The sphere is a three-dimensional symbol of wholeness, unity, and completeness that embodies the universe, the Earth, and its natural rhythms, including day and night, the changing seasons, and the cycles of nature. Across cultures, the sphere also signifies the divine, infinity, and eternity. Its balanced and symmetrical shape, perfectly round, represents harmony and flawlessness, making it a symbol of perfection. In geometry, the sphere is fundamental as it uses space efficiently, with all points on its surface equidistant from the center. In some way they’re a language, letter and symbols in the language of high strangeness.
The idea of spheres, and other circular shapes is something that comes back over and over again in the paranormal, from UFOs to cryptids (most recently in Scott Carpenter’s bizarre video of a possible Bigfoot portal and, of course, Adam Davis and John Carlson’s spectacular encounter with another alleged portal). But let’s take a look at a couple of spherical UFOs — and other kinds of circular objects hovering in our skies — and I’m saving the best one for last, a truly unique and weird Swedish encounter in 1947.
It’s also a recurring shape in UFO sightings and experiences. In an earlier text, I’ve written about the fairly unknown encounter at Klissberget, where a man calling himself Mr. Anonymous, in a letter and later a telephone call to a journalist, told about his experience: “On his way down he passed an area called Tallberget he saw something that wasn’t there on his way up, a craft of some sort. It was spherical and stood on four legs. It was approximately seven to eight meters in diameter and now it stood there, 20 meters from him. It kinda looked transparent, but he still couldn’t see through it. “I felt hypnotized and was drawn towards the craft, unstrapped by skis and got sucked up through an elevator”, he described what happened next in his letter. Inside he was greeted by three beings, all around 120–130 centimeters in height and very human-like. They were dressed in yellow-beige, baggy clothes and with glass domes over their heads, all adorned with small horns.”
Very strange indeed, but nothing uncommon in the world of high strangeness. The horns on the beings are extra interesting and remind me of the famous encounter at the Cussac Plateau in France on August 29, 1967. Thirteen-year-old Francois and his nine-year-old sister Anne-Marie (along with the family dog, Médor) met four short humanoids while out herding cows. The humanoids were seemingly collecting samples from the soil. Anne-Marie called out to them, “Do you want to play with us?”, which scared the little fellas so much that they took off up into the air and into a brightly shining sphere. Excited, they ran home and told about the “devils” they had seen. There was no mention of horns, but the symbolism is there, of course, both as physical horns and in the word used by the kids. And let’s not forget, the kids also reported the smell of sulfur, which is associated with both UFOs and the devil.
In Jacques Vallée’s seminal book on UFOs and folklore, Passport to Magonia, a case is described from October 7, 1954, in which a witness named Mr. Margaillon reported seeing a hemisphere-shaped object that had landed in a field in Montcuq, France. The object was approximately two and a half yards in diameter, and during the observation, the witness experienced a sudden lack of air and felt paralyzed — a phenomenon not uncommon in reports of landings. Additionally, the small entities associated with such sightings were described as having reddish-orange, glowing eyes in the dark.
Another story is an encounter that occurred in late August of 1963 near Sagrada Família, Brazil. Three boys, Fernando Eustáquio, his brother Ronaldo, and their neighbor Marcos, were drawing water from the well in the Eustáquio garden when they noticed a hovering sphere above the trees. The sphere had four or five rows of people inside it, and an opening under the sphere became visible, from which two light rays shot downward. A slender, ten-foot-tall being descended as if gliding on the two beams of light, alighting in the garden and walking awkwardly for around twenty feet. The giant wore a transparent helmet and had a dark “eye” in the middle of his forehead. His tall boots each had a strange triangular spike, which left an unusual impression in the soft ground and could be seen for several days afterward. His shiny garment inflated as soon as he touched the ground. He had a square pack on his chest that emitted intermittent flashes of light, and inside the sphere, the three boys could see occupants behind control panels “turning knobs and flicking switches.”
