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lights there was a small single-engined plane, keeping close on their heels despite the high winds and billowing snow. The year before, early in April 1967, I had pursued a peculiar flying light from the TNT area, an abandoned World War II ammunition dump, north of Point Pleasant to the steep hills behind Henderson, West Virginia. I joined a cluster of people on a hilltop just as a twin-engined plane circled and flew directly at us at treetop level. As it drew closer, it cut its engines and glided over our heads—an idiotic maneuver when flying the treach- erous updrafts surrounding the steep hills and valleys. The cabin was brilliantly illuminated, and the pilot was visible. Because it was about 9 P.M. and pitch-dark, this seemed doubly stupid. Here we had a pilot who was flying at treetop level over very dangerous terrain, yet he deliberately cut his engines and blinded himself by turning on his cabin lights! I sprang into a car and dashed across the Ohio River to the little airfield at Gallipolis, Ohio, to see if the mad flier had landed there. The field was deserted, and none of the parked planes had a warm engine. In any case, few sensible private pilots care to indulge in low-level night flying, and few would be willing to risk their licenses by performing stupid and dangerous stunts over populated areas. A Swedish researcher, Mr. Ake Franzen, has recently been going through the Stockholm newspapers of the 1930’s, piecing together the many fragments of the forgotten Scandinavian flap of 1932-38. He has uncovered more than ninety detailed reports thus far and has tediously translated them into English for us. They form a startling picture. Beginning in 1932, large unmarked airplanes began to appear over northern Sweden, Norway and Finland. They were always described as gray. They frequently appeared during raging blizzards and circled towns, railroads, forts, and ships at sea. Very often these planes would cut their engines while they circled. Many of the descriptions were of huge, multiengined machines. One group of five witnesses declared they had seen a giant plane with eight propellers. In several accounts, groups of three planes were sighted at one time. There were almost no private planes operating in Scandinavia at that time. The giant China Clipper was still under development in the United States, and the clumsy Ford trimotor had cornered the market and was being used by the few commercial airlines then operating. In 1926, Admiral Byrd and Floyd Bennett had flown a Fokker trimotor from Spitsbergen, Norway, to the North Pole. Their flight had received Unidentified Airplanes / 113 The Mystery Planes of 1934