In the early 1950s, rumors began circulating that a crashed UFO had been recovered on the Norwegian-owned island of Spitzbergen. Spitzbergen, or Spitsbergen, is one of a group of islands called Svalbard, which have been Norwegian possessions since the 1920s. The islands lie over 500 miles north of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. The few thousand inhabitants of the island were once mostly coal miners, but in recent years an increase in tourism due to the natural beauty of the islands has opened up other areas of income for them.
The 1946 crash story:
There are actually two separate UFO crash stories about Spitzbergen. The first is that a crashed UFO and alien bodies were discovered there in May, 1946. The story goes that in August of 1946 retired General James H. Doolittle made a visit to Spitzbergen to see the craft while on a trip to Sweden for his employer, the Shell Oil Company. Some sources say he arranged for it to be brought to the U.S. for study.
This story is said to have been reported briefly by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and to have been immediately pulled from the news media by the U.S. military. It has been said that "according to former sailors who were serving on the battleship ALABAMA at the time, the UFO was brought to the U.S. on that vessel directly from Spitsbergen."
The 1946 story is a mixture of stories that are told differently by different sources. Doolittle went to Sweden for the Shell Oil Company in 1946, and he was asked to investigate the phenomenon of "Ghost Rockets" while on this trip. Whether he went to Spitzbergen during this trip is unverifiable. Several sources say that Dorothy Kilgallen claimed to have been told by someone high in the British government (Possibly Lord Mountbatten.) that a crashed UFO had been recovered and was being studied by the British and U.S. governments. However, many of the sources make no mention of Spitzbergen, insinuating instead that Britain itself was the crash site. Kilgallen, although she is perhaps best known today for being a panelist on the TV game show "What's My Line?" in the 1950s and 1960s, was a well-known journalist who not only wrote a "gossip column", but also covered hard news stories. She covered the Lindbergh kidnapping and in the 1950s covered the Sam Sheppard murder trial. She died of a drugs & alcohol overdose under what some said were mysterious circumstances after interviewing Jack Ruby about the Kennedy assassination in 1965. Her item about a UFO crash is said to have appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner.
The 1952 crash story:
The other Spitzbergen crash story first appeared in the German newspaper Saarbrücker Zeitung in June 1952. The article, entitled "Auf Spitzbergen landete Fliegende Untertasse", was soon picked up by several other German newspapers, with many of them citing The Stuttgarter Tagerblatt as the original source. The story was that jets of the Norwegian Air Force spotted a crashed UFO while flying over Spitzbergen on maneuvers. The craft was disc-shaped with a series of jets around the rim of the disc to make it spin. According to the first article about the crash, the craft was an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle with Russian writing on the controls, but as the story was embroidered with each retelling, it soon acquired seven alien crewmen who were burned to death in the crash.
Journalist Frank Edwards wrote about this story in Flying Saucers - Serious Business, citing a Stuttgarter Tagerblatt article as his source. He also mentioned that he had written to a member of the Norwegian Board of Inquiry that had investigated the case and, four months later had received the following reply:
I regret that it is impossible for me to respond to your questions at this time.
What do we make of these stories?
Ole Jonny Brĉnne, of UFO Norway, says that his investigation shows that the second story must be a hoax. He says that the Norwegian Air Force had no jets in 1952 that could have been flying over Spitzbergen. He also went though the 1952 files of the island's own newspaper, Svalbardposten and was unable to find even the slightest mention of the story, likewise for Norwegian newspapers of that year. He was also unable verify that there was ever a newspaper called The Stuttgarter Tagerblatt.
The later German newspaper stories seem to have confused the Spitzbergen story with another purported UFO crash that was supposed to have occured on the North Sea Island of Helgoland (Heligoland), a German possession.
As for the tantalizing 1946 story, its origins seem to be a mystery. Who can say that there isn't a grain of truth in it?