Hessdalen: What the Valley Actually Looks Like : comments

Hessdalen: What the Valley Actually Looks Like

~ Friday, March 15, 2019 ~

In central Norway, roughly 120 kilometres south of Trondheim, there is a farming valley twelve kilometres long with a permanent population of around 150 people. The river Hesja runs through it north to south. For most of the twentieth century, no one outside Holtålen municipality had heard of it. Since the early 1980s, it has been the site of the most sustained scientific investigation of anomalous luminous phenomena in the world.

I want to start with the geography, because the geography is not incidental. Most accounts of the Hessdalen lights begin with the sightings. I think that is the wrong starting point. The valley has a specific geology, and every serious theory about what produces the lights connects back to it.

The mineral structure of the valley

The eastern bank of the Hesja valley contains rock rich in zinc and iron. The western bank is predominantly copper-bearing. At the southern end of the valley lies one of Norway’s largest unmined ore deposits — hundreds of tonnes of copper and zinc still in the ground. Old sulfur mine workings run throughout the valley floor, and rain causes sulfur to leach into the river almost daily. The bedrock throughout is quartz-bearing crystalline rock.

This is not background detail. The east–west contrast in mineral composition, the high sulphur content, the conductive ore zones — these form an elliptical structure approximately six by twelve kilometres oriented southwest to northeast, following the shape of a gabbro intrusion beneath the valley. When researchers try to explain the lights, they are working with this geology as their material.

What the lights look like

Sightings have been reported since at least the 1930s. The first period of widespread documentation came with a peak between December 1981 and mid-1984, when witnesses were reporting fifteen to twenty sightings per week. Since then the frequency has declined to roughly ten to twenty per year, but the phenomenon has not stopped. The automated monitoring station installed in 1998 — the first of its kind anywhere in the world for this type of phenomenon — is still running.

The lights appear both by day and at night. They are usually white, yellow, or red. Duration ranges from a few seconds to over an hour. Behaviour varies: sometimes extremely rapid movement, sometimes slow oscillation, sometimes a stationary hover. The variation is itself a data problem — it is not obvious that all observed events are produced by the same mechanism.

Hessdalen valley, winter 1953. Photograph by Billedbladet NÅ, National Archives of Norway.

What this is not

I should be precise about the status of the Hessdalen lights, because the topic attracts a great deal of confident misclassification from both directions.

It is not a folk legend. There is no established tradition of supernatural lights in this particular valley before the modern sighting period, and the contemporary witnesses were farmers and townspeople reporting what they saw, not repeating an inherited story.

It is also not, in any straightforward sense, a UFO story. The UFO literature has absorbed Hessdalen enthusiastically, but the phenomenon has been investigated by engineers and physicists from Norwegian and Italian universities using radar, spectroscopes, and magnetometers. It has been the subject of peer-reviewed papers in Acta Astronautica and the Journal of Applied Geophysics. J. Allen Hynek, who spent decades as the scientific advisor to the USAF’s Project Blue Book, visited the valley and concluded that the phenomenon deserved systematic study. His comment at the time — that it would attract more institutional attention if it occurred somewhere more prominent — was accurate and not flattering to the institutions.

What the Hessdalen lights are is an unresolved physical problem with a substantial documentary record and no satisfactory explanation. That is a narrower and more useful description.