The Delphos Ring: Ronald Johnson's Glowing Toadstool, Delphos, Kansas

Delphos is a small farming town in Ottawa County, Kansas. In November 1971 it was lambing season on the Johnson family's sheep farm nearby. Ronald Johnson was 16, and his evening chores meant tending the sheep with the family sheepdog, Snowball. Project Blue Book had closed two years earlier. There would be no Air Force inquiry into what happened next.

Tuesday, 2 November 1971. About 7:00 p.m. A clear evening, already dark. Ronald heard it first. A rumbling noise, "like a washing machine out of balance." The sheep were bellowing. Then he saw it, in or beside a small grove of trees about 75 feet away. He compared it to "a toad stool." It had a flat dome and a flat bottom, roughly 8 or 9 feet across, and it hung only a few feet above the ground. A mass of colours covered it, blue, red and orange. A shimmering glow reached from its base down to the earth.

Then the glow at the base grew brighter. The object took off at an angle. It cleared a shed by no more than 4 feet, with a high-pitched, jet-like sound. Ronald was left temporarily blinded. When his sight returned within minutes, he could still see it in the southern sky.

Ronald fetched his parents, Durel and Erma Johnson. Where the object had been, they found a glowing, grey-white ring that looked "crystallized." Luminescence was reported on the nearby trees. Both parents later described numbness. "You could have cut my fingers off for a couple of days afterwards and I wouldn't have known it," Durel said. Erma could no longer take patients' pulses at the rest home where she worked. For weeks Ronald suffered eye pain, headaches, nightmares and sleepwalking. Snowball would not go back to the spot.

The next day Sheriff Ralph Enlow, Undersheriff Harlan Enlow and Trooper Kenneth Yager came to the farm. The soil was "almost white in color and very dry," and a Civil Defense Radiological Monitor showed it was not radioactive. The sheriff vouched for the family. On 4 December 1971, Ted Phillips, working with J. Allen Hynek, found the ring outlined by unmelted snow. "The ring remains," he wrote. "And this unusual ground mark is indeed a mystery."

Seven laboratory analyses followed. Jacques Vallée identified Actinomycetales. Chemist Phyllis Budinger found high oxalic acid but none of the markers expected in barnyard soil. Erol Faruk reported a soap-like compound showing chemiluminescence, which he offered as the cause of the glow.

In 1973 the National Enquirer's Blue Ribbon Panel awarded the Johnsons $5,000. The prize drew suspicion. In UFOs: The Public Deceived, Philip J. Klass argued the ring marked where a sheep feeder or trough had stood for years, and Klass suspected a hoax. Sceptics on Metabunk later cited a neighbour who remembered a galvanised chicken feeder on the spot. Others proposed a fungal ring. Ufologists answer with Budinger's chemistry. No explanation has been accepted as complete.

Phillips' report was reprinted in the MUFON Journal in 1985, and his monograph Delphos: A Close Encounter of the Second Kind followed in 2002. Today the Center for UFO Studies uses Delphos as its model close encounter of the second kind. A sighting that left something behind.