Spitsbergen is the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, which is situated in the Arctic Ocean and administered by Norway.
The name Spitsbergen means Jagged Peaks, and was given by the Dutch explorer Willem Barents, who discovered the island while searching for the Northern Sea Route in 1596.
Spitsbergen is the only inhabited island in the archipelago, and according to the terms of the Svalbard Treaty, citizens of any of the signatory countries may settle in the archipelago. Currently only Norway and Russia make use of this right. The largest settlement on Spitsbergen is the Norwegain town of Longyearbyen, while the second largest settlement is the Russian coal mining settlement of Barentsburg (The Dutch sold it in 1932 to the Russian State company Arktikugol).
Early whaling expeditions to Svalbard tended, because of currents and fauna, to cluster around West Spitsbergen and the islands off-shore.
External links
General information on Spitsbergen (http://www.michellevandijk.nl/spitsbergen/index2.html)
In the early 1950s, rumors began circulating that a crashed UFO had been recovered on the Norwegian-owned island of Spitzbergen., or Spitsbergen, is one of a group of islands called Svalbard, which have been Norwegian possessions since the 1920s.
She claimed that someone in the upper echelon of the British government informed her that a UFO had crashed near Spitzbergen, and was under investigation by the British and American military.
The later German newspaper stories seem to have confused the Spitzbergen story with another purported UFO crash that was supposed to have occured on the North Sea Island of Helgoland (Heligoland), a German possession.
The Legends of UFO Crashes at Spitzbergen, Norway, 1946 & 1952
Some investigators claim that since no mention of the name Spitzbergen was found in the reports, that the location's mention was to cover up a crash in Great Britain.
According to the first article about the crash, the craft was an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle with Russian writing on the controls, but as the story was embroidered with each retelling, it soon acquired seven alien crewmen who were burned to death in the crash.
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