On the evening of 2 November 1971, on the Johnson farm near Delphos, Kansas, sixteen-year-old Ronald Johnson reported a glowing object rising from the ground; his parents Durel and Erma Johnson saw a glow at the site shortly afterwards. What it left was a ring of pale soil that would not take water, dry to a depth of about a foot under later snow, and not radioactive. A separate witness reported a light in the sky at Minneapolis, Kansas, the same evening.
The case matters in The Invisible College because of what Jacques Vallee did with it. Rather than argue about the soil he had material from the ring analysed in a French laboratory, and the whitish fibrous matter in it resolved under the microscope into an organism of the order Actinomycetales, reported by him as Nocardia. That is a finding rather than a rebuttal, but it displaced the explanation offered by Philip Klass, that the ring was ground saturated by sheep urine from a watering trough.
Later chemical work extended the record without closing it. Erol Faruk and, in a 1999 re-analysis published in 2003, Phyllis Budinger found an organic coating deposited from aqueous solution, largely fulvic acid with calcium oxalate and traces of other salts, with no evidence of heating. Budinger’s stated conclusion was that the material is not natural to the Delphos area and that the analysis neither proves nor rules out a UFO source.
Connections
Jacques Vallee · The Invisible College · Philip Klass · Control System Hypothesis