What’s a text about high strangeness and bubbles without mentioning farmer William Bosak’s adventure on the evening of December 2, 1974? You tell me, what is it worth? Please PayPal me your suggestions. No, just kidding, of course. Bosak’s encounter has lived its own life for a number of years now, and even had new catchy names like “bubblesquatch” and “balloonsquatch”, but to me, it will only be known as… THE BOSAK HUMANOID! What a great name! William… Let’s call him Bill, was on his way home from a meeting in Frederic, Polk County, Wisconsin, when he saw an object by the road. While not a classic sphere or bubble per se, it certainly fits into the category of this article. Bosak described it like this, “It had a curved front of glass and inside I could see a figure with its arms raised above its head,” told reporters, and in later interviews went into more detail regarding the weird creature inside the “bubble,” as quoted from A.P.R.O. Bulletin January-February 1975: “The human had hair sticking out from the sides of its head with ears protruding out about three inches and they were shaped like a calf’s ear. It had no collar or shirt with a seam in front but appeared to be clothed in something tannish-brown in color and fitted (skin-tight) like a diver’s suit. Both arms were extended above its head and hair stuck out from the outside of the arms. There was no beard, but there was hair or fur on the upper part of the body. The rest of it, from the waist down, was not visible because of the fog.”
The encounter turns even more interesting as Bosak, who was a dairy farmer, compared the creature’s ears to something from a calf. While it’s easy to say this could have been some kind of ultradimensional bigfoot or dogman or whatever makes your heart tick, it feels more like a calfman — or cowman, depending on how one would take a look at it. One thing is for sure, it’s a bubble sighting worth mentioning.
Let’s turn to something more modern, and a case which will lead us forward into the Swedish one I’m gonna write about. The year was 1996, and two women and two children were out driving on September 23 when they saw a huge triangle-shaped craft hovering at Falkland Hill, Fife. It shot off and disappeared to a hill not far away. The witnesses drove home and told their husbands about it, who joined them back to the area. The triangle was now hovering near the hill, above a field, and around it, they could see hundreds of smaller beings moving around what looked like boxes. They seemed to be monitored by taller beings. Above it all, a big “brain-like” translucent object was hovering, kinda like it was overseeing the whole operation! If this wasn’t weird enough, something even crazier happened moments later when the witnesses noticed how a number of bubbles were approaching them, and in each of the bubbles, they could see a face!
These small, aerial, bubble-ish flying vehicles make me think of Victor Fleming’s 1939 fantasy-musical, The Wizard of Oz, where the good witch is seen arriving in a transparent bubble in true fae fashion. Once again, fairy tale mythology interacts with allegedly real events. An archetypal symbol from popular culture — or is it the opposite, a folkloristic symbol integrated into mainstream entertainment? Another, later example, can be found in William Cameron Menzies’s 1953 science fiction classic Invaders from Mars, where the titular invader resides in a sphere. If Bernt Enström ever saw The Wizard of Oz before his encounter in 1947 or later, Invaders from Mars, we will never know, but he claims that at the time, he had never heard of anything like it before.
In an interview with Clas Svahn in UFO-Aktuellt, issue 4, 2015, he recalls the strange experience in his hometown of Älvsbyn with vivid details. He was 11 years old at the time and was walking home during the late evening on October 1, 1947. When he looked up at the sky, he saw three circles, kind of like rings with a void in the middle. They were in all the colors of the rainbow and seemed to be pulsating and spinning very fast. They went down, landed on a meadow 150 meters away from his home, after first melting together into one, disappearing behind the outhouse.
