(NICAP.org)
The whole UFO case report:
“11:00 PM. A high school girl was having her cousin [a
beautician] over for a visit and a sleep-over. The two young women were still
up when they heard a sound outside. Looking out their window, they saw an
object above the field across the road. It was less than a mile away. The thing
appeared to be a gray metallic disk, non-luminous, but with a orange-red band
of light around the circumference. This light enabled the girls to see the
shape clearly: like ‘a shallow inverted bowl with a curved bottom’. The object
was ‘clean’ [no protrusions nor individual lights]. The object came directly
over the farmhouse, its vibrations rattling the bedroom windows. [The parents
were asleep already and did not awaken]. The girls felt that the disk was ‘the
size of an automobile’ and was rotating counter-clockwise as it rose and sailed
away. The next morning they told the one girl’s parents what had happened but
were not believed. That morning however, the father was out walking the fields
and came across a forty foot diameter circle of dried out soybean crop, which
had not previously been there. This area was not only a ‘perfect’ circle but in
the proper location for the sighting of the UFO. The appearance of the affected
crop was ‘all of the leaves of each plant were hanging wilted from the stalks’
as if, the UFO field researcher hypothesized, ‘they had been subjected to
intense heat’. The spot was apparently the result of a ‘near-landing’ rather
than an actual touch-down, as the plants were not broken off nor crushed. A
fine aerial photo of this circle has been made and is attached to this report.
The UFO community was on the scene relatively early, with the APRO investigator
taking the photos and soil samples, and Walt Andrus of MUFON/APRO interviewing
the daughter [the only early interview of the cousin was by news persons]. As
was almost universally the case APRO dropped the ball on the analysis of the
samples and reported only that the plants were dry, shriveled, and not
radioactive. Dr. J. Allen Hynek even
visited the site and was later quoted: ‘I still don’t know what the hell this
thing is all about... It looked as though a big heater had been held six feet
above the ground’. Neighbors of the family contributed the remarks that their
dogs were making a racket that evening. Van Horne stands as one of the best
‘landing effects’ cases on record. This is because it has multiple witnesses,
an immediate corroberation [sic] of
the trace by someone who knew exactly the state of his farm fields, no desire
for publicity [in fact a parent who blocked almost all of it], no motivation
[in fact, a loss of valuable crop], multiple, early-on-scene investigators with
good track records for straight-shooting, and a fairly large and mysterious effect.
On some scales of rating ‘trace’ cases, this might be #1. [Mike Swords;
References: a). APRO UFO Report Form (case field investigation), undated but c.
September 1969 (Hynek/CUFOS files); ‘Saucer Near Landing In Iowa’, SKYLOOK #23,
October 1969; ‘UFO Over Iowa Bean Field’, APRO Bulletin, July-August 1969:
Kevin Randle, ‘The Iowa UFO Landings’, Official UFO Fall 1976; [news note]
DATA-NET V(9): September 1971; Al Swegle, ‘Sight UFO Over Benton County Farm’,
Cedar Rapids Gazette, August 15, 1969.]”
I also presented this UFO case report on 24 March
2016.
Wikipedia article: “Van Horne , Iowa
Related posts:
The 13 July 1969 Van Horne , Iowa
(CE2 case – soybean crop)
(4.bp.blogspot.com/thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com photo)
