Every Town - Stephen, Minnesota: 1979 Val Johnson UFO Encounter

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Go to https://deadboltmysterysociety.com/ and use the promo code: deadbolt20 for 20% OFF your first order!Scary Mysteries Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiE86yS_VM7qjiICqRPmwLQ?view_as=subscriberContact US: [e-mail] you been to the Marshall County Historical Society Museum on E. Johnson Avenue, Warren, Minnesota? Visitors will feel the nostalgia of living in a small 1880s community through its historical buildings at the Settler’s Square. A stroll along the boardwalk presents attractions like a vintage bank, barbershop, tavern, school, church and many more. Its new 10,000 square foot-Visitor Centre has been attracting more guests because of its many exhibits, war artifacts room, collection of antique vehicles, and the so-called “UFO Car,” undoubtedly one of the museum’s star attractions. According to Sherlyn Meiers, Marshall County Historical Society Director, large crowds come to the museum just to see the early 1970s Ford LTD cruiser. And what is so special about this outmoded car that piques the interest of more people than a 1912 Maxwell, a Hart Parr Steamer, and a Studebaker Wagon of 1870s? The car with a shattered windshield and bent antennas is by all means not just any ordinary car. It was a central character in an alleged UFO encounter in 1979 which is popularly known as the “Val Johnson Incident” with Marshall County, Minnesota Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson as the sole witness of an out-of-this-world experience. Was it perpetrated by a force from outside of the human realm? Did Johnson face head-on an unidentified flying object? Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and so there are times when you can check things like Facebook pages, phone numbers, and websites to gain insights. They have tons of reviews online from people that have joined a 95% of people. of them are five-star reviews, go to deadbolt mystery society.com today and use the code deadbolt 20 to get 20% off any subscription or single box. Again, that's 20% off when you use the promo code deadbolt 20. Come join the deadbolt mystery society today. Every town has a dark side. For this week, we're headed to Stephen, Minnesota, where we check out the 1979 Val Johnson UFO encounter and all the strange things that came along with it. Chances are you haven't been to the Marshall County Historical Society Museum

on E. Johnson Avenue in warm Minnesota. But visitors who go there will feel the nostalgia of living in a small 1880s community through its historical buildings in Settler Square. The stroll along the boardwalk presents attractions like a vintage bank, barbershop, tavern, school, church. and many others. Recently, its new 10,000 square foot visitor center has been attracting more guests because

of its many exhibits, war artifacts, room, collection of antique vehicles, and the so-called UFO car, undoubtedly one of the museum's star attractions. According to Cheryl Mears, who's the director at the Marshall County Historical Society, large crowds come to that museum just to get a glimpse of a 1970s, LTD Cruiser. This car with a shattered windshield and bent antennas is by all means not just any ordinary car. It was in fact a central character in an alleged UFO encounter in 1979, which is popularly

known as the Val Johnson incident with Marshall County, Minnesota Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, as the sole witness of an out-of-this-world experience. was the incident perpetrated by forces outside of this world and did Johnson in fact come face to face with an unidentified flying object? I'm Andrew Fitzgerald and this is every town. For all of us to understand the significance of the deputy sheriff's patrol car, I'll take you back about 40 years ago to a mind-blowing happenstance in Minnesota during the wee hours of the morning

on August 27, 1979. Former Marshall County Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, while on a night patrol along a rural section of State Highway 220 near the County of Warren, drove right into a ball of white light. What happened next has perplexed everyone to no end, and even Johnson himself couldn't offer a rational explanation about his experience. UFologists consider the incident as one of the most significant, and best publicized UFO events of the 1970s, although a few critics have discredited it as a hoax.

What made the UFO believers decide that this encounter was authentic? How did it change the life of Johnson and how does he regard his experience 40 years later? It was an incident that sparked interest after some decades through social media as the Marshall County exerted efforts to immortalize the Val Johnson incident in 2019. After all, it has significantly placed the county on the map of mysterious alien and UFO encounters. Sightings of alleged UFOs and reports of close encounters and alien abductions have been public knowledge way before the 20th century. Public interest about these matters heightened during the controversial Roswell-New Mexico UFO crash in June of 1947.

