'Shining metal spherical elliptical object': a Swedish DC-3 crew, December 1953

DOW-UAP-D163 is an Air Intelligence Information Report — the Air Force's standard form for raw field intelligence until defense-wide reporting standards arrived in the early 1960s — translated from a Swedish media report. At 1437 hours on 17 December 1953, near Hässleholm, the crew of a Transair DC-3 flying at about 2,150 metres reported an object approaching from the opposite direction approximately 600 metres below. Captain Christiernsson described it as 'strongly metallic, nearly round, and slightly elliptical,' visible for six to seven seconds, with no exhaust or condensation trail; it initially struck him as a jet or possibly an unmanned 'robot.' The crew estimated its speed at about the speed of sound. AARO's added note works the arithmetic: at the object's implied altitude of roughly 1,550 metres, the speed of sound is approximately 748 mph.

The Swedish Defense Staff reportedly identified no Swedish aircraft in the area and said it would examine possible radar observations; Swedish authorities had begun an investigation. The report also includes a brief character sketch of Christiernsson from a personal contact, who called him 'most untrustworthy.'

The report sits among nine other early-Cold-War reports in the same release, each with the preparing officer's own read. A B-52 crew over Saudi Arabia in January 1957 tracked a return on the gunnery scope for five to seven minutes (D155). An F-86D pilot near Guam saw a blinking light on New Year's Eve 1956 that a lighted weather balloon would explain only if it had malfunctioned (D156). Professor Giovanni Battista Sias reported a green-blue sphere larger than the full moon over Sassari, Italy in 1952 (D157). Three airmen in British Columbia watched a light hover at 150 and 300 feet (D158). British European Airways crews reported red 'rockets' and a stationary red light in the Berlin air corridor that Soviet authorities 'could not account for' (D159). A radar unit in French Morocco tracked a return shifting between 'V,' 'W' and 'M' shapes and concluded it was probably propagation, jamming, or 'geese or storks in flight' (D160). Two Alaska reports describe lights on the Soviet side of the Bering Strait and off St. Lawrence Island (D161, D162), and a Flying Object Report from Seymour, Indiana describes two gaseous objects with four bright points inside each (D164).