By KEN KORCZAK
The true story of an amazing high-speed chase between an Army MP and a UFO across the remote flatlands of Northwest Minnesota. Part II of a five-part series.
In Part 1 of this series, I provided an overview of what is sometimes called “Minnesota’s Roswell” or more often, “Minnesota’s most notorious UFO incident.” It’s the story of that day in August of 1979 when a UFO “rammed” the squad car of Marshall County sheriff’s deputy Val Johnson.
It is among the most renowned and baffling UFO cases in UFO history. Deputy Val Johnson found himself catapulted to international media fame, making appearances on the top-rated prime time TV shows of the day, such as ABC’s That’s Incredible, the Today show and many others, including top nationally syndicated radio interviews. Major newspapers across the world ran the story.
Johnson and his wife, Rose (she was my next-door neighbor when I was a kid growing up in Greenbush, Minnesota), quickly began to bitterly regret their 15 minutes of fame.
Their once normal lives of anonymity as ordinary hardworking folks in a small town were gone and never truly returned. More than 40 years later, Val and Rose Johnson still get requests from media types for interviews. To this day, a persistent stream of UFO buffs makes pilgrimages to their door. They want to talk to Val about that day his squad car “collided with a UFO … ”
… but Val and Rose dearly wish they could forget the whole thing happened.
I DECIDE TO REOPEN THE CASE AFTER FOUR+ DECADES
Even though I decided to reopen the Val Johnson case recently to see what I could find out, I opted NOT to get in touch with Val and Rose despite knowing them slightly in my youth. Call it a code of courtesy among small towners. As our current Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, recently told Jake Tapper on CNN: “People in small Minnesota towns mind their own business.”
Nevertheless, I brushed off my skills as a former newspaper reporter and got to work. I was amazed that I was able to flush out no less than five new witnesses. Each of them encountered what was highly likely to be the same anomalous object that struck Val Johnson’s car — witnesses that no one had ever spoken to before.
They told me about additional encounters with the object in nearly the same location within a close time frame of the summer/fall season of 1979. One of those new witnesses in particular had a wild story to tell. That’s what you are about to read here.
Furthermore, I believe this new account adds significant credibility to Val Johnson’s account. It happened two months and two days after Johnson encountered an anomalous object on Aug 27, 1979. This time it was another kind of law enforcement officer — a U.S. Army MP — who had a sensational run-in with what was almost certainly the same object that rammed Val Johnson’s cop car.
A RUMOR THAT TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE
For years after the 1979 Johnson encounter, I had heard rumors about a second man that had tangled with a mysterious object on Highway 220.
One day on a business trip to a printer’s shop in Warren, Minnesota, (the town where Val Johnson was stationed as a country deputy), I bumped into an acquaintance. Just in passing, this person told me he knew of a person — who knew the name of a third person — who knew a guy who had engaged a UFO in a hair-raising high-speed chase shortly after the Johnson incident.
This was the flimsy lead that jump started my new investigation. I made some phone calls. That produced a name and a few more vague details. I began to search the internet for someone who lived in Minnesota, who was a U.S. Army MP in 1979, and who was driving to a reassignment posting to Fort Snelling, Minnesota.
It was Facebook that led me to the name of a Twin Cities resident, Steven M. Shoemaker. I found him on the social media site and was intrigued to see that Shoemaker identified himself as a retired 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army — although he was a helicopter pilot, not an MP.
With nothing to lose, I messaged Mr. Shoemaker on Facebook and asked if he might have been traveling through northern Minnesota some 40 years ago and had experienced “something strange” on his trip.
I was delighted to get a swift reply. Shoemaker pinged back within minutes and said he had engaged in a “high-speed chase with the same object” that had rammed Val Johnson’s police car! Wow! I emailed him and asked if he would be willing to sit for an interview and go on the record with his name,
Steven answered, “Yes. When and where?”
Because I live more than 300 miles north of the Twin Cities, the interview happened via telephone shortly thereafter. Both Shoemaker and his wife, Susan, were on the call. She was along for the ride that night. Here is the amazing story Steven and Susan Shoemaker had to tell.