The U.S. Army Air Forces allegedly captured a crashed flying saucer and its alien occupants, but it was soon revealed in the media that it was just a crashed weather balloon. It regained attention in the late 1970s when UFOologists spread conspiracy theories about the crash landing of an alien spacecraft and the alien occupants were recovered by the military and then used for experiments. Around that time, specifically in 1979, two other UFO-related incidents were reported, aside from the Val Johnson incident. On November 9th of that year in the Detchmont Woods near Scotland and the UK, a forester was allegedly pulled by two spiked globes towards a large sphere-like object which hovered in a clearing.

The man lost consciousness, and when he woke up, he couldn't walk or talk normally and had an insatiable thirst. Meanwhile, two days later, a commercial flight over Abiza, Spain, an airline was forced to make an emergency landing reportedly because of three UFOs. It became the most famous sighting of alleged UFOs in Spain, but it was dismissed and the incident was attributed to a series of freak optical illusions. Three months before these UK and Spain strange occurrences, America, particularly its 32nd state of Minnesota, had been reeling from the Val Johnson incident. It has remained as one of the top ten most influential UFO encounters in history, according to writer Jerome Clark, who wrote about it in his 1998 book, The UFO Encyclopedia, The Phenomenon from the beginning.

So then, what made the purported UFO experience of a Minnesota sheriff's deputy so phenomenal that it's remained enduring for four decades? Two years prior to the Val Johnson incident, esteemed filmmaker Stephen Spielberg's science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released. The Blockbuster movie tells the story of an everyday blue-collar electrical maintenance worker Roy Neary, whose life changes after an encounter with an unidentified flying object. In one crucial scene, while Roy was asked to investigate a sudden large-scale power outage,

in Indiana in the middle of the night, he experiences a close encounter with a UFO when it flies over his truck. His truck's electrical systems go haywire, and one side of Roy's face gets lightly burned due to the blinding lights of the mysterious object. After that incident, his life is never the same again. That particular scene in the movie closely resemble what happened to Sheriff Deputy Val Johnson on that ominous morning on August 27. 1979. If you've ever watched that movie, then chances are that particular scene

is etched in your mind, and will ignite your memory once you learn the real-life incident involving Johnson. If the deputy sheriff himself had watched the film, it would have basically been deja vu for him. But Roy's plight was a product of fiction, while Johnson's was real, as he himself recounted in interviews

and appearances on TV shows. patrolling at night in Marshall County, Minnesota was routine for Johnson. The area is just a stones throw away from the Dakota border. With around a population of 13,000 in the 1970s, the county terrain then consisted of low rolling hills, carved with drainage ditches completely devoted to agricultural activities. It was a peaceful place and ideal as the number of criminal activities was nothing much of a grave concern.

Perhaps Johnson kept himself busy, issuing small traffic violations, but there were barely enough cars for that to be a nightly occurrence. In the early morning of August 27, 1979, it was likely thought it was going to be another uneventful period of keeping watch of the resident security.

But while patrolling the treeline streets of Stephen, a fine small town nestled in the, the Red River Valley of northwest Minnesota, Johnson became the real-life version of Roy Neary from close encounters of the third kind. Shortly before, 2 a.m., then 35-year-old Johnson was going west on County Road 5. It was so flat he could see a bright light off to the southwest, so he peered out of his car's window to get a better look. He initially thought a semi-trailer truck had smashed into a deer or an aircraft with bombastic lights had just landed. Driving at a speed between 50 to 60 miles an hour,

the deputy sheriff then audaciously approached the mysterious light to probe what it really was and realized that it wasn't a semi-trailer nor an aircraft, at least one that he recognized. The light was described as akin to a bright ball, around 8 to 12 inches in diameter, having very defined edges. floating around three and a half feet off the ground and zooming along the road. And then the unexpected happened instantaneously as Johnson closed in on the light. He said, just like that, the light was in the car with me.

