American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
The Man Sitting On More UFO Evidence Than Anyone Alive
21 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
It's not only a UFO library. It's about the unknown. So how many countries do you have files from? Oh, I don't know. I have no answer to that. But we have Japanese files, for instance, and Russian files. Wow. And they went out in the field and brought back debris. What? From this crashed object.
They were standing on the other edge of this carriage, and they had very tight helmets, small, small heads, and some gloves. She was eight meters from them. Meet Claes Svahn, journalist, author, and one of the world's most impressive UFO researchers. He's a real-life Swedish fox molder, and that's because he's basically in possession of the modern X-Files. I'm not kidding.
Since the early 1970s, Spahn has not only reported on the phenomena for Sweden's largest newspaper, but he's spent decades building, organizing, and preserving what is widely recognized as the world's largest UFO archive, the Archives of the Unexplained. This 16-room building houses detailed witness reports, photographs, audio recordings, radar data, video,
and original first-generation documents that no longer exist anywhere else. Time travel? There's a time travel section? What is this, Brown and Burrage? Townsend Brown. Yeah. I went to Eureka in California. I met with this guy in his garage. We packed it all together and sent it back to Sweden. Behind you here is the oldest UFO group in the world, Borderland Science Research Association. What?
There's something very interesting about them. They were new more than intelligence in certain cases in the 40s. In this episode, we go over a half century of overlooked evidence. Radar tracked objects executing impossible right angle turns. Military helicopters nearly colliding with wingless craft. Sonar and radar returns. and of course, covert European UFO crash retrieval operations.
we discuss the Swedish ghost rocket craze of the 1940s, a swarm of at least 1,400 documented rocket and cigar-shaped UFOs descending on Norway and Sweden, never landing on the ground, always plunging into water, a swarm that even caused the Swedish government to form a specialized military unit and American President Eisenhower to send his top general, James Doolittle, to investigate.
Klaus von isn't just an archivist. He's a field investigator in his own right, interviewing experiencers and witnesses at the very center of UFO history. He spent a lot of time with Betty Hill of the famous Barney and Betty Hill 1961 abduction case in New Hampshire.
Everybody knows about this canonical abduction story, but Kloss dug a little deeper and found out that Betty, outside of her abduction, witnessed a UFO crash near her home. She even recovered the debris, which she went on to bury in her backyard, where it still might be to this day. I usually say that we are standing at the very top of a mountain of knowledge today. Yes.
But the mountain is resting on this abduction. Mountain that is even bigger. Yes. That is moving into the future. This episode is one of the hardest core summaries of evidence for UFOs I've ever heard.
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Chapter 2: What are the Archives of the Unexplained?
Klaus, we're back. Thank you for being here again. Thank you for having us, rather. We're at the beautiful archives of The Unexplained. This is just one of 16 rooms and it's packed to the brim, full of documents. And so, yeah, this is so exciting. It's like being a kid in a candy store and you've compiled all of this. We started in 1973. You started in 1973. We've been around for a while.
That's amazing. So you've been literally compiling things since 1973. Yeah, that's right. That's incredible. I want to start with something you have in your hand. Oh, yeah. What is that? This one. It's a piece of metallic. It's from Sweden. An island called Vädö, northeast of Stockholm. Okay.
In 1957, two carpenters were driving their car in the middle of the night, really, because they were doing some work on Monday. This was Sunday. And suddenly they saw this object coming from east. moving in front of the car, making a U-turn and suddenly hanging in front of the car, which was totally died.
So the car stopped and those two guys were sitting in the car and looking at the object and suddenly it went away exactly the same way as it came. So they went out of the car and took a look at this road and they found this object there and it was hot so they couldn't really hold it in their hands. It was so hot so it was really burning them and the car started and they drove away.
After many years, this was analyzed, and I also analyzed it, and it's tungsten or warfarin carbide. This is very earthly. It has every impurity that it was in tungsten in 1957. But tungsten is a very good leader of heat. So this should have been cold in the middle of the night.
