Full Script

INTRODUCTION 

On a rare free weekend, I took a long drive up to the northwest corner of Minnesota, the freeway stretching straight and perpendicular against an impossibly flat horizon. This is tallgrass country, where the buffalo used to roam. Any towns around here might have just 1,000 people or less, with the parts in between divided into neat squares of farmland.

My GPS helped me find the coordinates I was looking for. It sits along a stretch of two-lane highway, bracketed by beautiful fields of crops and punctuated by small stands of trees. I just wanted to stand in one very special spot and see it for myself, even though there’s no monument, no sign, nothing to tell you that anything unusual ever happened here. The one piece of physical evidence left of the strange events I’d read about has been removed – it’s in a museum now, in the town of Warren, twenty miles away.

The artifact that the museum now cares for is nothing exotic, just a car. A 1977 Ford LTD, copper-colored. Its windshield is still shattered, antennas still bent, preserved just as they were over 40 years ago, after Sheriff’s Deputy Val Johnson had an encounter which is still unexplained. 

It was just before 2am on August 27th, 1979 when Johnson, out alone on this road, noticed a bright, white light in the sky. His first thought was that it might be an aircraft from the nearby Air Force base in Grand Forks, North Dakota. But it was an unusual time for any planes to be flying.

Johnson’s car was the only one for miles. Everyone in nearby Warren was sleeping. Determined to find out what it was, Val Johnson drove 65mph toward the light. As he drew closer, he realized that, whatever it was, it was not a plane. He described it as measuring about a foot across, and hovering just three feet above the road. And all of a sudden, that bright light zoomed toward his car at a rapid pace. In an instant, it seemed to absorb the car entirely. In Johnson’s words, quote, “what was there, all of a sudden was here.”

Johnson recalls hearing the sound of glass breaking. And then he passed out. 

He awoke approximately 40 minutes later; still in his car, only it was turned completely sideways and only half on the road. Muddied skid marks stretched 100 feet from his tires. His windshield was cracked, his radio antenna bent, and a headlight was shattered. Even stranger, as he tried to get his bearings, he discovered that both his watch, and the car’s clock, which he had set that morning, were both 14 minutes behind. His eyes burned, feeling like like they were on fire. 

Johnson radioed to the Sheriff’s station. According to reports, his voice was groggy and heavy. He said, “something just hit my car. I don’t know how to explain it. Strange…something attacked my car…it wasn’t a vehicle. I don’t know what the hell it was.” 

It’s not often that one gets to visit the location of an actual close encounter with a UFO. The history of UFO encounters has given us broad locations like Area 51 in Nevada, Roswell, New Mexico, and Rendlesham Forest in the UK. But this unassuming roadside near the US/Canadian border gave me a rare opportunity to stand in the actual location where a purported encounter took place, what’s become known in UFO circles as the “Marshall County Incident”.

I embrace the classic meaning of U.F.O. - “Unidentified Flying Object”. It doesn’t automatically mean aliens from another planet or another dimension. It just means that it belongs in a category of things we don’t understand yet. Like many of the topics we explore, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  I love the meme of the wild-eyed, hair on fire UFO researcher with the caption that says - I’m not saying that it’s aliens….but it’s aliens.  We’ll definitely post it on the website - it speaks to one extreme of the spectrum of thought.  This podcast isn’t at that end of the spectrum.  But history is replete with discoveries that were deemed impossible or stupid by the purveyors of conventional wisdom...until they weren’t.  Joseph Lister, a scottish surgeon was introduced to Pasteur’s germ theory of disease in 1864 and decided to apply it to the problem of surgical infections.  At this time, the risks of dying from infection created by surgery were extraordinary.  His creation and application of antiseptics attracted derision from all the knowledgeable surgeons of his time.  But as the number of surgery related infections fell, the evidence became irrefutable.  We’ll cover his story as the Surgeons’ Hall museum in Scotland presents his history and the amazing patience he demonstrated as he fought to do the right thing, despite what his peers thought.  It’s instructive on many levels.