A HIGH-SPEED GAME OF CHICKEN WITH A UFO
Sgt. Steven Shoemaker, then age 25, had been traveling for more than a week in his ’79 Chevy Nova. Something of a muscle car, the Nova packed a 305 cc 8-cylinder engine. Fitted inside the compact frame of the popular Chevrolet model, it made for a ride that “could really move out.” The car’s speedometer topped out at 80 mph, but everyone knew the Chevy Nova could easily do 110 mph.
(I know this for a fact — since I owned the very same model Nova with an 8-cylinder 305 in the late 1970s).
Sgt. Shoemaker and his wife began their journey at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska. Susan was six months pregnant. The couple headed south down the magnificent ALCAN Highway that traverses 1,700 miles through the remarkable, mountainous Canadian landscape ending in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
From there, it was a matter of connecting with several provincial highway routes to reach the U.S. border. The Shoemakers caught Trunk Highway 29 in Manitoba headed south to North Dakota where they crossed back into the United States.
At about 10 p.m. on a dark, starless night, the Shoemakers turned east on County Highway 54 and passed into Minnesota where the road became State Highway 220. After traversing approximately eight miles to the tiny town of Alvarado, Highway 220 transitions to Minnesota State Highway 1.
This is a straight-as-an-arrow stretch of blacktop passing through a treeless flatland surrounded by miles of empty space on both sides. It’s an area of vast stretches of open farm fields. There are no buildings near the road except for a few steel grain bins along the way.
If anyone wanted to stage a drag race with some tricked out cars in the middle of the night, Highway 1 between Alvarado and Warren would be an excellent choice. In this remote location, traffic is all but nonexistent during the overnight hours.
It’s 20 miles east from Alvarado to Warren. Exhausted from driving, the Shoemakers planned to drive through Warren and tough out the last 35 miles to reach Thief River Falls, a city of about 8,000 where Shoemaker’s sister lived in an apartment. They planned to stay there for the night.
The Shoemakers were to resume their journey the next day to his duty station at the Fort Snelling U.S. Army Reserve Center near the Twin Cities.
It was just after they passed through Alvarado that the night suddenly got weird.
About three-fourths of a mile on the road ahead, the couple observed an “unusually bright light” in the center of the highway. Out here in the middle of nowhere, Steven and his wife conjectured it might have been the lights of an airplane that made an emergency landing (just as Val Johnson had first thought) or perhaps some kind of bright construction light.
They assumed they would find out soon enough. As they got closer, the light appeared to recede from them at the same speed at which they drove toward it. Although it was only a few minutes, Sgt. Shoemaker quickly found himself feeling vexed and intensely curious about the light.
His Army MP impulses kicked in. He decided to stomp his accelerator to the floor. The Nova’s powerful 305cc engine roared and hurled the vehicle toward the mystery ahead. With his six-month pregnant wife sitting next to him, Shoemaker opted to go “full gangbusters forward.” (His words).
When I asked Steven about his sudden impetus, he said:
“You have to understand that, at the time, I was a young and extremely cocky 25-year-old military policeman. My job as an MP was to chase down soldiers that had gone AWOL and … and I don’t know, there was something here that just didn’t seem right. My instincts just kicked in. My job in the military was to chase things down. I was always in that mode. I became determined to see what that light was.”
Within seconds, Shoemaker buried the speedometer needle. It strained past the 80-mph mark — Shoemaker believes he was soon barreling along at 90 to 100 mph.
As he closed the distance between his car and the glowing anomaly, Shoemaker got his first look at a large orb-like globe of a bright yellowish light that was about six to eight feet in diameter. It cruised along neatly about three feet above the centerline of the highway.
Then Shoemaker was in for a shock. He said:
“When I got to within maybe 100 yards of it, it suddenly veered off the centerline, moved into the middle of my lane, reversed course and started coming right after me at full ramming speed!”
