As the resident Swede, I'll try to shed some light on Villarroel, VASCO and also the description of the two Scandinavian UFO periods (the Ghost Flyer of the 1930s and the Ghost Rockets of 1946) which is presented in the paper.
First of all, I think VASCO was (or is?) funded mainly by a grant from Vetenskapsrådet (A Swedish science government agency, they give out most grant money and you send the ethic review (I don't recall the English terminology right now, but you know, the description of what, if any ethical concerns your proposed study has) there, among other things. At least, at 3,150,000 SEK it dwarfs the other known contributions which is the L'Oreal UNESCO Prize for Women in Science in Sweden of 150,000 SEK and a couple of stipends from Märta and Erik Holmberg's research grant fund, totaling 137,500 SEK. On the
page of the grant [source in Swedish] it is stated that the project time period ran from 2018-2020:
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Projektperiod 1 januari 2018–31 december 2020
but by doing some very simple guesstimating from my knowledge of what a Swedish employee costs, if she never hired anyone else she could have maybe made the grant money stretch out for four years or so, and since some papers where published after that and she's now employed at NORDITA I am assuming she now gets money from somewhere else (as a general rule, academic positions in Sweden are
very precarious things. You live and die by your funding, which in turn translates to 2-4 year contracts at your university and real tenure is very rare outside of a few fields, but don't quote me on that or which fields...) or that she has been extremely frugal with her grants, essientially giving herself a rather lousy salary for someone with her education who also lives in Stockholm. I do not know if it is even possible to do that, I have no idea how much autonomy she has had over the grant money.
Anyhow, my impression by her and VASCO (which seems to be a pet project of hers that she probably spends at least some of her own free time on) is that she is a bonefide astronomer who has written at least one "big" paper but who also has a bit of a kooky side (the remote viewing does not instill confidence). That she works with UFO-Sweden when it comes to her more directly UAP focused activities, on the other hand,
does instill confidence. UFO-Sweden is, unlike most other citizen "UFO hunter"-groups I know of, mainly "serious debunkers who want to believe". They house the world's largest archive on UFOs, including the official UFO files of both the Swedish and Danish military.
So, when I read the paper's description of the Ghost Flyer and the Ghost Rockets flaps in Scandinavia, I thought it would be good to contrast that with how UFO-Sweden describes it. Since the original pages I will quote from are in Swedish, I have translated them to ease the reading, and anyone who wants to double-check it can run the original sources through a translation service of some kind or spend a few years of their lives learning a language that is both surprisingly difficult to master and useless outside of a very small and sparsely populated area in northern Europe.
So. On the topic of the Ghost Flyers the paper says the following:
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These were thought to be airplanes involved in smuggling and, as such, had attracted the attention of Swedish customs and the Swedish Air Force, which conducted surveillance.
and a bit further down:
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The investigation concluded with the statement that "There have never been any Ghost Flyers." However, General Pontus Reuterswärd published his own statement that "It could not be denied that a violation of our nation's air space has been going on" [70], for which he was heavily criticized. The Swedish military later issued a final report in July 1935 concluding that 42 of the 487 reports were of actual aircraft violating the countries' borders. As a final assessment, it should be noted that very few of the sightings were similar to modern UFO sightings [65].
In contrast,
UFO-Sweden writes:
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Many view the Ghost Flyer-wave [Tr. note: or "flap" as is more commonly used here] over northern Scandinavia as one of the first large UFO-waves. But if you look more closely at the enormous material that today is available at the Archive for UFO-research in Norrköping [Tr. note: now known internationally as AFU: Archive for the Unexplained] there are reasons to bring some nuance to that view. Though a few UFO-cases were reported it was not a UFO-wave.
Missinterpretations, airspace violations from foreign nations and pure hysteria accounted for the majority of the events this strange winter.
The star of Sirius and the eternally misunderstood planet of Venus confused many persons. That is not hard to understand. Suddenly, half of Sweden's population were looking to the skies in hope of finding a Ghost Flyer - the majority of whom had never previously studied the starry skies. Most people did not get to see any aircrafts, but bright lights that could easily be interpreted as the mysterious Flyer.
