What’s the story behind Minnesota’s ‘UFO car’?
“Everybody believed the deputy that something happened,” said Broten, the Marshall County Historical Society president. “That it wasn’t anything that he did.”
Johnson was on patrol, driving desolate roads west of tiny Stephen, Minn., in the early hours of Aug. 27, 1979, when he saw a light in the sky.
It was “like a spotlight,” he later told an Associated Press reporter.
He turned off County Road 5 onto Hwy. 220 to check it out, thinking it was a small plane’s landing light.
Val Johnson returned a few weeks later to the spot where he said he was engulfed by a flash of light. He indicated how big the beam was as it approached. (Stormi Greener/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
“It sat there and appeared to be stationary,” he told the Associated Press. “But when I got closer, boom, it was right there, just right now. I heard glass breaking, saw the inside of the car light up real bright with white light. It was very, very extremely bright. That’s all I can remember.”
