The Spitzbergen UFO Crash
In the early 1950s, rumors began circulating that a crashed UFO had been recovered on the Norwegian-owned island of Spitzbergen. Spitzbergen, or Spitsbergen, is one of a group of islands called Svalbard, which have been Norwegian possessions since the 1920s.
The islands lie over 500 miles north of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. The few thousand inhabitants of the island were once mostly coal miners, but in recent years an increase in tourism due to the natural beauty of the islands has opened up other areas of income for them.
The 1946 crash story:
There are actually two separate UFO crash stories about Spitzbergen. The first is that a crashed UFO and alien bodies were discovered there in May, 1946. The story goes that in August of 1946 retired (General James H. Doolittle) made a visit to Spitzbergen to see the craft while on a trip to Sweden for his employer, the Shell Oil Company. Some sources say he arranged for it to be brought to the U.S. for study.
This story is said to have been reported briefly by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and to have been immediately pulled from the news media by the U.S. military. It has been said that "according to former sailors who were serving on the battleship U.S.S. Alabama at the time, the UFO was brought to the U.S. on that vessel directly from Spitsbergen."
The 1946 story is a mixture of stories that are told differently by different sources. General Doolittle went to Sweden for the Shell Oil Company in 1946, and he was apparently asked to investigate the phenomenon of "Ghost Rockets" while on this trip. Whether he went to Spitzbergen during this trip is unverifiable. Several sources say that Dorothy Kilgallen claimed to have been told by someone high in the British government (Possibly Lord Mountbatten.) that a crashed UFO had been recovered and was being studied by the British and U.S. governments. However, many of the sources make no mention of Spitzbergen, insinuating instead that Britain itself was the crash site. Kilgallen, although she is perhaps best known today for being a panelist on the TV game show "What's My Line?" in the 1950s and 1960s, was a well-known journalist who not only wrote a "gossip column", but also covered hard news stories. She covered the Lindbergh kidnapping and in the 1950s covered the Sam Sheppard murder trial. She died of a drugs & alcohol overdose under what some said were (mysterious circumstances) after interviewing Jack Ruby about the Kennedy assassination in 1965. Her item about a UFO crash is said to have appeared in “The Los Angeles Examiner”.
The islands lie over 500 miles north of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. The few thousand inhabitants of the island were once mostly coal miners, but in recent years an increase in tourism due to the natural beauty of the islands has opened up other areas of income for them.
The 1946 crash story:
There are actually two separate UFO crash stories about Spitzbergen. The first is that a crashed UFO and alien bodies were discovered there in May, 1946. The story goes that in August of 1946 retired (General James H. Doolittle) made a visit to Spitzbergen to see the craft while on a trip to Sweden for his employer, the Shell Oil Company. Some sources say he arranged for it to be brought to the U.S. for study.
This story is said to have been reported briefly by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and to have been immediately pulled from the news media by the U.S. military. It has been said that "according to former sailors who were serving on the battleship U.S.S. Alabama at the time, the UFO was brought to the U.S. on that vessel directly from Spitsbergen."
The 1946 story is a mixture of stories that are told differently by different sources. General Doolittle went to Sweden for the Shell Oil Company in 1946, and he was apparently asked to investigate the phenomenon of "Ghost Rockets" while on this trip. Whether he went to Spitzbergen during this trip is unverifiable. Several sources say that Dorothy Kilgallen claimed to have been told by someone high in the British government (Possibly Lord Mountbatten.) that a crashed UFO had been recovered and was being studied by the British and U.S. governments. However, many of the sources make no mention of Spitzbergen, insinuating instead that Britain itself was the crash site. Kilgallen, although she is perhaps best known today for being a panelist on the TV game show "What's My Line?" in the 1950s and 1960s, was a well-known journalist who not only wrote a "gossip column", but also covered hard news stories. She covered the Lindbergh kidnapping and in the 1950s covered the Sam Sheppard murder trial. She died of a drugs & alcohol overdose under what some said were (mysterious circumstances) after interviewing Jack Ruby about the Kennedy assassination in 1965. Her item about a UFO crash is said to have appeared in “The Los Angeles Examiner”.