Greifswald lights

Greifswald is a town on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in north-eastern Germany; the Greifswalder Bodden is a broad, shallow lagoon between the mainland and the islands of Rügen and Usedom.^[2] In the summer of 1990 the area was still recovering from four decades within the German Democratic Republic, and German reunification was only weeks away.^[5]

The waters of the southern Baltic off Usedom lay within a designated military zone, the Luftschießzone II (Air Firing Zone II), which Warsaw Pact forces used for exercises.^[1] The nearby Greifswald (Lubmin) nuclear power station and the historic rocket-testing grounds at Peenemünde lent the area a strategic character that later featured in popular retellings of the case.^[5]

On the evening of 24 August 1990, beginning at roughly 20:00–20:30, witnesses around the Greifswalder Bodden saw two formations of about seven brightly glowing spheres each appear over the sea.^[1][5] Observers described reddish-white points of light that hovered, drifted and appeared to move within the formations while the groups as a whole held together; some accounts mention a sudden bright flash during the display.^[5]

The lights were seen not only at Greifswald but across a wide area, with reports from Rügen, Usedom and other localities along the coast and inland.^[5] Witnesses included holidaymakers on the beaches and motorists; one frequently cited account places a family near the Lubmin nuclear power station as the display unfolded overhead.^[5] The sighting lasted on the order of half an hour, long enough for several observers to fetch cameras, and at least several video recordings and a number of photographs were made — documentation that is often cited as making this one of the better-recorded European sightings of its era.^[1][5]

From an early stage the case was examined by German UFO researchers and skeptics, and it became a touchstone in the German-language debate over UFO reports.^[2][6]

Military-flare explanation. The German skeptics' organisation CENAP (Centrales Erforschungsnetz außergewöhnlicher Himmelsphänomene) and its researcher Werner Walter concluded that the lights were illumination flares deployed in a military exercise.^[1] In an analysis published in the magazine *Skeptiker* (issue 4/1999), Walter set out the case that the spheres were *Leuchtbomben* — luminous charges fired aloft and then descending slowly on oversized parachutes — released over the Baltic Air Firing Zone II.^[1] A former NVA officer was quoted describing how such luminous spheres were shot up from a warship by small rockets, ignited in rough formation, and sank slowly on parachutes, producing exactly the kind of display reported.^[1]

Czechoslovak Air Force attribution. In November 2012 the researcher Dennis Kirstein, writing for *ufo-information.de*, published a detailed report attributing the event specifically to an exercise by the Czechoslovak Air Force, which as a Warsaw Pact member was entitled to use the firing zone.^[3] Kirstein identified the objects as SAB-type illumination bombs, each carrying about seven pyrotechnic flares and released at roughly 10 km altitude, and tied the display to a Czechoslovak exercise in the zone.^[3] He acknowledged, however, that he had not obtained documentary confirmation from the air or naval forces of the former Warsaw Pact states he had contacted.^[3][4] On this basis CENAP and the GWUP skeptics regarded the case as solved.^[2][1]

Dissenting view. Not all investigators accepted the flare explanation. Illobrand von Ludwiger of MUFON-CES had earlier promoted a UFO interpretation, and a cross-organisation working group of German UFO researchers (DEGUFO, GEP, MUFON-CES) responded to Kirstein's report by arguing that ordinary illumination ammunition could not account for how long a single formation remained in the sky or the way the objects appeared to move, treating the case as not fully resolved.^[1][4] This disagreement, periodically revisited in German media and online, is part of what has kept the Greifswald lights prominent in regional UFO discussion.^[4][6]

The Greifswald lights are often described as a classic of German UFO lore, both for the number of witnesses and for the amount of photographic and video material generated.^[2][5] In English-language UFO writing the case is sometimes framed as a "last sighting of the Cold War," given its timing on the eve of reunification and its setting near the Lubmin nuclear plant and the Peenemünde rocket site.^[5]

Within Germany the episode is more commonly cited as an example of how a dramatic mass sighting can be reconciled with a mundane military cause: skeptics point to it as a well-documented case in which the flare explanation accounts for the observations, while a minority of researchers continue to regard it as not fully explained.^[1][4] Footage and stills attributed to the event continue to circulate, and the case is periodically revisited in regional reporting and on UFO websites.^[6][2]