Earlier Sky Reports from the Scandinavian Record

~ Saturday, June 20, 2020 ~

The question the 1947 Røros log entry raises is whether earlier accounts of unusual lights in the Hessdalen area exist in pre-modern sources. This is a straightforward historical question, and the answer is mixed: there is relevant material in the Norwegian clerical and parish record tradition, but most of it is ambiguous enough to require caution.

I want to begin with the methodological problem, because it is the problem that determines everything else. Once you know about Hessdalen — once you have the valley’s unusual geology and forty years of instrument data in your head — there is a powerful tendency to find precursors everywhere. Unusual lights appear in almost every pre-modern historical record from high latitudes. Most of them are aurora. Most of the rest are misidentified meteors, atmospheric refraction events, and the ordinary spectacle of the northern sky at night.

The question is not whether unusual lights were reported. The question is whether any pre-modern reports satisfy the conditions that would make them relevant to the Hessdalen problem: observed from a direction consistent with the valley, noted by a competent observer who excluded the obvious alternatives, on a specific date and time, with enough detail to be distinguishable from aurora.

The 1947 Røros note satisfies all of those conditions. Most other candidates satisfy one.

The parish record tradition

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Norwegian parish priests submitted periodic reports — the præsteinnberetninger — to their bishops. These county surveys covered agricultural conditions, population, unusual events. They are held in the regional archives, the Statsarkivet network, and some have been digitised.

Sky phenomena appear in these records occasionally. Unusual aurora, lights over hills, ignis fatuus-type reports from bog country. The problem for the Hessdalen question is that the Holtålen valley, while not remote, is not a prominent location in the clerical geography — it is not a market town, not a pilgrimage site, not a place where multiple educated observers were stationed. The reports that survive are sparse and their geographical precision is low. I have not found a pre-1900 parish record that unambiguously locates an unusual light in the Hessdalen valley specifically.

This is absence of evidence. It is not evidence of absence.

Hynek’s comment

J. Allen Hynek visited Hessdalen in 1984 as part of the early Project Hessdalen investigations. Hynek spent decades as the scientific advisor to the USAF’s Project Blue Book — he began as a sceptic and became, by the end of his career, convinced that some fraction of reported anomalous aerial phenomena were real physical events that science had not characterised. His visit to Hessdalen was one of the last fieldwork trips of his life.

His comment at the time was that the phenomenon deserved systematic study and would receive more institutional attention if it occurred somewhere more prominent than a small Norwegian farming valley. The comment was accurate. It is also a description of a research failure: the physical phenomenon does not become more or less real depending on whether it occurs in a newsworthy location.

The early reports from the 1930s that Project Hessdalen acknowledges without documentary support may reflect exactly this pattern — events noted by people who had no reason to file formal reports and no mechanism for doing so that would have produced a recoverable archive.

The Central European parallel

I mentioned in an earlier piece that the behavioural descriptions of the Hessdalen lights — rapid movement, sudden halts, configurations of multiple lights — have a structural similarity to accounts in sixteenth-century Central European sources. I intend to write about those sources separately, specifically a 1561 Nuremberg document with an unusually detailed eyewitness account. I am not asserting a connection between whatever was observed over Nuremberg in 1561 and whatever produces the Hessdalen lights. I am noting a resemblance in the phenomenological description that a careful reader might find worth thinking about.

The continuous spectrum is where any serious comparison has to start, because it is the physical constraint that distinguishes the Hessdalen lights from combustion events, from conventional plasma discharge, and from most things that produce visible light. If sixteenth-century observers described something with the same visual characteristics — and some of them did, with sufficient precision — that is a data point. I will say more when I have written the Nuremberg piece.

What the archive project would look like

If someone wanted to survey the Trøndelag historical record systematically for pre-modern Hessdalen light reports, the practical starting point is the Statsarkivet in Trondheim — it holds the regional parish records and county surveys for Sør-Trøndelag from the seventeenth century forward. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute archive in Oslo holds station logs from the 1860s. The Røros copper mine company archive, held partially at the Røros Museum, includes operational records going back to 1644 — a mining operation that scale kept observers in the valley through multiple centuries.

None of this has been surveyed with the Hessdalen question in mind. The 1947 Røros note turned up incidentally, in a batch of scanned records I requested for atmospheric baseline data. There is no particular reason to believe it is unique.

In this series

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