Even though Shoemaker was clocking nearly 100 mph, he stomped on the brakes. They locked and sent his Nova skidding wildly onto the road’s shoulder and half into the ditch. Everything the couple had packed in the backseat of the car came flying into the front seat — his wife straining against her seatbelt and dodging suitcases and bags flying forward.
In the seconds it took to stop, and before Steven and Susan could catch their breath, they noticed the glowing orb was instantly about the same distance ahead — about ¾-mile ahead of them.
“Now I was really pissed off!” Shoemaker said. “That cocky young police officer in me wasn’t about to be hounded off the road by … whatever that thing was. I pulled the car back on the road and floored it again. In a few seconds, I was doing a 100-mph chasing after it!”
Once again, Shoemaker got within about 100 yards. This time he got a better look.
“There was definitely some structure to the craft,” he said. “I could see now that the bottom one-quarter of the sphere was comprised of a brighter white light than the top portion of the object. Also, at this close approach, the light of the object was so bright that I had to squint my eyes. Susan shielded her eyes with her hands.”
I asked Steven an obvious question: “Wasn’t staring into a blinding light while traveling at 100 miles per hour pretty risky and with your pregnant wife in the front seat?”
Steven replied: “Well, the only thing I can tell you is that I was a young, driven and really gung-ho military man at the time who was determined to find out what was happening out here. This was something extremely unusual — who knows, even dangerous. You know, this location is not far from the Grand Forks Air Force Base and there are ICMB missile silos nearby on the North Dakota side, maybe less than 50 miles away.”
Whatever the case, Shoemaker was about to get a second dose of the same treatment. The object suddenly veered back into Steven’s lane and headed straight for him.
The most bizarre game of chicken ever played was now fully engaged on a lonely Minnesota highway in the middle of the night. As the object reversed again and headed straight for him, Shoemaker jammed on the breaks again and squealed the Chevy to another jarring stop. Once again, in a blink of an eye, the glowing sphere popped back to three-quarters of a mile ahead.
For Steven, there was now only one course of action — tromp down on the gas a third time!
This time he got even closer to his quarry.
“We came to within about 30 feet of the object — we almost hit it! We got a really good look at it, except its intense brightness made it difficult to make out exact structural details. Again, we could clearly see that the bottom quarter of the object was of a slightly different color than the upper portion. There seemed to be different sections to the object, you might say.”
At this point, Steven’s cooler operational military instincts took over. He reasoned there was little more he could do. He decided to back off and follow the object at a safe distance in an “observe and monitor” mode. He flashed his high beams at the globe and flicked his headlight on and off. No response.
The flying sphere got about a mile ahead of Shoemaker and then seemed to simply disappear into the sky as he passed by a drive-in theater (interestingly called the Sky-Vu Drive-In Theater) on the north side of the highway.
“It appeared as if we lost sight of the object as it went behind a hill but there are no hills out there. That area is as flat as a pool table,” Shoemaker said.
As they moved past Warren city limits, Steven thought to see a globe flying in the sky for a few seconds, then it was gone. The couple continued to Thief River Falls. Upon arrival at his sister’s apartment, Steven and Susan began telling of the many marvelous sights and adventures they encountered driving down the ALCAN — and Susan added:
“And we saw a UFO!”
Steven’s sister asked: “It wasn’t near Warren, was it? Because a local cop rammed his car into a UFO not far from there a couple of months ago.”
Steven said his sister’s statement “gave me goosebumps, a knot in my stomach and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.” He added:
“We hadn’t told her where we saw the UFO. I had never heard about the Val Johnson incident despite, I guess, that it was national news a couple of months earlier.”
The next day, Shoemaker and his wife proceeded with their 300-mile journey south to his new post at Fort Snelling. Even though the incident loomed large in their minds, they decided to keep it quiet. He and his wife Susan told only “a couple of friends and relatives.”
“I didn’t want people to think I was some kind of loon,” Shoemaker said.
