Hessdalen Valley
LocationRegionHessdalen Valley
LocationRegionHessdalen is a mining valley in central Norway where recurring unexplained lights have been watched by an automatic measurement station since 1998 and studied by Norwegian and Italian scientists.
Hessdalen is a mining valley in central Norway where recurring unexplained lights have been watched by an automatic measurement station since 1998 and studied by Norwegian and Italian scientists.
Hessdalen is a valley about 15 kilometres long in Holtålen municipality, Trøndelag, in central Norway, surrounding a village of the same name at 617 metres above sea level. It lies about 120 kilometres south of Trondheim and 35 kilometres north of Røros, and about 150 people live in the village and valley. The valley is known for its mines: the Østfold University College engineers Bjørn Gitle Hauge and Erling Strand have described large deposits of iron, zinc and copper ore still in the ground, with mineshafts reaching as deep as 1,000 metres.
Its wider fame comes from the Hessdalen lights, luminous objects reported over the valley since at least the 1930s and seen as often as 15 to 20 times a week between December 1981 and mid-1984. That wave turned the valley into a field site. Project Hessdalen, founded in 1983 by the groups UFO-Norge and UFO-Sverige, ran field investigations until 1985, and the project says its 1984 study documented 53 phenomena with cameras, radar, magnetometers and infrared viewers.
Permanent monitoring began in 1998, when Norwegian, Italian and later French researchers installed instruments in the valley. The project's automatic station, which it calls the Blue Box and describes as the world's first automated anomaly detection system, has watched the sky since then. Instruments have logged magnetic, radio, radiation, seismic, radar and optical data, and Hauge and Strand reported in 2013 that no electromagnetic radiation outside the optical band had been tied to the lights. Østfold University College and Italy's National Research Council led the EMBLA program, the Italian astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani published a long-term survey in 2004, and a 2024 study led by the Greek geophysicist George Vargemezis used very-low-frequency electromagnetic surveys of the ground to investigate the lights. None of the proposed natural explanations has won consensus.
Hessdalen drew new attention in 2026. In September the journalist Ben Schreckinger asked researchers who work in the valley about two luminous-orb reports in the U.S. War Department's UFO releases, and several said the cases could involve a similar phenomenon; Strand said his team had seen lights split in two and added, "We saw it on the radar screen." The project held a conference in Trondheim with a field trip to the valley in late August, and Østfold University College hosted a Researcher's Night in Hessdalen on September 25. Its significance lies in that standing record: a light phenomenon reported by residents has been met with a permanent instrument station for nearly three decades.
I’m the journalist who reported this. I compared two recently released U.S. government UAP cases involving luminous orbs with decades of scientific research on the Hessdalen lights in Norway. Seven Hessdalen researchers responded to me. Several said the U.S. cases could plausibly involve a similar underlying phenomenon, with proposed mechanisms involving plasma, geology and electromagnetic effects. One particularly striking parallel: a 2004 Hessdalen paper describes a large ball of light ejec...
Several scientists who have studied the Hessdalen lights, a luminous phenomenon observed for decades over a Norwegian valley, told PARADIGM that they could shed light on UFO cases from 2023 and 2025 disclosed this year by the Trump administration. Both cases involve recent eyewitness reports by U.S. officials of luminous orbs behaving in ways that have defied explanation. The 2023 case involved a report of a "mother orb" ejecting smaller orbs -- which was similar to an observation of ball of...
Earlier this summer I noticed some similarities between the October 2023 and late 2025 UFO cases from the PURSUE releases and research on the Hessdalen lights, which have been observed for decades over the Hessdalen valley in Norway. The most striking similarity was between the observation from the October 2023 case of a "mother orb" that ejected smaller orbs and a description in a 2004 Hessdalen paper of a large ball of light ejecting smaller balls of light. The Hessdalen lights are not full...
The truth: I was supposed to go back for three months and we were discussing the possibility of me moving there. I was gonna go to Hessdalen (UAP/mystery lights hotspot), but a week before my flight, she emailed me a Dear Joe letter. I was devastated. I sent out a post to my UFO/paranormal email list (they knew I was thinking of moving there) and titled it: "Norway Goes Boom." Will Miller (Wilson/Davis fame and UFO briefer of Pentagon folks) was one of my readers, saw my headline, and thought...
About a month ago in the middle of yhe day my girlfriend and I were in the vicinity of Hessdalen and decided to make the trip. She's open but not really a super believer. But, she is fairly spiritual. We went to the lookout point at the beginning of the valley. I asked her to send out positive energy and ask to see something. I saw something like for like a split second. It a small part of the clouds in a circular form inverted in color almost like a old analog photo negative then reurned to...
Massimo Teodorani has spent decades studying Hessdalen plasma, UFO propulsion, consciousness, and the cosmos. In this conversation, he describes how early anomalous experiences in his life led him to keep an open mind and reject dogmatic materialism. He also describes how observations at Hessdalen hint at sentient plasmids.
Both Prof Avi Loeb (Galileo Project) and Dr Massimo Teodorani have cited the below papers (from the 80s) in their own research. Dr Teodorani has extensively researched Hessdalen and, amongst other hypotheses has proposed the ET hypothesis as one possible explanation for UAP. 'Interstellar Probes: a New Approach to SETI', by Robert A. Freitas Jr., published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 33, pp. 95-100, 1980 'The Search for Extraterrestrial Artefacts', by Robert A....