But back to UFOs...The “U” stands for the unknown, the unexplainable, maybe even the unimaginable. It grabs our attention, makes us wonder, maybe even makes us fear. And as I started to look into incidents of UFO’s in the USA, I was surprised to learn that stories like Val Johnson’s didn’t start at Roswell. The unidentified and the unknown were happening here before we were even a nation.  

***

This is the My Dark Path podcast. 

Hi, my name’s MF Thomas; I’m an author and a lifelong fan of strange stories from the dark corners of the world. Growing up, I was enthralled by any hint of exciting, forbidden knowledge that waited behind the names and dates we learned in school.  And these days, as I travel the world, there’s nothing I enjoy more than to get off the traditional tourist map and find a place or story that has been overlooked, dismissed or ignored.

In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these topics….you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  To see content related to every episode, visit MyDarkPath.com.  And, just this week, we went live on YouTube.  Our first episodes on YouTube will be audio only, but we’ve been listening to your feedback...and in the near future we’ll be releasing a richer version of each episode with visuals that help tell the story.  If you have thoughts, feedback and perspective, please send an email at explore@mydarkpath.com.  I’d love to hear from you.

Lastly, thanks for listening.  I have an amazing team of people who love My Dark Path and its topics as much as I do. When we get together, we do, literally, geek out. What you’re hearing reflects the contributions of these talented individuals who are researchers, writers, designers and sound engineers.  We’re all very different in virtually every way - but in a world where people actively sow division and anger over the most trivial of topics - the dynamic of this team has reinforced for me the simple power of kindness and humility.  We don’t have to agree on everything, and we don’t.  But when we treat others the way we’d like to be treated...we open ourselves to the rich lives and experiences of others.  We don’t have to be the same to be kind, we just need a humble heart.  Despite the challenges and sorrows of this mortal life, we aren’t meant to be unhappy, but to have joy in the journey.  While there are many dark paths in the world, there is a bright path that we can choose to walk.  

So, after all that, let’s get started with Episode 5.

PART ONE

Let’s start from the beginning. Like a lot of people, when I think about stories of aliens and UFO’s, I think back to seminal works of sci-fi literature like H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, or the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. They seem to go hand-in-hand with the arrival of the modern age; as humankind was on the brink of conquering the planet, it seems natural that we’d start to look beyond our world, and wonder if we are really alone in the cosmos.

It turns out, authors and artists have been imagining other worlds for far longer than that; thousands of years, in fact. Lucian of Samosata, an Assyrian writer who emigrated to Athens in the second century, wrote a book that described a war between the Kingdom of the Sun and the Kingdom of the Moon. He called his book “A True Story”; it was meant as a joke. One of the stories in the Arabian Nights is called "The Adventures of Bulukiya", in which the hero, searching for an herb of immortality, journeys across the cosmos to other worlds. And one of the most famous stories in Japanese folklore is The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, about a baby discovered inside a bamboo stalk, who turns out to be the Princess of the Moon, brought secretly to our world.

What I wanted to know was – when did these fantastical thoughts of creatures from somewhere beyond Earth start to emerge as theoretical explanations for incidents like Val Johnson’s highway collision? When did our world and the out-of-this-world start to overlap? If you’ll remember in our first episode about airships, the development of the Zeppelin happened right around the same time as an undeniable explosion in UFO sightings in the U.S., even though the Zeppelin was being developed in Europe, and therefore couldn’t be the culprit. How did these two ideas collide?

If you start to look up historical accounts in America that match Johnson’s - of encounters with strange, hovering lights that move at surprising speed, you end up in a most unexpected place and time – the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the year 1639. And the account we have doesn’t come from some anonymous publication or a hoaxster, but no less than the Colony Governor himself, John Winthrop.

Winthrop was a devout Puritan, who wrote sermons and histories. He coined the phrase “City Upon a Hill” to describe his vision for the Colony; a phrase that was borrowed a few years later by President Ronald Reagan. You wouldn’t expect him to traffic in wild rumors. So when he described this bizarre event in his diary, we can assume he was bearing the most truthful witness that he could.

