Svanhild and the Sea Eagle

It was the afternoon of June 5, 1932 - and something bizarre was about to happen to young Svanhild Hansen. She was playing happily on her parents' farm on the municipality of Leka, Norway, and her parents had only taken their eyes off her for ten minutes when she suddenly went missing. It was as if she had been swept up into the sky - and people started to panic. Luckily, this story has a happy ending - but not one which answers many questions...

## Ørnerovet!

There is some dispute as to how old Svanhild was when the incident took place, but it is agreed upon that she couldn't have been more than five years old. Her parents had only left her alone for ten minutes - but this was enough time for vast talons from the clouds to clasp around her and take her up into the sky. Her parents soon noticed that she had vanished, and they started a panicked search effort which eventually included over 200 people from the local area. At first all they found were discarded items of the girl's clothing - one of her shoes and her handkerchief, specifically. Presumably after a period of unsuccessful searching, some members of the growing posse remembered that they had previously observed a sea eagle behaving strangely around Hagafjellet mountain. This prompted three men to climb up the mountain to look for the missing girl.

It was a man named Jentoft Svendsen who ended up being the man in the right place at the right time to find Svanhild. She was fast asleep on a mountain shelf, and was unharmed apart from a few small scratches. She was awakened and carried back down from the mountain. The girl may have been rescued, but there were still plenty of unanswered questions to be addressed. Hansen was examined by a doctor by the name of Fossum, and he was initially skeptical of the astounding story of avian abduction she told - but when he took the facts into account he was left questioning his preconceived notions of what was possible. If Svanhild was to have walked the distance she travelled, she would've had to make it across 1,700ft of terrain and 180ft of height.

He also weighed her and found that she was approximately 19kg. Ornithologists have disputed this number, seeing as it is supposed to be impossible for a sea eagle to carry this much weight. Some sources have since claimed that the 19kg was inaccurate and that Svanhild was likely just 10-12kg when she was taken - but this is of course still way over the 2-3kg that an adult sea eagle is supposed to be able to carry. Despite this, a zoologist by the name of Hartvig Huitfeldt-Kaas spent a month studying the story before declaring it to be completely reliable. Skeptics have claimed that the terrain was easily accessible and wouldn't have been too difficult to Svanhild to cross, but due to the fact that further sources are all in Norwegian - it is difficult for me to tell if this is a legitimate point seeing as I cannot tell how long it took for Svanhild to end up on the mountain from when she first disappeared.

Although she had initially told the story about the eagle, her memory of the event seemed to fade over time to the point that she would eventually claim that she had no memory of what had happened to her at all by the time she was 30 years old. Her forgetfulness might've been a ruse to evade some of the public attention that her extraordinary story had brought upon her, or might've been something stranger. Svanhild Hansen died on November 12th of 2010 at the age of 81.

## Sources

'Eagle Robbery at Leka' on *Wikipedia*

 'Thunderbirds' on *skygaze.com*

'Eagle Bairn' on *Obscure Marvels*