Val Johnson Incident

The Red River Valley. Northwest Minnesota, near the North Dakota border. Monday, 27 August 1979, about 1:40 a.m. Val Johnson, a 35 year old deputy sheriff for Marshall County, was driving County Road 5, ten miles west of Stephen. He was alone. He would be the only witness.

A bright light came through his side window. He knew it was not typical vehicle lights. "I thought maybe a semi hit a deer," he later said. "Or maybe an aircraft with one of those big lights had landed there." He turned left onto State Highway 220 to investigate, driving at about 50 to 60 mph. In his police interview he described it with care. "I noticed a very bright, brilliant light, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, 3 to 4 feet off the ground. The edges were very defined."

Then the light moved. It covered an estimated mile and a half almost instantly. "And then, 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." He heard glass breaking. He was blinded. He lost consciousness.

By most accounts Johnson was out for 39 minutes. His car had coasted 854 feet and stopped at a 90 degree angle across the road. He got on the radio. "Something attacked my car…it wasn't a vehicle…I don't know what the hell it was." Dispatcher Pete Bauer remembered it more simply. "He said 'I don't know what happened. Something hit me.'"

The squad car was a 1977 Ford LTD. Its windshield was smashed on the driver's side. The hood had a small circular dent. The driver's side headlight was broken, and so was the red emergency light. The antennas were bent. His wristwatch and the dashboard clock were both 14 minutes slow. An ambulance took him to Warren. The hospital compared the pain in his eyes to welder's burns.

Sheriff Dennis Brekke led the inquiry and brought in the Center for UFO Studies. Chief investigator Allan Hendry interviewed Johnson on 4 September 1979 and ran magnetic tests on the car. The results were inconclusive. The FAA and the Air Force said no aircraft were scheduled or reported in the area.

Ford sent windshield expert Meridan French. "I still have no explanation for what seem to be inward and outward forces acting almost simultaneously." Honeywell engineer Roland Wardell examined the car on 6 November 1979. The Minneapolis Star reported that no single earthly explanation covered all the damage, and that some of it fit an electrical field. Chris Rutkowski of Ufology Research of Manitoba found that everyone he interviewed believed Johnson.

Johnson never said he saw aliens or a spacecraft. Only that a force he could not identify collided with his car. Philip J. Klass went further. In UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983) he argued that Johnson had damaged the car himself, pointing to his earlier interest in forming a "UFO patrol." Klass wanted a polygraph test. Johnson refused, saying it would only "satisfy people's morbid curiosity." Hendry called Klass's approach "character assassination."

Others have proposed ball lightning, or secret military activity from Grand Forks Air Force Base, about 60 miles away. Johnson listed the possibilities himself. "It could be a UFO… time travel… top secret military from Grand Forks Air Force Base." His answer to the doubters never changed. "I'm not running for public office, I don't have vitamins to sell you… This is what happened to me."

Johnson appeared on Good Morning America on 11 September 1979. No official body has ever ruled the case either a UFO or a hoax. The car was never repaired. It sits at the Marshall County Historical Society museum in Warren, where the "UFO car" draws more visitors than any other object it holds. Sources say showrunner Noah Hawley named the incident as an influence on the second season of Fargo, set in 1979 Minnesota. In 2019, Newsweek ranked it among the most credible sightings on record.