He wrote that his friend James Everell, “a sober and discreet man,” was boating with two other men through the Muddy River – a thick and hazy river which wound through bubbling swampland. They were trudging through the difficult waters when a bright white light appeared above them, overpowering the light from the moon and stars. Winthrop wrote that when the light, quote, “stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square.” End quote.

The three men were mesmerized by the strange bright light. They sat in their boat for hours, staring at it. They told Winthrop that the light “ran as swift as an arrow,” as it leapt across two miles – from the city of Charlestown to their boat and back and again. It repeated this dance, hopping back and forth between the city and the boatmen, for two or three straight hours. The men could not take their eyes off of it, they were completely entranced. 

By the time the light finally vanished into oblivion, the boatmen found they had drifted a mile up the river, against the current – as though the light had taken them there. None of them had any memory of rowing and, on a night that was free of wind or breeze, it was impossible for the boat to float against the current on its own.

When they returned to town to tell their story, others in town reported that they witnessed the same thing. Winthrop wrote that, quote, “diverse other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.” End quote. Trying to survive in a strange new world, the townsfolk were haunted by this unexplainable experience.

The similarities to Val Johnson’s encounter are uncanny – the hovering light, its rapid movement, his car being dragged 100 feet and ending up sideways along the road, even the gap in memory. If there had been any UFO enthusiasts or science fiction fans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I wonder if they might have looked on this as a possible UFO encounter.

Then, five years after that first recorded sighting, Governor Winthrop recorded yet another strange occurrence in his diary. In January 1644, he wrote that, quote, “about midnight, three men, coming in a boat to Boston, saw two lights arise out of the water near the north point of the town cove, in form like a man, and went a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away.” End quote. What does that mean – “a form like a man”. A ghost? An angel? A demon? An extra-terrestrial? Winthrop doesn’t speculate, he simply records it for posterity, leaving us a tantalizing mystery.

Just one week later, he describes yet another seemingly celestial incident. According to Winthrop, quote, “a light like the moon arose about the N.E. point in Boston, and met the former at Nottles Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted diverse times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many. About the same time, a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!’; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times. It was heard by diverse godly persons. About 14 days after, the same voice in the same dreadful manner was heard by others on the other side of the town towards Nottles Island.” End quote.

Now this account offers several differences from the prior two. The addition of the voices, and the detailed description of them moving rapidly in the same manner as the lights. There was no radio at the time, no kind of recording technology. The idea of a voice moving was enough by itself to suggest spectacular events. And Winthrop adds this haunting post-script - that this latest version of strange light was coming from the same spot where a vessel had exploded months earlier. A sailor had accidentally ignited gunpowder on the ship, causing an explosion that killed five people.

We can debate whether this incident sounds more alien or more ghostly; it’s part of what we enjoy about these mysteries. But the record remains – these events were witnessed credibly enough for the Governor to record them, seeing how the Colonists he supervised had been shaken to the core.

PART TWO

Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with these famous words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…”

You could easily apply those words to the period right after World War II. After so many years of slaughter, catastrophe, and evil, the Holocaust, and the dawn of the Atomic Age in the shape of a mushroom cloud, there was finally a hope for peace. The United Nations was founded with a mission to prevent future global conflicts. The Nuremberg Trials did the grueling, wrenching work of documenting the true extent of Nazi atrocities for all of posterity. America was poised for the Baby Boom and a postwar explosion of modernization and economic growth.

And yet, parallel to all this, the Cold War and the nuclear Arms Race was beginning, and the gulags and purges in Stalin’s Soviet Union killed millions. Even as a better world seemed possible, threats even greater than the ones the Allies had overcome always seemed to be lurking.

This was the backdrop to the two incidents in 1947 that officially brought UFO fever to the U.S.A. One of them is Roswell, which we mentioned. The other isn’t a household name, but I think in the grand scheme of things, it’s much more important. We’ll explain.

On June 24, 1947, a pilot from Idaho by the name of Kenneth Arnold was flying his small CallAir A-2 across Mineral, Washington. He was on his way to an air show in Oregon but was taking a leisurely route, he wanted to circle around near Mount Rainer. Not long before, a Marine Corps C-46 had crashed and vanished somewhere in the region, and there was a reward of $5,000 promised to anyone who found it. So Arnold was taking a look. 