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Chapter 3: What insights are shared about time travel?
So the object affected it. So it was so hot. So it corroborates the story of the two carpenters. So it's evidence. And the car couldn't have made this, this tungsten hot? You think it was definitely that? No, it was in front of the car. It was, and it's impossible really. Wow. It must have been quite the heat to do that. That's amazing. So that's interesting. That's fine. Can I, can I hold it?
Absolutely. It does feel oddly, you know, very, very smooth, but I'm sure that is also a natural element of tungsten. It is, it is. And you have another object beside you that I brought with me. Yeah, this is actually from outer space. This is not earthly, but it is prosaic. What is this? This is a piece of an asteroid that crashed in Arizona 50,000 years ago. Okay. You can still see the crater.
It's a big museum at the rim of the crater. It's one kilometer, so it's a huge crater. You can see it from space. It's very, very heavy. It's 99% iron and a little nickel and some other elements. Wow. So you can tell if something like this, and from the beginning it was huge, of course, like a London bus or something like that.
If that had hit a city, of course, there were no cities 50,000 years ago. But today, a city would be gone, would have vanished.
how much can i feel it how much of ufo crashes do you think are this is amazing it's so heavy how much of ufo crashes do you feel are physical events nuts and bolts material gets left behind you can have a crash retrieval team going looking for it and finding a thing and trying to reverse engineer it do you think a high percentage of them are I mean, you know, we looked for one in Norway.
Yeah, we did. I mean, it landed and it sank. Yes. And in 1946, as we talked about the ghost rockets. Uh, the military were looking for them in several different, uh, lakes around Sweden. All they found were indentations at the bottom. Mm-hmm not a single debris, not anything, not anything like that or like the weather piece. So it is really strange.
I know that some of those UFOs as we're talking about could just vanish without the trace. Do you know of any, cuz this is an interesting question. I think the audience. often wonders, you know, in the U.S., there are all these rumors of reverse engineering and crash retrievals of UFOs. You know, Roswell is like the, you know, kind of archetypal example of 1947, July.
But the crashes often seem to occur around nuclear sites, possibly because there is this sort of nuclear connection. Do you know of any crash retrievals or even reported crash retrievals where vigilante... citizen who's interested in UFOs goes and finds actual material themselves? Not here in Scandinavia. And the thing is, I don't really understand why should those objects crash that often?
They're traveling presumably through space and they are crashing. Not all the time, but quite often. I mean, the UFO enigma to me is much more complex. And I'm not sure really that we are dealing with like these physical objects all the time. We are from time to time. I talked to Swedish radar observers that have told me about objects that are traveling huge speeds over Sweden.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Betty Hill's hidden past?
But we also know we have been there, we have traveled around and drove our own cars, and they shouted, oh, that is the object. But it was... our car. So there's really no place you can go here in Scandinavia to be sure to see something except Hessdalen if you stay long enough. So that's really the UFO hotspot. Yeah, yeah, it is. And it's been that for many years.
And the thing is about Hessdalen, even though most of the things you see are lights in the sky, If you talk to the people there, they can tell you ordinary UFO stories as well with crafts and sometimes even beings. Yeah. We were there and it was not, it was very easy to tell that an extremely high percentage of people that lived there had experienced things like upwards of 80, 85, 90% of people.
And that was all of the report and everybody had family members and they'd experienced things. It was ubiquitous pretty much. Yeah.
Several people in Norway, they have experienced stuff like that, seeing things, but they don't dare to tell it, because they are afraid of being chastised. So that's why, when you speak to other people, have you seen anything unnatural? Yes, yes, but I don't want to talk about it.
You could almost flip the percentages in any other place where if you were to poll people, they would say, you know, maybe 10, 15% would be open about, you know, it would be, it's the opposite in Hessel and you're the, you're the pariah if you haven't seen a UFO or something. I mean, we knocked doors and talked to 1,600 Swedes and 10% of them had seen something. That's remarkable.
