1916
Somewhere above the Minnesota border in Ontario, a “Skyman” appears to two Ojibwe. “I don’t belong to this land,” he says. “I dropped down from above yesterday, so I am here now.”
1951
Donald “Deke” Slayton, a test pilot who will become one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, sees a UFO while flying his P-51 above Minneapolis. In his autobiography, Deke!, he describes the encounter: “I realized I wasn’t closing on that son of a bitch.”
1965
Arthur Strauch, a deputy sheriff of Sibley County, is driving home from a family bowhunting trip when his party spots a metallic silver object in the sky flying at a tremendous speed. He manages to photograph the flying saucer with his Kodak Instamatic camera.
KEYL Long Prairie DJ Jerry Townsend reports his car dying in the middle of Highway 27 after coming upon a rocket ship. He says he was confronted by a trio of 6-inch-tall creatures resembling beer cans, moving around on fins. The aliens reportedly flew away, leaving behind three oily marks.
1969
In response to the federal government’s decision to close its UFO study known as Project Blue Book, Walt Andrus organizes a grassroots network of UFO investigators from six states—IL, IA, MI, MN, MO, and WI—calling themselves the Midwest UFO Network, or MUFON.
1972
Two Canadian trappers, Allen Kielczewski of Mine Centre and Horace Bowes of Fort Frances, recount nearly identical stories about a large mass the size of a city block hovering 90 feet above the Minnesota side of Namakan Lake, despite not knowing each other.
1975
A baffling rash of cattle mutilations—udders, eyes, and sex organs removed with a sharp instrument—is reported across an 11-state area. U.S. Attorney Robert Renner of Minneapolis orders an investigation but closes it after failing to link “nuts and occult groups” to the crimes.
1979
Marshall County Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson collides with a blinding light on County Road 5. When he comes to 39 minutes later, his car is smashed up and he has welder’s burns on his eyes. He appears on Good Morning America but comes to regret the national attention.
David Olson straps burlap sacks to his feet, enters a Lake City cornfield, and uses a ball of string and a butane torch to make perfect crop circles. The next day, his circles are swarmed with cops and reporters. Seven years later, after the statute of limitations passes, Olson confesses.
1988
A mother in St. Paul reports to MUFON that her 2½-year-old son woke her up in the middle of the night playing a ukulele usually kept on a high shelf. After hearing a bang on the ceiling, he exclaimed, “Bug Eyes is here!” Later, a medical exam finds an omega-shaped scratch on his back.
1992
Canby’s Jerome Clark, associate publisher of Fate magazine, authors the first edition of the comprehensive, multivolume The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning. Clark becomes a go-to pundit for TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings.
1998
Josh Hartnett, in peak sensitive-bad-boy-with-a-cowlick mode, portrays Zeke, a misunderstood drug dealer who ends up using his ecstasy pills to save his high school from alien invaders, in The Faculty. Soul Asylum covers “School’s Out” on the soundtrack.
Ian Punnett begins subbing in for Art Bell on Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio program on Saturday nights. Punnett begins each show with the same joke: “If any hostile aliens are listening: Eat the Canadians first; they’re much tastier!”
2001
Spoiler alert: In the penultimate scene of the Coen brothers’ neo-noir The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ed the alienated barber (played by Billy Bob Thornton) is visited by a flying saucer in the prison yard. What does it mean?
2013
Roger Kvande self-publishes Extraterrestrial Odyssey, which begins with an account of his 1966 abduction by aliens when he was a teenager in Bagley, Minnesota. The book details his journey aboard a spacecraft that flies him to Moscow and back.
2015
Fargo joins The X-Files as TV shows to reference the Val Johnson affair. After a massacre at a diner, Kieran Culkin looks up at the blue lights of a UFO as it zips away.
2022
Local scribe Martin Keller publishes The Space Pen Club, a book about his lifetime obsession with UFOs. It includes a sighting by Prince’s manager Owen Husney, the abduction of indie rocker Curtiss A, and a beach-blanket UFO-watching party at Horst Rechelbacher’s farm.