Marshall County sits in the far north-west of Minnesota, flat farm country near the Red River where section roads run straight for miles between fields and windbreaks. In the early hours of August 27, 1979 one of its sheriff’s deputies, Val Johnson, was on a routine night patrol along an especially empty stretch of County Highway 5, about ten miles west of the town of Stephen.
What happened
At about 1:40 a.m. Johnson noticed a light in the sky near the treeline. Thinking it might be a small plane attempting an emergency landing, he turned left onto State Highway 220 to look. In a taped interview afterward he described the light as only eight to twelve inches across, sharply edged and hanging three or four feet above the road. Then it was on him: he recalled it entering the car, the sound of breaking glass, and nothing more.
When he came round, 39 minutes had gone by. The car had traveled some 850 feet down the road, leaving skid marks, and stopped across the lane at a right angle to traffic. Johnson radioed for help, telling the dispatcher that something had attacked his car and that it was not another vehicle. He had a bump on the head and painful eyes, which a doctor at the hospital in Warren compared to the burns welders get from an arc. His wristwatch and the dashboard clock were each 14 minutes slow.
The car, a 1977 Ford LTD, showed the damage that would make the case famous: a cracked windshield, a dented hood, a smashed headlight, a broken light on the roof and two radio antennas bent back, one at about 90 degrees and the other at 45.
The investigation
Sheriff Dennis Brekke opened an inquiry. The Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration said no aircraft had been scheduled or reported in the area that night. Brekke also contacted the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois, whose magnetic tests on the car gave no clear result. In November an engineer from Honeywell examined the vehicle and concluded that some kind of electrical force had caused the damage. The sheriff’s investigation drew no conclusion about what had happened.
The story went national within days. Johnson appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on September 11 and on radio programs across the country, and the constant calls became a burden on his young family. UFO researchers, among them Allan Hendry and Jerome Clark, came to count it among the most significant cases on record, in part because Johnson never claimed to have seen a craft or a creature, only a light he could not identify.
The explanations
Supporters of the case point to the physical damage, the injuries a physician recorded and the deputy’s restraint in describing them. The best-known dissent came from the skeptic Philip Klass, who argued that the whole episode was a hoax and that Johnson had damaged the car himself. Clark wrote that Johnson declined to take a polygraph test, saying it would serve only to satisfy people’s curiosity. Neither side produced decisive evidence: no tampering was ever demonstrated, and none of the investigators offered a cause that covered the damage, the injuries and the slow clocks together.
Where it stands
Johnson stayed on as a deputy for a time, then became police chief in Oslo, Minnesota, helped set up the police department in Roseau, and later worked in security and customer service before retiring to Wisconsin. In 2015 he told MPR News that he did not believe the light was extraterrestrial but could not rule it out, and that he found the experience unexplainable. County officials had wanted the car repaired and put back on the road, but Brekke persuaded them to keep it as it was. It now stands in the Marshall County Historical Society museum in Warren under a sign reading “U.F.O. Car,” and is the main reason visitors give for coming. The damage is real; its cause has never been identified.