The paper doesn't even mention that the most likely suspect of those few actual airspace violations weren't thought by the military intelligence of either country (they were exchanging information between each other) to actually be smugglers, but German spy planes. UFO-Sweden even gives a model (Heinkel He60) and a point of origin (the German cruiser
Leipzig, patrolling along Norway's northern coast). Equally puzzling, giving the amount of details given for the cases from 1947 and forward is the fact that they don't bring up the more extraordinary cases from the Ghost Flyer years, such as the event at Vávrrosvárri (Fagerfjellet) in 1934 which UFO-Sweden describes like this:
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On the 6th of February a "ghost machine" was seen making an emergency landing on Vávrrosvárri outside Tromsø. The event was spectacular. When the rescue team arrived, they found tracks in the snow, 75 meters long and four meters wide, from some kind of machine. A person who saw the landing itself reported having also seen two persons by the machine and tracks from them were also seen in the snow [Tr. note: here the sentence Swedish is ambigous as to whether it was the person who reported seeing the landing who had seen the tracks, or if it was the rescue team. Logically, it would be the rescue team, since there would be very little reason for someone down in the valley to try and reach the mountain top in February if they weren't also part of the rescue team]. Two days later aviation experts who had gone up on the mountain explained that it was impossible for an aeroplane to lift from the place.
I mean, this is a case with actual, physical traces after a machine that the local aviation experts (whatever that means) claimed could not be any aeroplane they knew of, since it couldn't have achieved lift-off (which is a very fair point, given that, as most Scandinavian mountains, it is completely devoid of anything even remotely similar to a plateau or mesa that could be used as a landing strip)! I mean, it was more probably a prank done by some locals or a German spyplane that they somehow managed to destroy or get down from the mountain without the Norwegians finding it, but it is still a better case than most, evidence-wise!
In conclusion, while the paper seem to want to make a point (but it is not clear what kind of point) with the statement that "As a final assessment, it should be noted that very few of the sightings were similar to modern UFO sightings", when you read the descriptions from UFO-Sweden they very much seem to fall into common UFO-report categories of "bright celestial bodies", "mass hysteria" and "actual aircraft" and other prosaic explanations, together with a small number of hoaxes. I'm assuming that what the authors mean is that since people in general thought the Ghost Flyers were human aeroplanes (which a few of them actually were) that was also how witnesses usually described them even when they had mistaken Venus for a booze smuggler, just as after the term "flying saucer" was introduced to common parlance, people started describing UFOs as flying saucers, and today we have "orbs" and "tic-tacs".
Onwards to the Ghost Rockets of 1946 (perhaps another famous example of the shape of UFOs being determined by public expectations and zeitgeist, as it was just after WWII and rockets were all the rage). They are only given a very short sentence on their own in the paper:
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Scandinavian observations of unidentified aircraft, referred to as "ghost rockets", resumed in the late-1940s. As a result, they had an impact on American UFO investigations at that time [72].
Which is strange, since it is by far the more famous and mysterious of the two Scandinavian UFO-flaps. It is alluded to further down, when discussing Project SIGN, the paper states this:
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Unexplained sightings, such as these, were complicated by the fact that the Brigadier General Erik H. Nelson (who, at the time, was a technical
advisor for Scandinavian Airlines) revealed that there had been unidentified aircraft observed in Scandinavia again, which were not only rocket-shaped, but also in the shape of discs and spheres [92]. When the Americans inquired about this, the Swedish Air Intelligence Service stated that[72]
"some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that "these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth."
Now, I am far from an expert on the Ghost Rockets, I just know the basic gists and I haven't even read Clas Svahn's (the undisputed nestor of Swedish ufology and paranormal phenomena) writings on the subject. But lets compare this to what
UFO-Sweden writes:
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The objects traversed over Sweden in the most varied flight paths and even though many–the military included–suspected the Soviets as the culprits behind what was seen as a shelling they never managed to confirm their suspicions. In theory it could be Russian experiments with captured German V-rockets that were now flight tested from bases along the coast. In practice, this was very difficult to prove.
The article in Swedish is quite long and substantial, but it should be noted that nowhere in it is the non-human hypothesis mentioned seriously in what is known from the archives or the interviews with witnesses, both military/government officials and civilians. In the final report of the Defence Staff's Space Projectile Committee (colloquially known as "The Ghost Rocket Committee"), even the conclusion about the rockets being actual test rockets fired from an unknown (but probably the Soviet Union) adversary were toned down, since the physical evidence was non-existant if you don't count one crater/depression and dislodged water lilies in a small lake. It should be noted that the military personell that investigated the lake strikes never doubted that something had actually fallen into the lake, the man quoted in the article says that he thinks it was made from a magnesium alloy so it would leave almost no traces after splashdown (how feasible that explanation is, I do not know, but I do know what happens to magnesium in contact with water...).
My impression of the article is that at least when it comes to the Scandinavian cases of the 1930s and 40s, it is written by someone who a) wasn't very knowledgeable about it and b) introduced bias, either from the sources used or by themselves, in an attempt to make it seem more supportive of the NHI theories of UAPs.
