By KEN KORCZAK
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
About 25 years ago, I placed a classified ad in several small-town newspapers here in conservative, rural northern Minnesota.
Here is what the ad said:
“Have you seen a UFO, ghost, or anything you can’t explain? Please call me: xxx-xxxx. Confidentiality guaranteed.”
These are the stories that resulted.
ELDERLY FARMER CONFRONT MASSIVE UFO
After the first call I received from a Minnesota sheriff’s deputy telling me of his UFO encounter connected to the sighting of “little alien men,” I felt fortunate that my ad had produced any results at all.
Having expected nothing from my “classified” experiment, I was thrilled to have garnered at least one top-notch, authentic UFO case. Imagine my delight when the phone soon rang again from another ordinary northern Minnesota citizen who wanted to tell me about his UFO encounter.
This time the caller was an elderly gentleman whom I had known for years because we were from the same small town. I would describe him as a staid Bible-oriented Christian conservative type. He was a lifelong farmer and a no-nonsense, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy.
His name is Bernard Hanson. He agreed to go on the record for this story. Before retirement from farming, he lived just outside our tiny town of Greenbush, Minnesota, population 714. Bernard had a strange tale to tell. Here it is:
THE GIANT BLACK UFO
On a peaceful, clear June evening in 1987, dairy and grain farmer Bernard Hanson and his son, Dexter, were heading west on a dirt road after turning off Minnesota State Highway 11 just outside of Greenbush city limits.
Suddenly, father and son saw a fantastic thing floating above a grove of trees.
It was massive!
It had the look of hard plastic, deep black in color. It was easily bigger than a barn and hovered serenely about 100 feet above the treetops over the farm of Bob Melby. Hanson and his son were stunned — and “a little scared.”
“We just didn’t know what it was,” Bernard told me in a telephone interview. He said:
“It was cigar-shaped and pure black, coal-black. There were no markings on it. It was smooth all over. I would say it had the look of plastic. It was about 1/2-mile to 3/4 of a mile from us. It was at least as big as my barn, if not bigger.”
Bernard said he and Dexter sat in the pick-up and watched it for “a long while.” (At least 10 minutes). It was not a fleeting image or a streak across the sky. The object had the definite look of something solid — real enough to touch.
“It was a clear June evening,” Bernard said. “There was not a cloud in the sky. The sun had just gone down, but you know the way it stays light in the summer. There was still plenty of daylight and we could see it clearly.”
Even though they were somewhat frightened, Bernard and Dexter decided to get a bit closer. They put their old pick-up truck in gear and drove toward it.
“We turned toward it on County Road 104, but when we moved, it moved,” Hanson said. “We followed it for a while, and then we turned north, and it turned north.”
After following it for a couple of miles, Bernard said the object suddenly zoomed away.
“It tilted upward and streaked away from us — it turned into a tiny black dot in just seconds and was gone. It flew upward at a 45-degree angle …the rate of speed was tremendous… it was almost as if it just vaporized.”
After the object left, the Hansons decided to stop in at the farm of Wayne Juhl’s and ask him if he saw the curious object. Mr. Juhl said he had seen nothing, however. I later tracked down Bob Melby because it was above his farm that Bernard and Dexter first spotted the object. Mr. Melby, like neighboring farmer Wayne Juhl, reported he had not seen anything either, although he couldn’t be sure he was home that day.
Bernard knows he wasn’t “seeing things” because he and his son could not both have had the same hallucination. Also, he is certain it was not a conventional aircraft.
“A large balloon could never move that fast and go up at that angle,” he said.
Then what was it? Bernard has no guess, and he is not ready to say that he saw a spaceship or a UFO. But he knows that what he and his son saw was something entirely unexplained.
“I think we all have to admit that there are things in the world we don’t know about — there are a lot of mysteries. All I’m saying is that this was something I have never seen before, and I don’t know what it was.”
What about a blimp? This is unlikely in the extreme. This was rural and remote northern Minnesota where I grew up. To my knowledge, there has never been a blimp in our area. At any rate, the fact that the object “zoomed away” at extremely high acceleration also makes a blimp not at all a plausible explanation.
LOCAL COP ALSO SAW A UFO
Now I want to briefly circle back to the story I reported in Part 1 of Classified UFO.”
After Roseau County Sheriff’s Deputy David Randall (not his real name) told me his story about the “Grygla Globe UFO” and the subsequent sighting of “little alien men” by a Grygla resident, he said that this was not the first time he had seen a UFO.
As it turns out, he and his family got a close-up look at a “classic flying saucer.” Randall tells it this way:
“When I was a boy living on my parents’ farm near a small town north of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, we were eating dinner one summer day. We had been making hay that day.”
“We had a farmhand working for us back then. He suddenly came rushing into the kitchen and told us to come outside quick.”
Note: Thief River Falls is about 40 miles north of Greenbush.
They could clearly see their farmhand was unusually excited about something. The entire family got up and filed out the kitchen door. There, a short distance across a hayfield was a silver-metallic object resting nice-as-you-please in the summer green alfalfa field.
“It was just there,” Randall said. “It looked like a silver disk — bright, shiny, silvery with no marking on it of any kind. We didn’t know what it was. We just knew it was something unusual.”
Randall, his family and the farmhand observed the silver disk for a few minutes. He estimates it was 25 to 30 feet long, thick in the middle and tapered on the ends.
In short: A classic flying saucer!
Then it lifted into the sky and was gone in an instant.
“It didn’t make a bit of sound,” Randall said. “It shot up into the air and disappeared.”
I asked the caller if the object could have been something normal, such as a propane tank or a sheet from the roof of a grain bin that had been blown into their alfalfa field by a fluky flurry of wind.
“Oh absolutely not,” he said with conviction. “It was a still, calm sunny day. We all saw this thing as plain as day. We were 100 yards or less away. It wasn’t anything that could be identified as a common object, including any kind of conventional aircraft.”
Randall said the UFO sighting that day has been something his family has spoken of for years.
“It was a brief event, but it has stuck with us for all these years. You just don’t forget something like that. It is a special experience. To this very day, when I get together with my family, we mention that silver object in our hayfield and we talk about it.”
He added:
“It makes you wonder what is out there — things you just can’t explain. It really makes you think.”
NOTE: For more first-person and on-the-ground reports of UFOs, go to: KEN-ON-MEDIUM.