is able t ogive an official answer to this question.

The V1/V2 hypothesis

The first formulated hypothesis, i.e. that might be V1 and V2 rockets developed by Nazis in the Peenemünde base, fallen in Soviet hands, alarmed the Swedish authorities so much that Swedish Army forbade to the newspapers to reveal the precise location of the ghost rockets sightings or to give details about trajectory and presumed speed of the mysterious unidentified flying objects. However many of 2,000 sightings, 200 of which verified with radar returns, sometimes even with recovered physical fragments, happened over Greek and North Africa skies, a long way from the presumed Soviet launch site.

The Santorini Commission

Greek government decided to give a leading role in a committee of inquiry to physicist Paul Santorini, a Manhattan Project scientist,but, as Santorini revealed in 1967, once concluded that the flying objects recordered over the Greek skyes were not V1 or V2 missiles, greek army, after some talks with Us military officials, quashed the investigation. Which for Santorini is the proof that they wanted to maintain the secret regardin a “superior” (alien?) technology because there was no defense against it at that moment.

Meteorites or contrails

Meanwhile it has been widely reported in the media, both in Sweden both in Greek, that ghost rockets could be just meteorites, particularly since the peaks of the sightings was recordered between the 9 and 11 August 1946, i.e. within the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. However, most other sightings simply displayed characteristics inconsistent with a natural phenomenon like a meteor shower. Decades later the scientific skeptic Robert Sheaffer advanced the hypothesis that in such cases might have been contrails of high altitude planes.

Ghost rockets were UFOs?

A top secret Usafe military documento from 4 November 1948, declassified only in 1997, stated however that military investigators at time suggested that ghost rockets origin could be alien. In the document is written that when the theory was formulated, “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”.

The experts therefore suggested “ that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the Earth”. A theory that still is staying in place, even after Swedish directors Kerstin Übelacker and Michael Cavanagh shot a documentary about Swedish ghost rockets(“Spökraketerna”), by interviewing witnesses and analyzing and by making public through the website www.ghostrockets.se tens of new documents concerning the cold case.