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The Delphos
Wolf Girl - A Possible UFO Connection?
Part 1 |
Part 2
The Alleged UFO Connection
Two and a half years previously, in December 1971, Delphos had again been at the centre of
controversy over a strange occurrence, involving a supposed UFO sighting and
landing. On 2 November 1971, sixteen-year-old Ronald Johnson was
looking after sheep with his dog, at the back of his family home, when he heard a rumbling
noise and saw a mushroom shaped object illuminated by blue, red and orange
lights about 25 metres away in a grove of trees.
 The UFO was described as about eight feet in diameter,
and seemed to be hovering about five feet off the ground. Before long the object
began to glow at the base and took off with a whining noise, the glow
temporarily blinding the boy. Johnson brought his parents out just in time to see the
UFO, now high up in the
sky, but over a full moon in size, before it vanished over the horizon. Walking into the
grove of trees where the object had been, the family found a glowing grey-white circle.
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson
felt inside the circle and found that the soil felt as if it were crystallised.
Strangely, Mrs. Johnson noticed that her fingers had become numb after touching
it and that when she tried to rub off the
bits of soil on her leg, the part of the leg she touched also became numb. Soil samples taken from the glowing ring
where the UFO had supposedly landed were obtained by a ufologist called Ted Phillips,
who had them tested by
seven independent laboratories. These tests showed the presence of fungus-like
substance but were ultimately inconclusive as to the exact nature of the ring,
and there is still much debate about the case.
For days after the UFO sighting Ronald's eyes were painful, and he had
headaches and suffered from nightmares for around a week. Later Ronald Johnson
claimed that he'd acquired psychic powers since his close encounter with the UFO. A short
time after the sighting,
he reported meeting a strange 'wolf-girl' with wild blond hair, wearing a torn
cloth coat, who escaped him by running away on all fours when he got close.
Quite what Ronald's psychic powers were is
not clear, but if his statement was true could he have seen the same
wild girl that the Stouts and others claimed they saw three
years later? If so, who or what was she? Was she was an abandoned child,
a
runaway, or a strange entity connected with the UFO? Or are both the UFO and the
feral girl cases simply
hoaxes? Recent research does indeed show that the entire Delphos
'wolf-girl' story was invented by bored local kids and simply got out of hand.
Perhaps the hoax was inspired by Ronald Johnson's encounter with
a blond wolf girl two and a half years before, which was probably also an
invention.
A more bizarre report, from the early spring of 1971,
involved inhabitants
of a neighbourhood in Mobile, Alabama, who claimed they had encountered a
'wolf woman' roaming around at night, described by one witness as having the top half of a
woman and the bottom part of a wolf. The Mobile police investigated the reports
but the results were inconclusive, unsurprisinlgy as this sighting has all the
hallmarks of either another hoax or a creature from the realms of folklore.
Sources and Further Reading
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book:
Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial. Detroit, London, Visible Ink, 1998,
pp168-172
Clark, Jerome. Unexplained.
(2nd edition) Detroit, London, Visible Ink, 1999, p519, p526.
Dash, Mike. Borderlands.
London, Arrow Books, 1997, pp142-4.
'Delphos Folks divided By Reports of Wild Girl', Wichita
Eagle, (31st July 1974).
'Search For 'Wolf Girl' Unsuccessful', Kansas City Times,
(29th July 1974).
Copyright 2003 by Brian
Haughton. All Rights Reserved.
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