Let us travel back to 1981, when people in Norway's Hessdalen valley began seeing something strange in their night skies. Colored lights that hung silently sometimes appeared above the valley. Curious onlookers found they were best seen from a slope at the north end of the valley, looking south, and within a few years UFO seekers started converging on Hessdalen. And ever since, there has been one of the lengthiest and most technical of all UFO investigations.
Some call them UFOs, some call them ghost lights, some call them Earthlights. None of the researchers have a very good idea what they are, but Hessdalen's residents don't seem too concerned. Theirs is a small, quiet valley, well off the beaten path, and only a few hundred people live in its scattered village. In 1983, Dr. Erling Strand, a UFO researcher, initiated Project Hessdalen as a sort of central framework for all the information gathered by UFOlogists and other researchers. Strand was convinced that some unknown branch of physics was responsible for the strange lights, and he encouraged as many scientists as he could to join his project.
