There’s a foreign-language documentary making the rounds that’s destined to flop in the U.S. for obvious reasons: no blaring hype, no epic proportions, and an unhurried narrative pace that’s more meditation than dramatic tension. As Americans, of course, we prefer messages gift-wrapped in tidy payoffs, or arterial spray, or at least decent fireworks. So nah, not much hope on this side of the pond for “Ghost Rockets,” a 72-minute subtitled offering from Sweden. But it spoke volumes to De Void, and maybe it’ll speak to anyone else who’s ever wondered why in the hell they squandered so much time on a journey with no prospects for rewards. Like nothing before it, “Ghost Rockets” holds a mirror up to that lonely, largely futile but perhaps reaffirming endeavor.
Hardcores know the term from the UFO wave that swept the Scandinavian peninsula in 1946, a year before “flying saucers” entered the language. Initially thought to have been Soviet weapons systems designed by captured Nazi scientists, ghost rockets drew the attention of military leaders in the U.S. and the UK, and filled Swedish government files with nearly 1,000 eyewitness reports. The ghost-rocket outbreak was as quirky and illogical as any other; for nearly a year, the objects seemed to gravitate to water, They were frequently reported to have splashed down in ponds and lakes. But no one ever recovered a scrap of debris that could be used as evidence.
However, this crowd-sourced documentary, some four years in production, doesn’t spend much time rehashing that postwar phenomenon. Instead, it follows newspaper reporter Clas Svahn as he pursues a 30-year-old UFO sighting lead at one Lake Nammajaure in the far north. The still-living witnesses had been hiking when they saw something reminiscent of a ghost rocket. They described a massive, airborne metallic pipe-looking thing that hovered over the remote lake before submerging in a gurgling discharge of bubbles. The couple never saw it re-emerge.
As director of the UFO-Sweden research group, Svahn contributed to the indispensable 2012 retrospective UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry and is an old hand at the tedium of mounting a cold-case investigation. He makes a pitch to his conscientious colleagues. No one has ever dived Nammajaure before to see what’s on the bottom. Let’s check it out.
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