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URECAT - UFO Related Entities Catalog

JULY 17, 1978, OREBRO, NAERKE, SWEDEN, SOMEONE:

Brief summary of the event and follow-up:

According to Albert Rosales, Jan-Ove Sundberg, a journalist interested in UFO reported in the sensationalist magazine "UFO Universe" in 1993 that in Orebro, Sweden, on July 17, 1978, at 0300 a.m., someone was sleeping with his family when he suddenly woke up feeling a presence in the room.

He lifted his head and spotted a four feet tall creature at the foot of the bed. It was grayish green in color and transparent, with club-like hands and no discernible facial features.

Somehow the humanoid pulled the blanket off the witness and put both its hands on the witness foot. The witness felt a terrible pain shoot through him and jumped up screaming form his bed. The creature turned around and floated out the open balcony and up into the air.

Strange half-moon shaped marks was found on the witness foot and allegedly, "severe physical after-effects" were reported.

Basic information table:

Narratives:

[Ref. ar1:] ALBERT ROSALES:

Albert Rosales indicates in his catalogue that in Orebro, Sweden, on July 17, 1978, at 0300 a.m., the witness was sleeping with his family when he suddenly woke up feeling a presence in the room; he lifted his head and spotted a four-foot tall creature at the foot of the bed. The creature was grayish green in color and transparent, with club like hands and no discernible facial features. Somehow the humanoid pulled the blanket off the witness and put both its hands on the witness foot. The witness felt a terrible pain shoot through him and jumped up screaming form his bed, the creature turned around and floated out the open balcony and up into the air. Strange half moon shaped marks was found on the witness foot. Severe physical aftereffects were reported.

Albert Rosales indicates that the source is "J O Sundverg, UFO Universe Spring 1993."

Points to consider:

"UFO Universe" was a sensationalistic UFO magazine.

"J O Sundverg" cited as author in [ar1] is actually Jan-Ove Sundberg, a free-lance journalist and traveller of Motala, Sweden, interested in UFOs and "ghosts".

This all makes think of some hypnagogic hallucination experience, very poorly reported, probably sensationalized by exaggerating mundane effects and hiding crucial information.

The "witness" has no name, and the age is not given. Is this to hide that it was a young child who had just dreamed of a "monster"?

Was it a child whose blanket slipped, prompting the unpleasant hypnagogic experience? Did the "witness" really "see" the being pull off the blanket? Or doesn't "Somehow the humanoid pulled the blanket off..." precisely suggest that the blanket was just off but nobody saw the being pulling it off?

what about the "pain?" Was it just that with the blanket off, the witness felt cold?

We are told the witness was "sleeping with his family". What does this mean? Is it that the whole family was normally sleeping that night, each in the usual bedroom, or is this imprecise detail supposed to mean that all were together in the same bedroom?

It is said the witness had "half-moon shaped marks on the foot". Is it possible that this was a mark caused by the foot pressing on the bed structure? It is, and clearly no attempt of checking this possibility is mentioned in the report. It is just the same with the alleged "severe physical after-effects". What effects, how did they relate to the nocturnal experience? Did the witness simply cautch a severe flu after a night without a blanket? Was it something else, less mundane? We are just not told.

The being had "no discernible facial feature". This is often the case with dreams and the dream-like experience of hypnagogic hallucinations. Some features are clear, others are not discerned, as the wandering mind just leaves it out. This is what happens in dreams and does not happen in reality. Dreams do not have to be entirely consistent. In dreams, and therefore in hypnagogic hallucination, there is no problem with a creature "floating out" of the bedroom - whereas in reality there was likely a closed window in the way.

With all this and what I listed in the List of issues, I feel the case is of no decent credibility, terribly ill-documented, and could be an hypnagogic hallucination episode experienced by a child and hyped up late by the family or some reporter.

Although hypnagogic experiences are now quite understood in the medical literature on non-pathological sleep disorders and sleep phenomena, although there are knowledgeable ufologists who understand this phenomenon, many other ufologists are still unable to identify such causes when they apply and still believe such experiences are alien encounters or alien abductions.

I provide a few references among dozens about the topic of hypnagogic hallucination and sleep paralysis:

• "The Old Hag phenomenon as sleep paralysis: a biocultural interpretation", paper by R.C. Ness, in Cultural and Medical Psychiatry, vol. 2 #1, pp 15-39, March 1978.
• "Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep", book by Celia Green and Charles McCreery, Routledge publisher, U-K., 1994.
• "Wrestling With Ghosts: A Personal And Scientific Account Of Sleep Paralysis", book by Jorge Conesa Sevilla, Xlibris Corporation publishers, U-K., 2004.
• "Hallucinations and pathological visual perceptions in Maupassant's fantastical short stories - a neurological approach", by L.C. Alvaro, in Journal of the History of Neuroscience, vol 14, #2, pp 100-115, June 2005.
• "Effects of hypnagogic imagery on the event-related potential to external tone stimuli", paper by N. Michida, M. Hayashi, T. Hori, in Sleep, Vol. 28 #7, pp 813-818, July 2005.
• "Sleep and Society: Ventures into the (Un)Known", book by Simon A. Williams, Routledge publisher, 2005.
• "Mental representation of space: Insights from an oblique distribution of hallucinations", paper by T.A Girard, D.L. Martius, J.A. Cheyne in Neuropsychologia, vol. 45 #6, pp 1257-1269, 2007.
• "Parasomnias", paper by D.T. Plante, J.W. Winkelman, in The Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Vol. 29 #4, pp 969-987, December 2006.
• "Paranoid delusions and threatening hallucinations: A prospective study of sleep paralysis experiences", paper preview by J.A. Cheyne, T.A. Girard, scheduled in Consciousness and Cognition for April 2007.

List of issues:

Evaluation:

Possible hypnagogic hallicination and sensationalist magazine exaggeration.

Sources references:

* = Source I checked.
? = Source I am told about but could not check yet. Help appreciated.

• [---] ? Jan-Ove Sundberg, in the UFO magazine UFO Universe, USA, Spring 1993.
• [ar1] * "1978 Humanoid Reports", compiled by Albert Rosales, circa 2007, at www.ufoinfo.com/humanoid/humanoid1978.shtml

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This page was last updated on December 20, 2011