Maria Lax's "Some Kind of Heavenly Fire" Revisits UFO Sightings in Northern Finland

Finnish photographer and filmmaker Maria Lax, now based in London, created the series "Some Kind of Heavenly Fire" between 2015 and 2019. The project took her back to her childhood hometown, a small town in northern Finland where numerous unexplained UFO sightings occurred during the 1960s. Lax's photographs depict snowy expanses, forests, isolated houses, and dark roads pierced by green, red, blue, and purple glows, producing a surreal, cinematic atmosphere. The series was inspired by a book written by her grandfather that collected testimonies and accounts of strange lights seen in the region's skies and woods. No explicit alien references appear in the images; instead, the mysterious apparitions serve as a starting point to narrate the territory and its memory, weaving together family recollections, old stories, and suggestions from the past. Lax studied cinematography at the London Film School. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and published in outlets including "The New York Times," "TIME," and "The Guardian."