Hey, strangers. Just a note at the top. We found a local on a very obscure car commercial

pronouncing this town name a little differently, but it's been pretty universally called

Delphos in the media for the past 50 years. So we're going to go with that for continuity.

If that was you in the commercial, please forgive us.

I'm Lauren Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Thank you. be explained. Now, we've been told that rural Kansas, it's the perfect setting for anyone who'd like to

spend some time considering the vastness of the night sky.

While we have not personally had that chance, it's easy to imagine

the scene, a horizon that just seems to stretch on and on and on. We figure that if you've picked your

spot just right, you'll be far enough away from any pesky city light, and we can imagine stretching out on the hood of a car, a nice big one, circa 1970 or so, and then just gazing up into a starscape that we've never been privy to in the city.

Constellations, they'd be easy to spot. A comet? We might actually see one if it was on the

celestial menu for the evening. We'd like to think that if something extraordinary was to

appear overhead, we'd be in the perfect position to spot it. And we think that Delphos, Kansas,

it might just be the perfect setting for such an excursion.

It's a little town in the north-central part of the state.

The 2020 census put the population at just over 300,

and twice that back in 1971,

when our story, we'll get to that in a minute, takes place.

Now, according to Kansas, a cyclopedia of state history, Delphos was established as a railroad town

back in the 19th century. The town was once famous for two things, being the site of a terrible

tornado that destroyed roughly half of the town,

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