Finland’s Infamous UFO Case
Date: April 12, 1969
Location: Pori, Finland
The following case deals with the only UFO sighting that has been formally acknowledged by the Finnish Air Force to this day. On April 12,1969, pilot Juoko Kuronen was taxiing his aircraft, preparing to take off for an orienteering flight over Pori, Finland. Prior to his departure, Kuronen reported that he had heard a conversation over radio between the air traffic control operator and Tarmo Tukeva, a combat pilot who was airborne at the time.
According to the conversation, it seemed as though there were seven unidentified objects in the sky. Given that the seven unidentified objects were being tracked on radar, the air traffic control operator instructed Tukeva to try and identify the seven UFOs and intercept if necessary. At an altitude of approximately ten thousand feet, Tukeva made visual contact with the objects, however, the objects were not weather balloons as he initially presumed, nor were they anything he had seen previously in the sky.
Flying in formation were seven disk-shaped bright yellow objects. The presence of the objects was confirmed by three independent radars: Tukeva’s, Kuronen’s, and the ground radar. As Tukeva started approaching the objects, he noticed that the disk-shaped objects began accelerating toward the north at an incredible speed, out-pacing his fighter jet. Within a couple of minutes, the objects started showing on radars in Vaasa, which is 200 kilometers away from Pori. This means that the object must have been traveling well over the speed a terrestrial aircraft can travel at (if one assumes that the objects follow the general laws of physics, they must have been traveling well over ten thousand miles per hour). It must be pointed out that once again, no sonic boom was heard even though the object had broken the sound barrier.
It has not been disclosed whether an official investigation was carried out or not. However, a couple of months after the incident, Kuronen was named the head of Lappeenrata Airport. Throughout the years, he has been asked numerous times what he thought of the incident and whether he thought the objects were interplanetary or not. In an interview with a local news station in 2009, Kuronen said, “I cannot explain the observation in any way, and hardly anyone can ever do that.” 138
138. “The UFO Sighting in Pori Still Speaks,” UUTISET, last modified July 12, 2009, https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-5971507.