When Bernt finally entered his yard, it didn’t take long until the next otherworldly event happened. From behind a woodpile, something best described as a bubble came flying, around 30 meters away, and approximately two decimeters above the ground. It was transparent, and inside he saw a small man, around the same height as himself, sitting and piloting the bubble. In his hand, he held some kind of rod, which he seemed to control and make the bubble move forward with. The surface of the bubble was intact, but somehow the rod made its way out from it and down towards the ground. The bubble had moved around ten meters when two more bubbles came up from behind it, from the same place, also with similar small men with rods. They all sat in chairs and had big ears. The bubble vehicles themselves were around 1.5 meters in diameter, and the men a bit shorter. “I remember I thought it was strange how the men could fit in there, but during that time, I had never heard of anything like this”, he told Clas Svahn in his 2015 interview. The men in the last two bubbles seemed to talk with each other, and Bernt got the notion that they noticed his presence and laughed at him.
The odd visitors then moved further behind the above-mentioned outhouse, where the colorful rings had earlier landed, and disappeared from sight. Bernt walked after them to see where they went, but nothing was there. He just left it at that and went inside, and it took a while for him to even mention the incident to anyone. His parents claimed he read too many books and maybe entering puberty had something to do with it. Bernt waited 68 years until he once again talked about the incident, and then as an official report to UFO-Sverige. It felt good to “get rid” of the story and also share it with others, if anyone would be interested in his experience.
On an interesting note, a similar observation was made by Mrs. H.M. Dickinson and a male friend in Surrey, Maine. It was on an evening in late April 1979, and Dickinson was sitting on the porch, chilling with her white-haired fox terrier (no name available, sorry), when her friend showed up. After entering through the main door and greeting her and the dog, he suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that?!” Outside the house, not far away from the porch, came a small transparent craft, dimly lit and “just big enough for one occupant and shaped like an antique Edison Electric light bulb,” as Mrs. Dickinson later told the editor of the CUFOS Associate Newsletter. Yeah, I know, it’s not strictly a sphere or a bubble, but damn it looks very much the same!
Like triangles, cubes, and other kinds of geometric symbols, the sphere is timeless. It’s something one can recognize from a far distance. It’s as if these objects, both material and non-material, are a language that we have to decipher. Jacques Vallée goes into similar territory in his book Dimensions: “Emerging fully armed into our local universe, the UFOs provide the physical support for our own dreams. We do the rest. Our brains erect a ladder of symbols toward the darkened skies where the strange machines hover, and we meet them more than halfway across the bridge of their strangeness — perhaps because we vaguely perceive that their irresistible, pathetic adventure is closely related to our own. But the extraterrestrial theory is not good enough, because it is not strange enough to explain the facts”.
The idea of the phenomenon as a language, as symbols, attracts me. Maybe these visions, or whatever they are, are a way to connect us to ourselves and our own world rather than the universe?
Special thanks to Clas Svahn and Flying Saucer Review for the kind permission to use material from their archives.
Fred Andersson is a Swedish story producer and writer with over twenty years of experience in commercial television and the author of five books. He lives in Märsta, outside Stockholm. Join him on Twitter and Instagram.
Sources:
“Cam Footage: Entity arrives through a portal in the National Park” (Anomalien.com, March 2, 2023)
Adam Davies & John Carlsson (Binell of America, 2015)
“We Will Be Back: The 1944 Alien Abduction at Klissberget” (Fred Andersson, Medium, January 11, 2023)
“Occupants in France “ (The A.P.R.O. Bulletin July-August, 1968)
“Encounter with Devils” (Joël Mesnard & Claude Pavy, Flying Saucer Review, October-November, 1968)
Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers (Jacques Vallée, 1969)
“Astounding claim of an alleged flying triangle landing in Scotland” (OVNI, December, 1996)
“Occupant Case In Wisconsin” (The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, January-February, 1975)
“Varelser i bubblor sågs hösten 1947” (Clas Svahn, UFO-Aktuellt, issue 4, 2015)
“Seated Occupant In Light-Bulb-Shaped 1979 Maine CE-111” (CUFOS Associate Newsletter, February-March, 1984)
Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (Jacques Vallée,1988)
Fred Andersson is a Swedish story producer, researcher and writer with over twenty years of experience in commercial television and the author of three books. He lives in Märsta, outside Stockholm, with his photographer husband Grzegorz and two overly active cats.
