The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ 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.
~ Friday, February 14, 2020 ~
Earlier this year, while requesting digitised historical weather data from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute for a separate project on atmospheric baseline conditions, I received a batch of scanned observation logs from the Røros station. Røros is a mining town approximately fifteen kilometres northwest of the Hessdalen valley. The station has been operating since the nineteenth century. I was looking for temperature and precipitation records. What I found, in a log entry dated February 14, 1947, was something else.
~ 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.