Clas Svahn
Clas Svahn is a Swedish UFO researcher, journalist, and archivist who has spent over five decades documenting unidentified aerial phenomena, field-investigating witnesses, and building what he describes as one of the world's largest UFO archives. He is a leading authority on the 1946 Swedish ghost rocket wave and on Scandinavian UAP cases more broadly, and he has personally interviewed key figures from Betty Hill to Edgar Mitchell.
Archives of the Unexplained
Main article:
Archives of the Unexplained
In 1973, Svahn and colleagues began what became the Archives of the Unexplained (Arkivet för UFO-forskning, AFU), a 16-room building housing witness reports, photographs, audio recordings, radar data, video, and original first-generation documents that no longer exist elsewhere. The AFU holds 22,000 case files from Sweden alone, drawn from what Svahn estimates is roughly one million Swedes — approximately 10% of Sweden's eleven million population — who have seen something unexplained. Files also come from Japan, Russia (including material Svahn retrieved during street fighting in Moscow during the early 1990s), and numerous other countries. The archive also contains the collection of the Borderland Science Research Association — which Svahn describes as the oldest UFO group in the world — retrieved by Svahn personally from a garage in Eureka, California, and shipped to Sweden. Collections of William Corliss and Hilary Evans are also held at the archive.
Research and investigations
Svahn's extensive field investigations — including the ghost rockets wave, radar-corroborated Swedish military sightings, physical evidence cases, and ongoing lake-bottom searches for submerged objects — are documented in the articles on ghost rockets and Betty and Barney Hill abduction.
Svahn holds a piece of tungsten carbide recovered in 1957 from a road on the Swedish island of Veda, northeast of Stockholm. Two carpenters witnessed an object hover above their car (which stopped), then depart; on exiting, they found the tungsten carbide piece in the road — still so hot they could not hold it. Analysis confirmed the metal contains all the impurities present in 1957-era tungsten production, but tungsten is an excellent conductor of heat and should have cooled rapidly; Svahn treats its anomalous temperature as corroborating the witnesses' account.
Svahn's archival rescue efforts extended to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) files — a collection of 18 filing cabinets containing an estimated 15,000 UFO sighting reports, photographs, fragments, and artifacts. After the Lorenzens' deaths and the APRO archive's seizure by individuals who permanently closed them to researchers, Svahn documented the archive's fate in an article titled "Unique UFO Archive Hidden in Warehouse," which UFO historian Richard Dolan cited as a primary source on the APRO files' disappearance.
The ghost rockets phenomenon that Svahn has extensively investigated was also referenced by David Grusch as a historically significant case: "We do know for a fact that Eisenhower sent General James Doolittle to investigate Swedish ghost rockets. These were tons of UFO sightings in Sweden and Finland in the immediate aftermath of World War Two."
Publications
Svahn has authored numerous books on UFO cases and anomalies, including Files of the Unexplained (2024). He has also written a book on solar flares.
Views
Svahn does not claim to be a believer in the extraterrestrial hypothesis and describes himself as "not a believer — just a curious researcher." He is skeptical that the UAP phenomenon reduces to a simple extraterrestrial-visitors model, arguing the phenomenon is far more complex and may involve states that are not entirely physical. He believes the Hessdalen lights valley in Norway is the most reliable European UAP hotspot for sustained observation.
Svahn was named Educator of the Year in Sweden for his public research communication.