Photo courtesy of Marshall co. Historical Society
Squad car in a museum
UFOs exist? Deputy Val Johnson’s squad car (now at the Marshall Co. Historical Society), for one, feels vindicated.
It’s August 1979. And it’s late—nearly 2 am. Marshall County Sheriff’s Deputy Val Johnson is on routine patrol on Highway 220 near Warren when he spots what he later describes as a “very bright, brilliant light” floating a few feet off the ground. He does what, er, anyone in that situation would do: drives directly at it.
Roughly 30 minutes later, he wakes up in the ditch. His Ford cruiser’s windshield is smashed, as is a headlight; his watch and the cruiser’s clock are both 14 minutes slow; his eyes are surrounded with burns; and he will forever be known as the cop who hit a UFO.
Well, that or, maybe more likely in decades since, the cop who went crazy and thinks he saw a UFO—a hero to alien aficionados, a sideshow to others.
That is, until now. Thanks to the Pentagon throwing decades of statements to the contrary under the bus this spring by suddenly declassifying the fact that they know and have known for decades that unidentified flying objects (unidentified aerial phenomena, as they call them) exist. A Navy task force report reveals that Navy pilots and assorted military and government personnel have been reporting unexplainable flying objects for decades, including 144 credible sightings between 2004 and 2021.
This might also back up the nearly 1,500 UFO sightings in Minnesota crowdsourced by the National UFO Reporting Center over the past 15 years, including 20 and counting already in 2021.
Just don’t go thinking any of this is proof that aliens exist. The Navy task force report says that while it doesn’t know what the mystery objects are, there “are no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation” for them.
It’s like Val Johnson says of his encounter.
“I saw a ball of light,” Johnson says. “I drove toward it, and suddenly it was in the car with me. It’s unexplainable and will remain so. I’m happy with my mental stability.”