It was a clear, breezy day, and as Arnold would his little plane through the sky, suddenly he had to cover his eyes. A blinding, bluish light flashed out of nowhere. He assumed it must be coming from another plane, but as he checked his instruments, the only other plane in sight was a DC-4; it was 15 miles away, and it wasn’t flashing. 

These bluish lights flashed over and over, nine times in a row. Arnold described them as appearing to be enormous, as much as five miles wide, and darting from side to side like, in his words, “the tail of a Chinese kite.” He watched them shoot across the sky in diagonal formations, darting between Mount Rainer and Mount Adams – peaks that are nearly 50 miles apart. Arnold measured the time it took them to move between the peaks, and determined that the lights were making that amazing distance in just a minute and forty-two seconds. That works out to an airspeed of seventeen hundred miles per hour – twice the speed of sound and three times faster than aircrafts were capable of moving at that time. 

Arnold had what he described as an “eerie feeling.” This wasn’t something that flashed and disappeared in the blink of an eye, he was watching it for several minutes, in broad daylight, while alert enough to fly a plane. Later, he told reporters at the East Oregonian that he’d seen, quote, “unidentified flying objects”, that flew, quote “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.” In other interviews, he described the shape as a “disk” and a “pie pan”. But “Flying Pie Pans” didn’t have the right ring to it. Saucer was the name that stuck. 

There’s an important point to stress, here. When Arnold used words “saucer” or “pie pan”, he wasn’t describing a saucer-shaped object. Remember, what he saw were massive, blue lights moving at impossible speed, like the light Val Johnson saw, like the lights the citizens of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw. He came up with the word “saucer” in an attempt to describe the way the lights moved through the air. 

Here are his own words in a later interview: “some of the reports [the journalists] did take from newspapers which did not quote me properly. Now, when I told the press, they misquoted me, and in the excitement of it all, one newspaper and another got it as ensnarled up that nobody knew just exactly what they were talking about…these objects more or less fluttered like they were, oh, I’d say, boats on a very rough water or very rough air of some type, and when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in saucer-like fashion.” End quote.

A whole lot of science fiction and UFO lore has come out of that misquote, but we want to respect Arnold’s actual eyewitness account. According to Houston Chronicle, “after the reports, people everywhere were scanning the skies for flying saucers. And when enough people look for something, some people will think they see something. Reports of flying saucers started coming in from all over.” 

And the timing of Arnold’s experience, and that introduction of the image of a flying disc or flying saucer into the public imagination, may have had a major impact on another incident that happened less than two weeks later, over a thousand miles to the southeast, in the little desert town that did become a household name – Roswell, New Mexico.

It was between mid-June and early July 1947 when W.W. “Mac” Brazel, a New Mexico rancher, stumbled across a massive wreckage on his sprawling property, 75 miles north of Roswell. He described it as a messy pile of tangled-together rubber strips, tinfoil, tough paper, and sticks. This doesn’t sound like the sort of material you could use to travel between planets; but Brazel couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be at all. He read the media coverage of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting; which had happened less than two weeks before. He got excited by the idea that this unusual debris he had found could have a connection to that “flying saucer” he’d heard about.

The next time he went to town, he told the local Sheriff, George Wilcox. Wilcox figured that, if there had been anything strange in the air, he should contact Roswell Army Air Field, the local military base. An intelligence officer there, Major Jesse Marcel, brought a pair of fellow officers out to Brazel’s ranch, where they examined the debris he’d found. Just as he’d described, it was a lot of rubber, sticks, tinfoil, some glue and tape holding pieces together.

They released a press bulletin – here’s the Air Force’s own language:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eight Air Force, Roswell Army Airfield, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.”

It’s clear from this phrasing that there’s already an atmosphere of intense curiosity around anything that might be a flying disc or flying saucer. If the government was looking to cover something up, they probably wouldn’t have been the ones to say “flying disc” to the press. News outlets all over the country printed the report, prompting wild speculation. Meanwhile, the Air Force sent a memo to the local FBI office, in which they described the object in detail, frequently using the word ‘balloon’.

