That evening, 38-year-old police officer Evald Hansen Maarup was driving his patrol car on a country road near Haderslev in southern Denmark. According to Maarup, the car's engine and lights suddenly failed as the vehicle was illuminated by an intense beam of light from above. He described the interior of the car becoming warm and, as the light appeared to withdraw, seeing a large, flat, greyish object above the car before it disappeared rapidly and silently. During the incident, Maarup took six photographs with a camera mounted in the patrol car.
More than 55 years later, the new investigation has produced several significant findings:
- The object photographed by Maarup appears to have been considerably lower in the sky than previously assumed. A new examination of the original photographic material changes important assumptions about the geometry of the observation.
- Three of the most frequently proposed conventional explanations can probably be ruled out. The investigation revisits the suggestion that a loose battery connection caused the patrol car to stop, and the theories that Maarup saw either the landing lights or the exhaust of a passing military jet. The new evidence makes all three explanations highly unlikely.
- There appears to have been something unusual in the sky around the time of Maarup's experience. A renewed investigation of reports from other witnesses provides additional information about aerial phenomena observed in the area that evening.
- Claims of a simultaneous radar observation have been investigated again. The book reconstructs the origin and development of the radar story and examines what can – and cannot – still be established from the surviving evidence.
- Several fireball observations were reported on the same evening. The authors have uncovered reports of bright meteoric phenomena around the time of Maarup's encounter, adding another potentially relevant element to the reconstruction of events.
- New information about Maarup himself changes the context in which his experience can be viewed. Personal notes and previously overlooked information about his interests provide a more complex picture of the observer than the one presented in most previous accounts.
- A striking optical effect may help explain one of the strangest elements of Maarup's account. Experiments show that a powerful beam of light directed upwards and viewed through a car windscreen at a particular angle can appear to point downwards. This is particularly interesting because Maarup described a sharply defined beam apparently shining down onto his patrol car and later seeming to retract upwards into the object.
Taken together, the findings do not provide a simple solution to the Maarup case. Instead, they show that the incident was considerably more complex than the story usually told over the past half-century – with some long-standing explanations becoming less plausible while newly uncovered information opens other avenues for understanding what Maarup experienced that night."
