The Delphos Wolf Girl

[year2027]

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The Delphos Wolf Girl - A Possible UFO Connection?

The following 'Wolf Girl' / UFO case was in the end proved to be simple hoax perpetrated by local kids, though it is included here to illustrate the severe limitations of anecdotal claims as evidence of strange goings-on.

In July 1974, at least four people claimed to have seen a child of about ten or twelve years old, with blonde, matted hair and wearing tattered red clothing, running through vines and bushes in a wooded district on the north-west edge of Delphos, a small town in Kansas. One witness described encountering the girl during a search for her; she didn't speak but only growled at him before running off. Children had also seen the 'girl' eating out of cat and dog dishes.

About 7.30 am in the morning of 22 July, Mrs. Joe Stout saw the child in a shed on an unoccupied, overgrown lot. She came face-to-face with 'her' sitting on a picnic table only five or six feet away. She wasn't sure if it was a boy or a girl, except that it was wearing a red dress. It made an odd gurgling sound when she tried to get closer and then jumped down from the picnic table and disappeared through a small hole in the wall. Mrs. Stout thought the child was definitely human and not deformed, although it ran on all fours. She described it as about the size of a six year old, with a horseshoe shaped scar running from its right eye to its mouth. She denied the possibility that it was a monkey or other primate.

Mrs. Stout said she saw the child for the second time around 4 pm, and again about 8.30 pm the same day. During a late-night search of the area, Mr Stout was scratched on the shoulder and a neighbour, a teeenager called Kevin Marsh, was scratched on the throat from behind. Both only got a glimpse of their diminutive assailant.

The sheriff of Ottawa County, Leonard Simpson, organised a posse to search the area, but they found no trace that anyone or anything had been there..Residents also reported chasing the girl through milo fields, but officers sent to search the area found no trace of the wild girl. On Tuesday evening the girl was reported by a resident to be inside a shed. Officers and about 35 residents surrounded the shed, but they found nothing.

Although sheriff Simpson was sure that people had seen something, he wasn't convinced it was a child. He suggested that the reports could have been caused by the large amount of cats and dogs running loose in the area (!). No children had been reported missing anywhere in the state, and without any new evidence Simpson announced that he'd closed the case.

According to Simpson, although most people who thought they saw something had, for some reason, changed their story by the next day when asked to give statements, the Stouts, Kevin Marsh and another teenager, Doug Kaiser, maintained that they had seen a little girl. People living in the area were afraid of what 'she or it' might do next, and parents of young children told The Wichita Eagle that they were either keeping their children indoors or well within sight.

Despite the scepticism of some, those who saw something strongly believed it was a child. Mrs. Stout was convinced she saw a child. She said objects in the shed, including dolls from a collection formerly kept in barrels along with some clothes, had been moved during the night, although she didn't see or hear anyone near the shed. When she first saw the child she noticed that someone had lined the dolls up on the picnic table and covered them with pieces of cloth.

Newspapers in the area dubbed the mysterious child the 'wolf girl', but there were no more reports and no trace of her was ever found.

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.

with love and a holy kiss Roy