The next day, there were further presentations to the press, describing the debris as coming from a downed weather balloon.

But for the record – this was a lie. 

This isn’t just a casual accusation; but in this particular case, it’s their own admission. They have officially acknowledged withholding the truth about Roswell from the public. The debris they recovered was a balloon, but not a weather balloon. It was part of a classified operation called Project Mogul, which was experimenting with a way to detect sound waves traveling through the upper atmosphere from Soviet nuclear tests. Spy balloons were a major component of Cold War espionage, and the Army Air Force made the decision to mislead the public rather than acknowledge the existence of technology they didn’t want the Soviet Union to know about.

Nearly 50 years after the Roswell incident, an official internal review by the U.S. Air Force led to them finally admitting to the deception. By then, of course, the speculation had gone far beyond their ability to control it. There was an entire, elaborate mythology to Roswell; and this simple, Earthbound explanation was just no longer satisfying.

PART THREE

You’ll notice that we haven’t mentioned many details that have become part of the popular Roswell narrative. We haven’t mentioned aliens, or alien corpses, alien autopsies, or an interplanetary flying saucer. We’re telling the story as it was told in 1947 – a pile of debris recovered on a ranch, and a misleading cover story told by the government. Almost everything which has been added to the story since then wasn’t reported until decades later.

It’s uncanny, though, how this was the perfect time, place, and conditions, for a captivating story to take hold. If you remember, in our episode about Peenemunde, the American physicist Robert Goddard had spent years before World War II conducting secret rocket research at his private facility outside of Roswell. The locals were known for being suspicious of outsiders, and for telling misleading and confusing stories to anyone who came asking where Goddard’s base was located. They had a high-functioning rumor mill, especially when it came to stories about secret new technology.

And coming just days after the news reports of Kenneth Arnold’s mysterious encounter, and the tantalizing new idea of a “flying saucer”; it showed that there was a deep, ravenous appetite in the American public for these stories.

And it’s worth mentioning, the military already had experience lying to the public about downed balloons being discovered in parks, on farms, and ranches. We have an episode coming for you soon about the Fu-Go balloons, a strange and often overlooked chapter from the end of World War II that you’re really going to enjoy. 

But the bottom line was that the American government had technology it wanted to keep a secret; and, to make matters worse, they were also on the lookout for signs of Soviet technology and espionage efforts. In the Cold War, secrecy and information were among the biggest battlefields. And if American citizens were reporting lights in the sky, whether they were coming from the Eastern Bloc or somewhere beyond, determining the truth behind them could be a matter of national security.

Efforts by the government to research these phenomena eventually coalesced under one umbrella. It was called “Project Blue Book”, and starting in 1951, it took charge of investigating any and all mysterious airborne phenomena witnessed by the American public; to determine if there was any potential threat. In an 18-year period, they documented over 12,000 sightings. In many cases, they were harmless misunderstandings with an easy and innocent explanation. But 701 of them are considered unexplained to this day.

The first head of Project Blue Book was an experienced Air Force Officer, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt. His goal was to approach the question without bias – he didn’t want to prove aliens were real, or that the stories were all made up. His mission was to gather as much good quality data as possible, and he would dismiss anyone from the team that he thought was too biased in either direction.

He created a standard questionnaire for field agents to use when interviewing witnesses. And, knowing that people might be reluctant to be branded as crazy for seeing a flying saucer, Ruppelt coined a term that he considered more accurate, and more neutral. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt ordered everyone working on Project Blue Book to use the term, Unidentified Flying Object.

It’s worth saying at this point that there is a field of study known as ufology that has attracted thousands of people. In fact, much of the debunking of the wilder stories about the Roswell incident has come from skeptical research by Ufologists who don’t want the study of potential extraterrestrial life to be dominated by hustlers and crackpots. 

When Project Blue Book began, it brought on an outside consultant, an astronomer and University professor named Dr. Allen Hynek. In the early days, he considered it his job to debunk UFO claims as aggressively as possible. In 1948, he called it a fad that would soon pass, and said “the whole subject seems utterly ridiculous.” As years went by, though, he found that not every story could be easily dismissed, and that some of the witnesses he spoke with were capable, competent professionals. In 1953, he started to signal a shift in his thinking when he famously wrote: “Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and people should not be taught that it is.”

