United States.Delphos · a teenager sees an object, then a glowing ring

Around 7:00 p.m. on November 2, 1971, 16-year-old Ronald Johnson was tending sheep on his family's farm near Delphos, in Ottawa County, Kansas, when he said he saw a mushroom-shaped object, about 3 meters across (nine feet), covered in multicolored lights, humming as it hovered about two feet off the ground, some 25 yards (about 23 meters) from him, sounding like "an old washing machine which vibrates". When it took off, a bright light from its base temporarily blinded him. Ron went to get his family and, when they returned, the entire family saw the object in the sky. His parents, Durel and Erma Johnson, found at the spot where it had been a ring of soil glowing in the dark and luminescence on nearby trees, and felt numbing when they touched the ring.

According to the Johnsons, the ring's glow was bright enough to read a newspaper by, and one of the photographs they took that night needed no flash. The glow lasted until the next night. The soil inside the ring was discolored, lighter, and let no water through: it was described as impermeable and dry to a depth of at least one foot (about 30 cm), a property the samples retained for decades. The case is classed as a close encounter of the second kind (CE2): a close sighting that leaves physical traces.

Organic chemist Erol Faruk analyzed the soil in the 1970s (Journal of UFO Studies, 1989). In 1999, analytical chemist Phyllis Budinger, at the request of Ted Phillips of the Center for Physical Trace Research, repeated the analysis on the ring and control samples, which had been taken two months after the event and turned up in November 1998 in John Timmerman's attic, where they had been kept for years in their original containers.

Budinger concluded there had been "a definite release of material", most probably deposited as an aqueous solution, which coated the soil and amounted to 2-3% of its weight. It was 85% humic substance (probably fulvic acid), resembling a "mull type humus" that occurs under conditions of high biological activity, and 5% calcium oxalate, a skin and eye irritant that could account for the witnesses' effects. She added that the soil was not exposed to high temperature, that humic substances with oxalate and a suitable catalyst "may possibly" cause the glow by chemiluminescence, and that adding water and agitating the soil made it lose the hydrophobic effect. She cautioned that it is unknown whether the samples changed over 27 years and that the analysis "neither proves nor rules out a UFO source of the release".

The conventional explanation proposed is a "fairy ring", the circle a soil fungus forms. Scott Snell (National Capital Area Skeptics, 2014) notes that, as reported years later by Jacques Vallée, analysis of the soil indicated a fungus-like organism capable of producing that phenomenon. Faruk ruled it out on the grounds that the soil compound would not be produced by a fungus, and James Harder wrote that the hydrophobicity and the fungus were "not necessarily connected". In any case, the fungus hypothesis does not explain the object Ronald Johnson said he saw.

Delphos left a soil sample that could be analyzed decades later. Budinger found in it a layer of material that still made the ring soil hydrophobic, and concluded the soil had not been exposed to high temperatures. Her report does not attribute that material to a specific cause: it says the analysis neither proves nor rules out a UFO source.

The object is described up close by a single witness, a 16-year-old; his family saw it afterward in the sky. No soil analysis touches that sighting, and the samples were taken two months later and analyzed 27 years after that. Budinger cautions that it is unknown whether they changed in that time.