Delphos

Delphos and the Glowing Ring

On the evening of 2 November 1971 sixteen-year-old Ron Johnson was tending sheep on a farm outside this Kansas town when, he said, a glowing object on three legs stood twenty metres away and then went up with a roar. His parents, running out at his shout, found a glowing ring on the ground about two and a half metres across. The ring was photographed. The soil inside it repelled water for months afterwards, and laboratory analysis found an unusual organic content; botanists suggested a fungal ring — but a fungal ring does not glow and does not appear in a minute. The case remains one of the few in the subject where the argument is not about a story but about soil analysis.