It was only one of them who didn't want to talk with us. The other ones were very open. Okay. And the interesting thing is that we have 22,000 case files from Sweden here at AFU. Yeah. And presumably 1 million Swedes, 10% of around 11 million have seen something. Wow. And last night I talked with a lady who wrote me a letter.
And she, for the first time, told anyone outside her family about something happening in 1971, in October 1971. And she was bicycling in a small city in the middle of Sweden. It was daylight, and the train was coming. And this is so strange, you know. This is typically strange for me. Back in the day, I used to chug coffee like I was prepping for a quantum jump.
But then I'd crash like my nervous system got slingshotted through a kaleidoscope. Anxiety spiking, aura flickering, and REM sleep never met her. It was like drinking battery acid on an empty stomach. Then I found mud water. It doesn't fry my circuits or my synapses. I use Mudwater's original blend over ice.
It still has a little bit of caffeine, but it's stacked with adaptogens and nootropics like L-theanine, chaga, lion's mane, cacao, the whole earth squad to keep you naturally energized and to ensure that you don't wake up with the morning scaries. One sip of Mudwater and my cells report for duty. Two sips and boom, I'm plugged into the fungal star fleet. All systems go.
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Chapter 5: What significant UFO case is highlighted in this segment?
Yeah. Damn. The other, the other pilot is, uh, in Australia. Okay. Wow.
Chapter 6: How did radar corroboration play a role in UFO sightings?
Amazing. Well, that seems like an unprecedentedly important case. It is. It is a good case. And I hope that I can really find all the pieces here.
Chapter 7: What personal UFO experiences does the speaker share?
Do you have any other cases like that where you have radar corroboration for an eyewitness sighting? Because that seems like very important. Yeah, we do have. I've seen with my own eyes military radar, UFO sightings. Really?
Chapter 8: What lessons has the speaker learned from decades of UFO research?
You've seen with your own eyes? And when was that? And what's the context? It was, I think, in 2005. It's what we call the first mobile picture of UFO in Sweden. It was two guys up in this cottage in the very north of Sweden. They were sitting playing card quite late. And they hear a strange noise. So they went out and they saw this very illuminated object coming towards them.
And it's moving around this cottage. So one of them gets his mobile phone and takes a picture. And you can see it's a very bright object that flashes around, but that's probably a lens flare. But it's a very bright object. And it flies around the cottage. And then it vanishes. So I go to the military radar unit, which is very secret. You cannot just go there, but I know people.
And I can see the radar returns from this event. You can see the object coming. going around. So yeah, that's a case you can corroborate. That's absolutely incredible. Have you seen, so you don't have UFO material, have you seen the remnants of a UFO, just like you showed me that little piece of rock where it's interacted with a local physical environment in some way that's left out?
No, not here in Sweden.
Okay.
Because you told me last time about lily pads being affected by the ghost rockets. And so you're showing that it's interacting with the physical environment. Radar is obviously reflecting radio waves. And so that's like, it's a really important, you know. And I interviewed six people at the radar station in the very north of Sweden. Ah, really? I found them one by one.
They were there in the winter of 1973, 1974. At that point, they had left this mountain. You know, they're deep inside a mountain. They are up on the surface, had lunch. And they are looking out around, and suddenly they see over the treetops this cigar-shaped object moving like this. So they are running down into the radar equipment and look, and they can see the object on their radar screens.
And it's doing 90 degrees angles like this. Whoa. And suddenly it flies away over Norway and straight up. And, uh, every one of those six, I found them during, uh, several years are telling the same story. Wow. Yeah. All six. Yeah. That's amazing. Do you have them all on camera and stuff or? No, I have them on, uh, tape. Okay. Only, but, uh. Well, that's good.
The problem is that, uh, they told me that their commander is in the mountain. They are, were asked by him to take pictures of the radar screen. So they did. Yeah. But I haven't found them. I don't know where they can be. Is the tape published on your website? No, no, I never published the tape. I've written about them in my books and things like that.
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