Illustration by Torren Thomas
Geneseo hosts an interplanetary party
For three years, Geneseo has hosted the Kansas UFO Day Festival, a celebration that draws on the area’s legends and historic dreamers.
On the festival day in July, the Rice County town of some 220 people holds a parade, offers UFO-themed handmade crafts, and serves up alien-themed foods.
“There is absolutely nothing in the state of Kansas like this, so that sets us apart as something unique,” says Jim Gray, a local author and historian who created the festival. “We like to call Geneseo ‘Dimension G.’”
That space-age rebranding of Geneseo reflects the character of the Geneseo Museum and the eccentric visionary responsible for it. Located in the former home of Dr. Elmer Janzen, the museum holds artifacts from Geneseo’s history along with artifacts from Janzen’s personal collections.
“Dr. Elmer Janzen was an eclectic, all-around genius. He had a number of different degrees. He never married, so he had lots of time to devote to Geneseo, and he collected the photographs from family albums and put them into slides,” Gray says. “We have over 8,000 slides that are mostly Geneseo families and the surrounding area.”
Janzen’s personal collections at the museum include UFO- and alien-themed memorabilia and artwork from the 1950s to the 1970s, a rich and prolific time for the sci-fi genre. “It’s a little snapshot into the culture of the 1950s and 60s UFO movement,” Gray explains. “It’s a very interesting time period.”
Gray first encountered Janzen’s collection when he was growing up in Geneseo and attended the museum as a kid. What intrigued him most about the UFO part of Janzen’s collection was an exhibit about a man named James Hill, from Seymour, Missouri, who owned two dogs he claimed to be from Venus. There are photographs of Hill with his dogs and tufts of hair supposedly from the dogs. “As a kid that really intrigued me,” Gray laughs.
Decades later, in 2018, Gray became president of the reorganized museum board and set to work with other residents to rejuvenate the old museum.
“The spacecraft collection was a little bit of an embarrassment to the community. It was sort of Geneseo’s little secret that no one talked about,” Gray recalls. But he knew the museum was exactly the kind of quirky, unique attraction that could bring visitors to Geneseo. So far, that notion seems to be proving correct, with the festival doubling in size and attendance every year.
Gray hopes more believers and enthusiasts continue to join the celebration every year. No encounters with aliens are guaranteed—or even required.
“What’s interesting about Janzen is he never had his own experience,” Gray notes. “He just kind of documented all these other people who did. He was kind of hoping for one, but it never happened.”
Gort and Klatuu Arrive
One of the main events for Geneseo’s 2024 Kansas UFO Day Festival was the dedication of two new space-themed statues to the Geneseo Museum.
Veteran artists Bruce Bitter and his brother Brent created the statues of Gort and Klatuu, characters from the 1951 sci-fi thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still, from their B&B Metal Arts studio in Hoisington.
The Bitters began their project by studying photographs of both characters, determining the measurements of torsos, arms and legs, as well as costume details.
Bruce said he was thrilled not only to be making the figures for the Geneseo Museum but also to be working with his longtime friend Jim Gray. “This is something unique, that when I tell people I’m making Gort the Robot and Klatuu, and Geneseo is the UFO capital of Kansas, everyone just smiles,” Bitter says.
Kansans might know the Bitter brothers’ work from their Earth steel globe statue in the Steve Fossett Plaza at the Salina Regional Airport. The Plaza is a memorial for the pilot of the same name who completed the world’s first solo, nonstop, unrefueled, fixed-wing flight—which started and ended in Salina.
Jim Gray’s Geneseo UFO Experience
In the summer of 1972, Jim Gray and his then-girlfriend, Robyn White, were driving about four miles south of Geneseo when suddenly, the inside of the car lit up.
It was, Gray recalls, “the most brilliant white light you can imagine.”
Gray adds that he then looked up through the windshield and saw a light “retracting” into the sky.
“It didn’t just go out. It kind of followed itself up into the sky—straight above us. The thing is, it was a very dark night, so I didn’t see where it came from. I didn’t see any kind of a [craft] body above us—it was just darkness,” he says. “We were really spooked.”
Gray drove Robyn to her parents’ house in Geneseo, where they sat on the front porch to talk about what they’d seen. They watched in amazement as a dust devil suddenly blew up out of nowhere and came bounding down the street. This was just minutes after the strange light from the sky.
“Dust devils generally kind of wander and move around a little bit, but this went straight down Main Street, right past us,” Gray says. “And I looked at her and I said, ‘You’re going in the house.’”
That was the end of that date, but the couple would be married about a month later.