It felt like I got hit in the face with a 200-pound pillow, and that's the last I recall. The last sounds he heard were the breaking of glass and the halting of the brakes. He was unaware of what happened. happened in the succeeding 39 minutes or so, as he lay unconscious in his patrol car. When Deputy Johnson had regained consciousness, he felt like his world moved in slow motion. As Johnson gradually opened his eyes, he felt a burning sensation, rippling across his face and stinging his eyes, perhaps caused by the bright light that had shot directly towards him.

That's when he remembered to radio for assistance, his weak voice, crackling over the radio. When asked what his condition was, Johnson replied, I don't know. Something just hit my car. I don't know. Strange. An off-duty officer who received the call immediately sped off and spotted the motionless Ford LTD Cruiser on Highway 220. Sure enough, he found the situation Johnson was in as strange.

In a disoriented state, the deputy sheriff was leaning against the steering wheel and grummel about the intense burning feeling on his face and eyes and aching head. When other law enforcement personnel arrived, they found more strange things as they detailed the physical damage left on the deputy sheriff's vehicle. It sustained serious impairment. The windshield was cracked. The hood was dented. One headlight was broken and two stainless steel antennas were bent in 90-degree angles.

The deputy sheriff was then treated at a nearby hospital. and the attending physician determined Johnson's sustained eye burns the kind welders get from staring at the spark shooting off their instruments. After getting the treatment, Johnson was brought to the sheriff's department where he recorded an official statement of what he saw but couldn't provide an explanation for it. As his reporting to then Marshall County dispatcher Pete Bauer was winding up, Johnson remembered calling his wife, who must have been worried about his whereabouts. Since his eyes were covered with bandages, he asked a fellow deputy to read the time on his wristwatch,

and it was 14 minutes delayed. The other deputy curiously checked the dashboard clock on Deputy Sheriff Johnson's wrecked car, and it was also ticking 14 minutes behind. But Johnson clearly remembered that both his watch and the dashboard clock were running perfectly throughout his shift. Johnson says he has no idea how that happened. The inexplicable phenomenon persuaded Johnson's supervisor in the 1970s, former Marshall County Sheriff, Dennis Breck, to contact the Center for UFO Studies, a privately funded UFO research group based in Chicago.

The following day, American astronomer and UFOologist Alan Hendry, the center's main investigator back then, arrived in Warren. Hendry is considered by UFO historian Jerome Clark as one of the most skilled investigators in the history of UFO research who advocated for the scientific studies of UFOs. The Val Johnson incident became one of the most famous, unexplained cases Hendry ever investigated. He examined Johnson's patrol car and the surrounding circumstances of his collision with an unknown object. The expert UFO investigator's verdict, It was not a hoax, and Johnson didn't stage it.

Meanwhile, a Ford Motor Company executive did an inspection on the Ford Cruiser as well. He found the cracks on the windshield unusual. They weren't the kind that were shattered using a hammer nor hit by Johnson's head. Whatever caused those cracks came through the windshield and came back out again. Honeywell, a conglomerant that produces commercial and consumer, products, engineering services, and aerospace systems also sent its investigator. Upon a thorough inspection of the patrol car's antennas, he deduced that they had been bent by a highly forceful blast of air for unknown reasons.

There were also bugs found in the aerial transmitters indicating that they weren't bent using human hands. The collective evidence, the physical injuries inflicted on Johnson, the damage on his patrol car, and the unaccounted 14 minutes lost, all led to a mysterious occurrence that has never been fully understood. A lot of people over the years have offered their theories, though. One suggestion presented a military explanation, citing a possibility that what Johnson saw that night was part of an experiment done by the Grand Forks' Air Force 60 miles away. Others believed, based on the deputy sheriff's description, that it was perhaps a meteorological phenomenon such as a rare encounter with ball lightning. However, both

possibilities couldn't provide logical explanations to the bent antennas of the cruiser and the 14 lost minutes. Thus, speculations of a probable UFO or extraterrestrial encounter grew stronger as UFOologists like Hendrian Clark supported this. However, not everyone would buy the UFO encounter idea like American journalist and UFO researcher Philip Klass. Often referred to as the Sherlock Holmes of UFOology, Class was known for his skepticism about UFOs and he expectedly debunked the Val Johnson incident as a hoax perpetrated by the deputy sheriff himself.