Project Blue Book’s reputation went far downhill once the Air Force took control back from Captain Ruppelt. A series of internal turf wars, a rotating carousel of officers in charge, and an overall heavy-handed and dismissive attitude about the whole idea of UFO’s was, ironically, only fueling the public’s belief that the government was hiding something. 

After Blue Book finally ceased operations, Dr. Allen Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies. The professional skeptic, was now, professionally, open-minded. It was Dr. Hynek who first came up with the term “Close Encounter”, as a way of classifying peoples’ experiences with UFOs. Until he died, he was firm in saying that he had never seen a UFO, and was not drawing any conclusions from the wide variety of reports he had investigated over the years. But, as a way of explaining the unexplainable, he thought it was a worthy theory.

PART FOUR

There’s a rich market for sensational stories about UFOs; and plenty of people willing to shove a little speculation and sloppy research into the world in order to make a buck. In 1949, two men showed up in the town of Aztec, New Mexico, trying to sell devices they said were based off of alien technology. They told a wild story about recovering the devices from a crashed UFO, and even got a columnist for Variety Magazine named Frank Scully to publish two articles about it. The articles were so popular that Scully turned those columns into a book called Behind the Flying Saucers.

Eventually, though, the whole thing was exposed as a hoax. The two men were traveling con artists who had been fleecing people for years. But details they provided about their supposed crashed UFO in New Mexico seem to have leaked into the folklore about Roswell; with people quoting Scully’s book to this day despite it being an established fraud.

This can be entertaining, even captivating, whether you believe in it or not. But it’s also too easy to dismiss it all as fantasy until we remember Deputy Val Johnson’s smashed car. Some of these unexplained encounters have involved real danger; and in at least one case, real death. 

Frederick Valentich was a 20-year-old pilot working for Southern Air Services in Moorabbin, Australia. For two years he’d been touring the skies in various aircrafts – with dreams of one day becoming a commercial pilot. Like Kenneth Arnold before him, he was an experienced pilot, with a license to fly solo at night.

The evening of October 21, 1978 started like any other for Valentich. He took off in his Cessna 182 light aircraft at exactly 6:19pm, planning to fly along the coast for forty minutes or so. His route was well planned – he would start in Melbourne before heading south over Bass Strait towards King Island. It was a route the twenty-year-old pilot had taken many times before. He didn’t expect to run into any problems. 

When the plane was flying over Bass Straight, however, something strange happened. An unfamiliar aircraft zoomed out of seemingly nowhere right above Valentich’s plane. Quickly, Valentich radioed Melbourne Airflight Service Controller Steve Robey. 

Robey informed the worried pilot that “no known traffic” was in the area. Robey asked for more information and Valentich gave a chilling account through his radio. These are his exact words:

“It is four bright, it seems to me, like landing lights. The aircraft has just passed over me at least a thousand feet above…It seems to me that he’s playing some sort of game…He’s flying over me two, three times, at a time, at speeds I could not identify.” 

Valentich described the unfamiliar aircraft as long and metallic, with a bright green light. It was weaving in and out of the sky, vanishing and reappearing again out of thin air. 

Finally, in a panic, Valentich told Robey that “it is hovering and it is not an aircraft.” 

Then – silence. For seventeen long seconds Robey could not hear a sound from the other end of the radio. Then, the transmission cut completely. Frederick Valentich was never seen or heard from again. 

In the weeks following his disappearance, witnesses came forward who had also noticed a strange object in the sky that night. One anonymous witness claimed he was walking along the beach with his family when he noticed a lime green light hovering over an airplane. He said that he watched as the plane and the green light moved closer and closer together, until they both disappeared into the darkness – as if swallowed by the sky. 

Another witness, Roy Manifold, was photographing the sunset over the ocean at the time of Valentich’s disappearance. Six weeks later, he was sorting through his photos when he noticed a black spot in the upper righthand corner of the last picture. He took the photo to an examiner, who found no dirt or damage that could have made that mark. 

