SWEDEN: Intrusiveness

The long northern summer days almost wiped out the night. The meadows were fairytale green, and the air was clear as aquavit. But the idyllic season was broken by two alarming intrusions.

In the North, it was the bears. From their deserted mountain regions they were drifting down toward forests and villages, killing cattle and even attacking humans. Declared Dr. Nils Dahlbeck, a Swedish bear expert: “They are reclaiming their former habitat. Also, they find populated areas more profitable for variety in diet.” Chief victims were the Lapps who experimented for centuries with anti-bear measures. Sample: put brännvin (brandy) under juniper bushes and get the bears drunk.

In the South it was the rockets, and more than brännvin was needed to counteract them. Since last May, swarms of spool-shaped, silent missiles with fiery tails have been zooming over Swedish territory at 875 m.p.h. (500-odd reports described some as slower and cigar-shaped, others as square and red-bottomed).

The missiles’ most likely origin: Peenemünde, former V-bomb base on Germany’s Soviet-occupied Baltic coast. Swedish Army spokesmen knew little beyond the fact that they were fired with a new type of weapon. But a picture released by the Army last week finally convinced all the papers (except the Communist) that the rockets were real, and that a foreign power (i.e., Russia) was using Sweden as a testing ground. Blustered Stockholm’s Social Democratic Morgantidningen: “Intrusiveness must not be allowed to continue.”