Creatures in the Fog
Beware of The Blob! It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides!
On December 20 1958, two young Swedes had a terrifying close encounter with a group of aliens as unlike the friendly 'Space Brothers' of the era as could be imagined.
At 3am that night, Hans Gustafsson and Stig Ryberg were driving home to Halsingborg after spending the evening at a dance. The road was lined with dense forest on either side, and heavy fog forced them to drive much slower than usual.
As they neared the village of Dornsten, the men saw a peculiar bright light shining through the trees. They stopped to investigate and discovered a glowing disc, 16 feet wide and 3 feet high, sitting in a clearing in the forest.
"It was resting on legs about two feet long," recalled Gustafsson. "It seemed to be made of a peculiar shimmering light that changed colour."
Four small dark-blue creatures "like protozoa" were "hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly". The 4-ft-tall entities were "lead-gray" in colour with no visible limbs. Without warning, they suddenly rushed at the Swedes and tried to herd them towards the disc.
Earlier generations might have interpreted the entities as a group of Fairies dancing in a glowing ring.
Ryberg punched one of his gelatinous assailants but found that his arm merely sank into it up to the elbow.
"The drag these things exerted was terrific," he told investigators. "And they gave off such a terrible smell - like ether and burnt sausage."
Gustafsson grabbed hold of a fence post and hung on desperately as the entities tugged away at him. Meanwhile, Ryberg managed to struggle free from their grasp and run back to the car. He frantically honked the horn, hoping to attract help from the nearby village.
The sound seemed to terrify the strange creatures. They promptly released Gustafsson and rushed back into their craft. It rose into the air with a high-pitched whistle, then shot away at tremendous speed.
A military psychologist later examined the witnesses. After learning that Ryberg was agoraphobic and had a mother who practised spiritualism, he concluded that "Ryberg is a victim of autosuggestion, and he in his turn has influenced Gustafsson".
After a brief career on the UFO convention circuit, the two men had a falling out. Hans Gustafsson died soon afterwards in a boating accident. After Ryberg's death in 1984, Gustafsson's brother claimed that Hans had once told him the story was a hoax.
Return of the Jelly-Men
In 1975, a teenager on holiday in Dovey Vale, Wales saw a pair of similarly amorphous entities.
At sunset on July 22, 'Trevor' set out to climb Wyfla Hill; a prominent local landmark. He reached the summit only to encounter a transparent dome-shaped object, 40 feet in diameter, which was pulsating with bright unfamiliar colours. Inside stood two small beings resembling lumps of jelly.
A hatch opened in the dome, and one of the entities flopped out and began undulating towards the teenager. The terrified boy fled down the hill to fetch his father then ran back to the summit.
Both creatures were now back inside the dome, which was fading from view "like a chameleon blending into the background". By the time Trevor's father arrived on the scene, the object had completely vanished.
The teenager was so shocked by the encounter that he temporarily lost his voice and suffered from intermittent hysterical blindness. It took a bevy of doctors and psychologists months to restore his former good health.