Word got around to the United States, and an American photo analyst examined the picture and concluded that the mark showed a metallic object in a cloud of exhaust, only about a mile away from the lens. 

Other analysts believed it was some unspecified error made in development, but the coincidence of the incidents of that night and the mark on the photograph are certainly chilling. 

Both land and sea were searched extensively for any sign of Valentich or his aircraft – but not a trace of either was ever found. To this day, no one knows what really happened to Valentich – just that he seemed to vanish at once, from the middle of the sky, after approaching something unfamiliar. 

There’s a lot else we could say about Valentich – about his flight safety record, about his previous intense interest in UFO’s, about a flap that was found washed up on the shore of an island five years later that may have been a part of his plane. But none of it provides any answer to the disappearance itself. It’s another case of the unknown; a darker version of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in the skies. 

To this day, unexplained incidents and encounters are happening, in more countries than just America. There are strong theories for some, others are like those 701 cases in Project Blue Book that were never closed; even with all of modern technology to throw at the problem.

Which brings me back to the copper-colored Ford driven by Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson on that two-lane road I found my way to in Northern Minnesota. It was examined by experts. A glass specialist from the Ford Motor Co. found that the shattered windshield was caused by, “inward and outward forces acting almost simultaneously.” He marveled that the spider-web like cracks were, “extremely unusual,” like nothing he had ever seen before.

Meanwhile, a metallurgical engineer from Honeywell Labs investigated the car’s bent radio antenna. Perplexed, he explained that the cause of the damage seemed to be “a highly charged electrical ‘thing’ with enough mass and momentum to create the effects.” Finally, Allen Hendry, a ufologist from the Center of UFO Studies in Chicago, the same organization founded by Dr. Allen Hynek, examined the car. In Hendry’s words, quote, “it’s hard to find one neat explanation.” 

And then there was Johnson himself, complaining about his eyes burning. After a medical examination, it was determined that his retinas were burned from the glare of a powerfully bright light. Where did it come from?

To this day, Johnson’s accident remains one of the most famous, probable UFO encounters in US history. Soon after it happened, his car was displayed in the Marshall County Fair. Today, it’s an exhibit at the Settler’s Square Historical Museum in Warren, Minnesota. Sitting between covered wagons and vintage technologies, the car, with its broken windshield and bent antennas, is the museum’s most popular attraction; with visitors still trying to imagine just what could have caused its strange wreckage.

The museum even hosted a UFO-themed party for the 40th anniversary of the incident. I wasn’t there, but apparently there was an alien costume contest, a reenactment of Johnson’s radio call; and a local band, The Jenson Sisters, performed a song written just for the occasion – called “The Marshall County Incident.” 

Johnson received daily phone calls and media attention for years, before he moved away to Wisconsin, where he currently resides, and rarely gives interviews. Still, even today, his phone will ring from time to time – a reporter, alien enthusiast, or curious stranger hoping to hear more about what might have happened that night 4 decades ago. 

I like that there’s something in America that embraces big mysteries. To face a big mystery, you need to be able to consider big possibilities. And I like that we’re willing to follow-up when our government tells us a story that doesn’t sound right – that’s a habit we’re always going to need. 

But what I especially like, in fact what I love about UFO’s is that, if we think about there being other life out there, if we think of ourselves as citizens of the Universe, maybe we think just a little bit more about how to be good neighbors.

Even if we never learn for sure, that “U” in UFO does us a lot of good. It came to us out from a dark path, a time of paranoia and secrecy amidst a nuclear arms race. But the simplicity of it can give real comfort – it’s great to want to know, but it’s also okay if we don’t know yet.

As Val Johnson stated after his life forever changed on that late August night, “it’s unexplainable and it will remain so,” but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. 

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host. This is the first episode featuring the research of Laura Townsend, the lead writer. Our senior story editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our lead researcher is Alex Bagosy.  Plus I’d like to thank our producer Emily Wolf and sound engineer Dom Purdie.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening.  This makes a huge difference in helping the show get visibility to new listeners. Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me, your host, MF Thomas.   We’ll see you in two weeks with episode 6 - Until next time, good night.