Van Horne, Iowa: Spinning object over soybean field leaves 40-foot oval of dried plants

At 11:00 p.m. on July 13, 1969, Patti Barr and Kathy Mahr, two teenage cousins, heard a loud roaring noise at Van Horne, Iowa, while upstairs in their house. Looking out the window, they saw a dull, gray-black object with a reddish-orange band of light around its center spinning counterclockwise above the adjacent soybean field. The next morning they told Patti's father, farmer Warren Barr, who discovered a 40-foot-diameter, nearly bare oval in the soybean field; the plants' leaves were severely dehydrated, dry and brittle, leaving stalks about 3–4 inches high. The case was investigated by several groups at the time, and localized intense heat or radiation was listed as the most likely cause. The entry cites the Cedar Rapids Gazette, NICAP's 1969 chronology and photos, the APRO Bulletin, Skylook, J. Allen Hynek's The UFO Experience, Ted Phillips's catalog of physical traces, Kevin D. Randle and a 2022 article by Chet Dembeck. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.