Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: Lawman has a close encounter

By MIKE CONLEY
nconley@mcdowellnews.com
Thursday, May 1, 2008

Early one morning, a deputy sheriff in Minnesota found himself blinded by the light of a UFO.

In the dark early hours of Aug. 27, 1979, Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson was driving his patrol car on a rural highway in Marshall County, Minn. not far from the North Dakota border. At 1:40 a.m., Johnson spotted a bright light along a group of trees some distance from his car. At first, he thought it might be a downed plane so he turned his car in that direction to check it out.

Johnson noticed the weird light was not illuminating the surrounding area. Suddenly, the light started to move towards him and almost instantly covered an estimated mile and a half before resting above his car.

"I heard glass breaking and saw the inside of the car light up real bright with white light ... after the light hit my vehicle, I don't remember a thing," he later stated.

For some unknown reason, Johnson lost consciousness. When he awoke, his head was resting on the steering wheel. His patrol car had somehow skidded across the rural highway's southbound lane and now faced eastward. He also had vision problems, according to a Web site about the incident.

At this point, Johnson radioed the Marshall County Sheriff's Department in Warren, Minn. for help. It was 2:19 a.m. He told the dispatcher "Something just hit my car. I don't know how to explain it...I heard glass breaking and my brakes lock up. I don't know what the hell happened." A fellow deputy sheriff, Greg Winskowski, soon arrived on the scene. He noticed that Johnson had a red bump on his forehead, and concluded that he had hit his head on the steering wheel and been knocked out. He called for an ambulance to take Johnson to the hospital.

At the hospital in Warren, Minn., a doctor tried to examine Johnson's eyes, but found that shining a light onto them caused Johnson extreme pain. The doctor compared Johnson's eye injury to "mild welder's burns," and gave him some salve and bandages. Johnson then gave a statement at the Sheriff's Office and was taken home.

The next morning, Sheriff Dennis Brekke himself took Johnson's patrol car to the garage to have it checked out. Mechanics at the garage found that the car was damaged in some strange ways. For example, the hood had a circular dent about a half-inch in diameter. There was a crack in the windshield which ran from the top to the bottom. The crack had four impact points which may have been caused by small objects. The car's dashboard clock, set correctly at 7 p.m. when Johnson reported for duty, was now 14 minutes late. In addition, Johnson's wristwatch was also 14 minutes late. Other investigators found more weird damage to the car that couldn't be easily explained, according to the Web site.

After taking Johnson's patrol car to the police garage, Sheriff Brekke drove Johnson to the nearby city of Grand Forks, N.D. for a more thorough eye exam. The physician there found that Johnson's eyes had cleared up and his vision was fine. Brekke later called the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Ill. He described Johnson's encounter to Allan Hendry, who agreed to immediately fly to Marshall County and check it out.

When he arrived, Hendry found that skid marks at the site of the encounter revealed his patrol car had skidded for 855 feet before the brakes locked up and it had continued to slide for another 99 feet. After interviewing numerous people in Warren, Minn. who knew Johnson, Hendry concluded he had not hoaxed the event. He also determined that an airplane could not have caused the damage to the patrol car.

The Val Johnson UFO incident received national publicity and became one of the best-publicized UFO reports of the 1970s. Johnson even appeared with Hendry on ABC's "Good Morning America" program.

Several of Johnson's friends urged him to take a lie detector test to prove he was telling the truth. They also urged him to undergo hypnosis to see if he could better remember the incident. Johnson refused both requests saying he felt that undergoing hypnosis or a lie-detector test would only satisfy people's "morbid curiosity," according to the Web site.

So we may never know just what caused him to temporarily lose his eyesight or what happened during that missing time.