The Miklabraut Abduction

As in most places in the world, UFOs, Unidentified Flying Objects, are a well-known phenomenon in Iceland. Most people know someone who has seen something unknown and strange in the sky. However, such stories rarely make it to the media and generally only do so if the phenomenon is captured on film.

There are few places in the country known for frequent UFO sightings, but they do exist. Notable locations include Snæfellsnes and Kambar near Hveragerði. There are also quite a few reported sightings from Reykjavík, including the only known Icelandic account of UFO abduction and missing time.

In the early hours of Thursday, August 10, 1995, a seventeen-year-old couple from east Reykjavík decided to go for a drive. Perhaps they weren’t ready to go to bed after Stöð 2’s (Channel 2‘s) program ended at 1 a.m., and enjoyed driving, having recently obtained their driver’s licenses. It had been rainy and windy that day, but the weather had mostly cleared up with occasional rain showers.

Shortly before they reached the intersection of Miklubraut and Háaleitisbraut, heading east, they noted the time and saw that it was 1:30 a.m. They decided to head home as both needed to wake up for work the next day.

As they stopped at a red light on the intersection and waited alone in the rain for it to change, a strong light suddenly shone down on the car, accompanied by a loud thud. Startled, the girl behind the wheel accelerated through the intersection. There were no other cars in sight, nor any airplane or helicopter that could have produced the light. They noticed, however that half an hour had passed, even though it felt like only 30 seconds to a minute. The boy also noticed that it had stopped raining.

On the way home and the following day, they discussed their strange experience back and forth, and four days later, the girl decided to contact FÁFFH, the Icelandic UFO Enthusiasts’ Association, to report the incident and seek possible explanations. She remembered an interview with the chairman that aired on Stöð 2 the evening before the incident, and a lecture by the group she had attended a year and a half earlier.

The association was welcoming and showed great interest in the matter. Their story appeared in the next issue of the association’s newsletter, Geimdiskurinn (The Space Disc). Morgunblaðið and Tíminn reprinted it, and a third newspaper, DV got contact with the girl and interviewed the chairman. He called for witnesses, and it emerged that the girl had found red spots on one of her arms after the couple, at the chairman’s urging, looked for marks on their bodies.

Almost three months later, it was reported in the next issue of Geimdiskurinn and Morgunblaðið that a witness living in Kjalarnes, a suburb on the outskirts of Reykjavík, had seen lights over the neighborhood with the intersection, that same night and time. It was also mentioned that efforts were being made to find a hypnotist to regress the teenagers and uncover what had happened during the missing half hour.

The couple’s story resembles many accounts of UFO abductions. In the book Missing Time by Budd Hopkins, a typical description of such events is given. The couple did not recall boarding any spacecraft or seeing extraterrestrials, but key elements aligned: young people in a car, bright light, strange noise, and missing time. The association’s chairman thought abduction was the most likely explanation and suggested that they had been “light-sucked” from their car from a great height.

When examining possible explanations for the event and the teenagers’ experience, one can choose a starting point on a scale ranging from simple and credible to complex and incredible. The simple explanation, which is not so simple because it involves many factors, could be as follows:

The young couple, tired and sleepy at the light, could have seen rays from the full moon breaking through clouds during a rain shower. The sudden brightness reflected off raindrops and wet asphalt might have startled them. The loud noise could have been the sound of their old car, typical for first-time drivers.

The time discrepancy could result from mismatched clocks in the car and on a watch or phone. The red spots might have been unrelated, and the lights seen from Kjalarnes could have been the annual Perseid meteor shower that was peaking around that time and was especially strong that year.

An alternative explanation to the missing time and their sense of something strange having happened could be that they actually fell into a trance. Hypnotists often use focus and sudden stimuli to induce a trance. A classic example involves having someone focus on a swinging pocket watch followed by a snap of the hypnotist’s fingers. So the couple in their drowsy state might have been hypnotized by the environment; the traffic light, the rythmic beat from the windshield wipers, the bright moonlight and the loud thud. They might have fallen into a half hour long trance they couldn’t remember afterwards.

At the extreme end of the scale is the possibility that beings from another planet were present, possibly disguised by the aforementioned meteor shower. They might have been on some kind of research or scientific expedition and hypnotized the young people or erased their presence from their memories but didn’t go far enough back in time, as the chairman of FÁFFH thought possible.

The year before, more than sixty schoolchildren in Rwanda saw a bright light in the sky near their school, a UFO land nearby, and beings emerge from it. Some of these children reported missing time from their memory. Two years after the Miklubraut incident, thousands of people witnessed a large V-shaped craft or bright lights silently move over Phoenix, Arizona, with some also reporting missing time or other psychological effects. These incidents are both famous in UFO history from the 1990s.

In between on this scale, another explanation is possible: human involvement in creating the UFO phenomena. All branches of the U.S. military have divisions dedicated to psychological operations, abbreviated Psy-Ops. Keflavík, where a U.S. military base operated from 1951 to 2006, is approximately a 40-kilometer direct flight from the mentioned intersection. Such an incident could have been a training exercise or operation designed to strengthen belief in UFOs so the phenomenon could continue to serve as a cover for espionage missions and invasions.

It would have been illegal, unethical, and risked international disputes if exposed, but as the history of U.S. intelligence agencies shows, such concerns haven’t always stopped them, one need only mention MKUltra, an extensive experimental project where the CIA investigated methods of mind control on its own citizens and Canadians.

However, one might also argue that, if anything went wrong, no friendlier government could have been in place. Sjálfstæðisflokkur and Framsóknarflokkur (The Independence and Progressive Parties) wanted to keep the Keflavík base open as long as possible, but the military’s activities there were already being significantly reduced.

It so happens that shortly after the incident, the director of the American TV series Rescue 911 arrived in Iceland to film an episode about a rescue from a crevasse on Snæfellsnes Glacier. He landed three days after the incident at Miklubraut, but possibly some of the large production crew arrived earlier with all their equipment, making it convenient for psychological operations personnel to hide there with their devices.

The fate of the couple is unknown, as they have remained anonymous as FÁFFH promised all who reported UFO sightings. Whatever the explanation for the teenagers’ experience, it had a significant impact on them, and for them at least was very real.

Hopefully, it was only the moon that hypnotized the young couple and stole half an hour of their lives, rather than aliens collecting biological samples or military mind controllers.