Conventional prop-driven airplanes with discernible wings and tails are an integral part of the UFO mystery. Although international law requires all aircraft to bear identifying marking and license numbers on their wings, tails, and fuselages, none of these mystery airplanes bother to comply...

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...

On April $0, 1934, Major General Reutersward, commanding general of upper Norrland, Sweden, issued the following statement to the press:

Comparison of these reports shows that there can be no doubt about illegal air traffic over our secret military areas There are many reports from reliable people which describe close observations of the enigmatic fliers. And in every case the same remark has been noted: No insignias or identifying marks were visible on the machine....It is impossible to explain away the whole thing as imagination. The question is: Who are they? And why have they been invading our air territory?

When all of the well-described ghost-flier sightings of 1934 are laid out on a map, their route becomes clear. They seemed to have followed a great arc week after week, circling southward into northern Norway, sweeping across Sweden, and heading north again over Finland. If they were following such an arc, the upper part of the circle had to lie somewhere in the Arctic Ocean, perhaps in the vicinity of the very thinly populated island of Spitsbergen. An alternate route could have brought them from northern Greenland. There have been many interesting sighting in Greenland...

The hundreds of UFO flights seemingly emanating from the Arctic regions and following routes south have helped reinforce the popular theory that flying saucers are coining from a hole in the North Pole. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization has advanced the theory that the objects enter the earth's polar regions from space in order to avoid the intense radiation belts which are concentrated in space above the temperate zones.