The Van Horne Soybean Field Trace, Iowa (1969)

Summer 1969. Benton County, Iowa. A family farm near the small town of Van Horne. The farmhouse had upstairs windows that looked out over a soybean field. That year Project Blue Book was winding down, and no government body ever looked into what happened here. The investigators who came were civilians.

It was 11:00 p.m. Patti Barr, the farmer's daughter, was upstairs with her cousin Kathy Mahr. They heard a loud roaring noise. They looked out the window.

Something was rotating above the adjacent soybean field. The Center for UFO Studies records it as a reddish-orange ball of light spinning counterclockwise. A NICAP summary by Mike Swords, drawn from the APRO report form, gives a closer look. It was a gray metallic disc that did not glow itself, "like a shallow inverted bowl with a curved bottom," with an orange-red band of light around its rim. It was the size of an automobile.

It rose, still turning counter-clockwise. It passed directly over the farmhouse. Its vibrations rattled the bedroom windows. Then it left. Neighbours said their dogs were unusually noisy that night.

The next morning Warren Barr went out to his soybeans. He found a nearly bare patch. CUFOS describes a 24-foot-diameter oval. NICAP and Ted Phillips' catalogue describe a 40-foot circle. The plants' leaves were "severely dehydrated, dry, and brittle," hanging wilted from the stalks. Yet none of the plants had been broken or flattened. To investigators, that suggested the object had hovered close rather than touched down.

APRO took soil samples and photographs. Its analysis found the plants dry, shriveled and not radioactive. The case ran in the APRO Bulletin that summer. Walt Andrus interviewed the daughter for Skylook, then the newsletter of MUFON. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported the story on August 15, 1969.

J. Allen Hynek visited the site. He is quoted as saying: "I still don't know what the hell this thing is about… It looked as though a big heater had been held six feet above the ground."

The groups on site listed localized intense heat or radiation as the most likely cause. That describes the damage, not its source, and APRO's tests had already found no radioactivity. No one on record has proposed a conventional culprit. No hoax has ever been alleged. The family did not seek publicity, and the damaged patch meant a loss of valuable crop.

Ted Phillips listed Van Horne in his 1975 catalogue of physical trace cases. Kevin Randle wrote about it in "The Iowa UFO Landings." Swords called it "one of the best 'landing effects' cases on record." He pointed to the multiple witnesses, a farmer who knew his own fields, and credible investigators on site early. Today the Center for UFO Studies uses Van Horne as a standard example of a close encounter of the second kind. Crop circle archives count it as an early formation.