Class also came up with another version of the event which, if you have a asked me, seems difficult to accept, much more comprehend. He said that Johnson was attacked by malicious UFO knots, who took a hammer-like device to the car and then reached inside to set back the hands of the watch on Johnson's arm and the clock on the car's dashboard. The opposing views of Hendry and class about the Val Johnson incident were brought to a higher platform when the two UFO enthusiast engaged in a debate at a symposium held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1980. Val Johnson became sort of a Marshall County celebrity after the Sheriff's Department released his story about that fateful night in August. The department, as well as Johnson and his family,

was besieged with calls from around the world eager to know more. The deputy even appeared as a guest on ABC Network's Good Morning America two weeks after the incident, but he soon quickly grew tired of the interviews. He admitted that the national publicity and attention he gained had caused a great deal of emotional anxiety to the Johnson family. Thus, it was a relief when media attention later shifted to other more pressing stories, and the Val Johnson incident took a back seat.

Johnson remained a police officer for a while after the incident, then he became chief of police in the nearby town of Oslo, where he earned the trust of the local residents. His good record, however, was tainted when he got embroiled in a funding dispute while setting up the police department in Minnesota in 1982. It was the end of his career as a police officer, but he still guarded people's safety working as a mall security guard in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Before he retired, Johnson worked at 3M answering the customer service line. He didn't keep in touch with his former colleagues in Marshall County for over three decades,

so people had a difficult time tracking him down. In 2014, Johnson moved to Euclair in the west part of Wisconsin in an effort to be closer to his family. Perhaps leaving Minnesota offered him and his family a fresh start. Now in his mid-70s with a short white beard and thinning gray hair, Johnson continues to find himself accommodating sporadic calls and visits pertaining to his mysterious encounter. While many still find the mystery unnerving, the main witness himself simply considers it a fact of life.

Johnson said, For the first three years, it was on my mind daily. After that, I went on with my life, had more children, other jobs, and got busy doing this, that, and the other. It's of no great concern to me at this point. He added that the whole experience had not negatively impacted him at all and emphasized he's happy with his mental stability. Forty years have passed, yet Johnson is still uncertain what he had encountered.

For him, it's unexplainable and will remain so. He also welcomes all the possibilities offered by people, It could be a UFO, it could be extraterrestrial, it could be time travel, it could be top secret military from Grand Forks Air Force Base, it could be a variety things he articulated. As for the skeptics, the former sheriff's deputy, said he just wanted to tell people what had happened to him. If they chose to believe him, then that's great, and if they don't, that's okay with him too. Johnson has moved on from his 1979 experience saying it's not a defining incident in my life. But for the people of Marshall County,

the Val Johnson incident has made their place famous. It continues to be a magnet that draws curiosity seekers from different parts of America and the world, especially to its museum where Val Johnson's patrol car is on exhibit. The still unsolved mystery is definitely up the county must visit reputation among tourists who flocked to the museum and get a close look at the patrol car. A woman shared that she saw the same light

while driving on the same night heading to Grafton, Wisconsin. Others who visit the museum would sometimes afterwards drive out to State Highway 220 where the presumed UFO incident happened. The controversial patrol car has been on loan from Marshall County for four decades, but on August 21st, 2019, the county commissioners donated it to the Marshall County Historical Society that runs the museum, which is now the infamous patrol car's permanent home.

And on the Ruby anniversary of the Val Johnson incident last August 27, 2019, the society commemorated the event with a program dubbed as the UFO incident at the museum. The spotlight that night, undoubtedly focused on the bronze-colored sheriff's patrol car with a shattered windshield and bent antennas. Stories about the Val Johnson incident were recounted, and if these were not enough, Warren County Mayor Mara Hannell has proclaimed August 27th UFO Day. Whether Val Johnson wants it or not, his one-of-a-kind experience is immortalized. But the question that will linger forever is what exactly happened. And chances are, you, me, and even Johnson himself will probably never know. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown.

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