Shoemaker’s career in the Army would continue to blossom. He moved on from his role as an MP to take on training as a helicopter pilot. He commanded both the UH-60 Black Hawk and the CH-47 Chinook. He retired after 20 years of service in 2001.
In many cases of close-up UFO encounter, even a simple sighting, witnesses often report additional experiences with ancillary paranormal phenomenon, but Shoemaker said his encounter was strictly a “one-off deal.”
TWO COPS GET TOGETHER TO COMPARE NOTES
Two months after his encounter, Steven happened to catch a radio interview with Val Johnson — a time when he was still giving interviews.
“I made up my mind to call Val,” Shoemaker said. “I just felt I needed to talk to him and tell him that I tangled with must have been the same object.”
Shoemaker contacted the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department. They, in turn, called Val Johnson at his home in Oslo, Minnesota, and gave him Shoemaker’s number. The two men hooked up by phone for what Shoemaker called “an excellent conversation.”
Johnson was gratified that there was another witness to what was almost certainly the same or “twin” of the anomalous object that had rammed his squad car. Shoemaker also said Johnson confirmed his observation that the object displayed a lighter color near the bottom quarter of the sphere — a detail Johnson said he had noticed but never reported. Johnson also recalled that the orb he encountered traveled directly over the centerline of the highway.
After his chat with Val Johnson, Shoemaker put the incident behind him and went on with his life and military career. However, he often thought about his amazing game of cat-and-mouse with a UFO.
A RETURN TO THE SCENE
Eighteen years later, Shoemaker returned to the location of his amazing race.
As it happened, his son would be playing in a high school hockey tournament conducted in Thief River Falls in 1997. Steven and his wife drove the 300 miles to northern Minnesota to watch their son skate. It was a good opportunity for a 30-mile side trip over to Warren for a visit to the Marshall County Historical Society where he knew Johnson’s car was on display.
Unfortunately, the facility was closed for the winter when Steven arrived. Still in touch with his unstoppable, can-do-will-do Army soldier’s attitude, Shoemaker decided to pay a visit to the local newspaper office, the Warren Sheaf. There he chatted with the published-weekly paper’s long-time owner and editor, Neil Mattson.
Shoemaker asked Mattson if it was possible to find someone who could unlock the doors to the Historical Society building so that he could get a look at Johnson’s car. He also asked Mattson if he was familiar with the Johnson UFO story.
Neil Mattson said: “Yes, everyone around here knows about that, but I believe all that was just a big hoax.”
Shoemaker shot back:
“Well, let me tell you something. I chased that hoax for almost 20 miles down a highway in almost the same location just two months after deputy Johnson rammed it! My wife Susan was with me, and she saw the same thing I did!”
Mattson was able to pull some strings with the Historical Society. Its director agreed to tromp through knee-high snow in the facility’s parking lot, shovel a snowdrift away from the front door and let Shoemaker inside.
Viewing the damage to the old Ford LTD police cruiser was a profoundly moving experience for Shoemaker. The memories of his night chasing a UFO down a lonely Minnesota highway came flooding back along with a sense of wonder — and also with a new certainty that what he encountered, in his view, was extraterrestrial technology.
“There’s just nothing else it could have been,” he said. “If you saw it up close like my wife and I did, you would not find it so easy to be a skeptic. I’m spent years as a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army. We’re trained to recognize anything that flies high in the sky or low to the ground. What I saw that night was no kind of technology we have, or any other nation has, especially not back in 1979.”
Although now in his mid-60s and retired from the Army, the old soldier still regrets he could not have done more all those four decades ago.
“I often think about how great it would have been if I had a 50-caliber machine gun mounted in the hood of my Chevy Nova that night. Those guns would have been blazing. I would have loved to have taken that thing out.”
(My series on the Val Johnson case continues here in Part 3: More witnesses, including an FBI officer; a second car “rammed” by the same UFO and a nuclear missile connection?)
ALSO: SEE MORE OF MY ORIGINAL UFO STORY INVESTIGATIONS HERE: KEN-ON-MEDIUM