Petter Aliranta had just switched off his chainsaw when he noticed something descending between the treetops.
It was February 5, 1971, in the woods of Kangaskylä, a village in Kinnula, Finland. Aliranta and his fellow forestry worker, Esko Juhani Sneck, were approaching the end of their working day. According to the account published that year, the object came straight down towards a clearing close to where they stood.
Within minutes, Aliranta would say, he had restarted his saw, advanced towards a small green figure, and reached for a boot that burned his bare hand.
That was the story the men told. Its journey from a Finnish woodland to the pages of UFO magazines would last much longer than the supposed encounter.
Between the trees
Aliranta was twenty-one; Sneck was eighteen. In the surviving transcription of Tapani Kuningas’s 1971 report, it was around three in the afternoon. Sneck was still occupied with removing branches and initially missed what had caught his companion’s attention.
Aliranta described a metallic object shaped like two saucers joined together, approximately five metres across. Four slender legs supported it when it settled roughly fifteen metres away.
An opening underneath revealed a much smaller figure. Instead of climbing down a ladder, it supposedly floated to the snow.
The reported visitor stood less than a metre tall. Its green covering extended over its head, with a lens-like opening where a face might have been. The description offered no familiar expression to read, only the surface of a suit and a forward-facing viewing aperture.
It began to walk towards Aliranta.
The saw starts again
The figure’s movements, as subsequently summarised by Finnish UFO Researchers, were short and stiff. Its rounded hands showed no visible fingers. Its boots appeared to be part of the same covering as the rest of its body.
Aliranta’s response was to start his chainsaw and step towards it.
This is the moment around which the Kinnula story has come to revolve: a forestry worker meeting a supposed visitor from a flying saucer with the tool already in his hands. The recorded account describes an advance with a running saw. It does not describe the chain striking the figure.
Nor does it describe two men charging with chainsaws. There were two workers in the woods, but Aliranta was the pursuer.
The visitor turned back before they met. Aliranta followed it towards the landed object.
A hand on the boot
Other shapes were now reportedly visible through the craft’s windows. Three figures moved inside while the one outside approached the opening beneath it.
In the detailed account collected in Patrick Gross’s source dossier, the small occupant rose from the ground before reaching the saucer. Aliranta reached up and caught its right boot by the heel.
He immediately released it. The boot, he claimed, was painfully hot.
The figure disappeared inside. A faint buzzing accompanied the craft’s departure; the lower opening closed as it rose. Soon there was nothing left above the clearing to pursue.
The men claimed they remained stiff and shaken afterwards, waiting close to an hour before leaving. Their story also included circular impressions from the landing supports and small footprints in the snow. Aliranta’s injured hand gave the narrative a further, more personal detail: something he could show after the supposed visitor had gone.
Out of the clearing
The encounter entered print. Kuningas’s article appeared in the September–October 1971 issue of Flying Saucer Review, translated from Finnish by Elis W. Grahn. It carried the story beyond its original locality and into an international readership interested in humanoid encounters.
Later catalogues condensed it into a sequence that was easy to remember: forestry workers, a landed disc, a green occupant, a chase, a burned hand. Gross’s dossier traces several of those subsequent entries back to Kuningas.
The chainsaw made the report distinctive. The burn seemed to give it a physical consequence. Together they provided a story that could survive being shortened to a few sentences.
But a later Finnish account supplied another explanation for both the encounter and the injury.
What Is Known
The Kinnula encounter was a hoax. Finnish UFO Researchers explicitly includes it in its collection of known Finnish UFO hoaxes.
A retrospective by Tommi Ruuskanen reports that the original Keskisuomalainen newspaper feature appeared on April 1, 1971. Its author, local contributor Mauno Ihanti, reportedly disclosed in a 1990 Radio Jyväskylä interview that the men invented the story and that he helped develop it.
Ruuskanen also gives a mundane explanation for the burn: Aliranta had grasped the hot end of a fireplace poker. According to that retrospective, the injury inspired the fabricated UFO account.
Those details come from the later written account of the admission; the radio recording and original newspaper page were not directly examined for this article. The 1971 encounter narrative was consulted through a later transcription and source dossier. These distinctions matter, but the sources’ conclusion is explicit: this is a fabricated encounter, not an unresolved alien attack.
The Bigger Picture
Kinnula illustrates how a correction can become separated from the story it corrects. A catalogue can preserve an encounter’s date, measurements and dramatic actions while a later account of its invention remains elsewhere, in another language or publication.
Repeated appearances then create an impression of accumulating support, even when the entries lead back to the same report. Gross’s comparison makes that dependence visible.
The story remains memorable. Its place in UFO history, however, is as a hoax that circulated as an encounter. The two Finns and their chainsaws belong to that history of storytelling; they are not evidence of a confrontation with extraterrestrial occupants.
Sources
- Tapani Kuningas, “The Humanoid at Kinnula,” Flying Saucer Review, volume 17, number 5, September–October 1971. Contemporary article consulted through a later online transcription of an excerpt; English translation credited to Elis W. Grahn.
- Finnish UFO Researchers, “Tunnetuimpia suomalaisia ufohuijauksia”. The Finnish organisation’s account and explicit classification of Kinnula among known hoaxes.
- Tommi Ruuskanen, “Kinnulan ufohuijauksesta jo 30 vuotta,” preserved in a Finnish PDF compilation. Later retrospective describing the April 1 newspaper report, Ihanti’s reported 1990 radio admission and the explanation for the hand injury.
- Patrick Gross, URECAT-000145: Kangaskylä, Kinnula, February 5, 1971. A 2007 comparison of the published narrative and later catalogue entries, evaluating the case as a journalistic hoax.
