The 1966 Michigan "Swamp Gas" UFO Sightings
(in which mysterious lights and objects were seen by scores of people
on two consecutive nights in two different locations, and were later
controversially dismissed by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force investigator,
as being caused by luminous swamp gases)
One of my goals for this website is to make contact with people who investigated, reported on, or who had sightings (or knows someone who did), or were otherwise involved in the "swamp gas" UFO incidents of 1966. Please click on the "Contact Me" box above to contact me. Thanks.
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During the summer of 1999, I was reading a lot of books about UFOs. Inspired and intrigued, I began to wonder if there was some aspect of the UFO mystery, as yet uncovered or unwritten or unexplored, that I could research and write about. The answer was right under my nose, as such answers usually are. Part of the motivation can best be described by quoting author Toni Morrison -- "If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
It's like meeting a soul mate. Within a few weeks or months of dating, it just feels natural and as if you've been together for ever. Within the space of a few readings of UFO classics such as Edward Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia (and his Dimensions trilogy), or Aime Michel's Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery, they felt like old friends, and returning to them repeatedly, or reading favorite sections, was a pleasure and a joy. Like the soul mate, you can't imagine not knowing them. My interest in the subject was such that I'd found and devoured most of the "good stuff" pretty early, and was hungry for more of the compelling and beautiful books. I might make it clear, too, that though I have both a healthy respect and a healthy skepticism for the alien abduction material, I find it far less interesting than the sightings of strange objects in the skies. A book that I ran across that summer actually kicked off my own research. John Keel's UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse was exciting as all get out when I first read it. Keel writes with a swagger and moxie that is at first beguiling, though it later starts to sound like the detective magazine stuff and pulpy fiction on which Keel cut his writing teeth. (The Mothman Prophecies is a wonderful and unique book, by the way, and very much worth a look for the glimpse it offers into the wild side of ufology.) In Operation Trojan Horse he breathlessly, and with abundant hyperbole, tells of his own investigation of the 1966 flying saucer flap that centered around Michigan in 1966. As he discusses the 1897 airship wave and the patterns and characteristics of "saucer flaps," he wrote something that thrilled me to my 25-year-old bones: |
". . . if we compare the 1897 flap with the things that are going on now, we find that the sightings have been concentrated in many specific areas for many years. The area around Dallas, Texas, is one. Michigan is another. There was a well-publicized flap in Michigan in March, 1966, around Ann Arbor and Hillsdale. There were sightings in Ann Arbor on April 17, 1897. Michigan had, in fact, 30.5 percent of all the sightings used in our 1897 study. There is still constant UFO activity in that state, despite the dearth of publicity."
Since then I've learned to question a lot of Keel's proclamations and conclusions, though I still love his moxie. But this excerpt was the reason that I rode my bike downtown one day and started looking through the microfilms from the spring of 1966. The excerpt told me that I did not need to live in New Mexico or New York or California or France in 1954 to research UFOs. It suggested that I could do it right here in my own little Michigan town.
I knew the dates of the Dexter and Hillsdale sightings in Michigan, and, sure enough, there were the Associated Press and United Press International articles about these sightings that occurred on March 20th and 21st, 1966, respectively. There were various follow-up articles all week leading up to the Detroit press conference on Friday, March 25th, in which J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force consultant, in a carefully worded statement, said that what had been seen in these two locales was most likely luminescent swamp gas. Those who had seen the phenomena heartily disagreed with this assessment. Many articles and editorials expressed the growing sense that the Air Force's handling of the events had been a "whitewash."
These events are among the most publicized in UFO history -- the press conference was the largest that Detroit Press club had hosted up to that time. Hynek himself, along with Donald Keyhoe and others, often wondered why these sightings garnered so much publicity. Timing is everything -- and that's another, longer story. But one key ingredient was the sheer number of observers involved. When the rural Dexter family sighted an multi-lighted object hovering and slowly rising and descending in the swampy fields behind their home, they called local police and the sheriff's department. A crowd gathered, and part of this was due to the fact that there had been other sightings in the previous week in which most of the witnesses had been law enforcement personnel. Then, the following night a group of several dozen young women watched from their dormitory window, at Hillsdale College, about 50 miles from Dexter, as a dimly lighted object performed similarly over an arboretum nearby. They called the county Civil Defense director, who soon joined them for the extended viewing. In both cases, it seems that the object or lights were visible for several hours.
As I scrolled through microfilm reels for the spring of 1966 at my local library, I found that other sightings had been reported to law enforcement agencies and to the newspaper in my town in the month or so that followed the events in the Ann Arbor (Dexter is about 15 miles northwest of Ann Arbor) and Hillsdale areas. Some of these sightings were vague, of the lights in the sky variety, while others were far more intriguing. I had known, too, that another sighting had occurred in my area about 10 days after the "main events" in the other areas -- and there it was, too, cast in newsprint. It was the story of a man, driving home from work late at night, who encountered a lighted object hovering over a country road. Even though he'd been in a military airplane that had been shot down over Hungary, he "freely admitted that the encounter had frightened him more than anything else in his life," a local scientist and investigator noted.
Within a few weeks I took a drive to another town and looked through the newspaper on microfilm there, and then repeated this at other nearby libraries. The pattern from my own local paper was repeated over and over until some interesting facts emerged in my own investigation of the UFO mystery:
1) Just like in my local newspaper, other sightings emerged "out of the woodwork," so to speak, as the events in Dexter and Hillsdale were receiving heavy coverage. And just like in my local paper, many of the reports were vague and bore the stamp of public interest (I'll refrain from using the term "mass hysteria"), where local folks reported any odd light as a UFO and even went out stargazing in hopes of seeing a UFOs. But there were other reports that were detailed enough to suggest that, if the person wasn't making things up or totally mistaken, they had seen something out of the ordinary, indeed -- most of these good reports are from people who had no interest in UFOs at all, and simply had a sighting near their home or when they were driving. Many of these sightings contained little details and descriptions that form some of the underlying patterns of the UFO phenomenon.
2) Seemingly valid sightings were being reported from other states and other far-flung locales, though many of these, too, seemed concentrated in certain areas.
3) Many sightings were occurring in time clusters, as well, on certain dates. Many of these spikes mirrored and corresponded to the media coverage, but many seemingly detailed reports clustered around certain dates -- what Keel, who talks about all this stuff in his book, called "flap dates."
4) Eventually, I even found sighting reports in Michigan and elsewhere that pre-dated the Dexter and Hillsdale events by several days and weeks.
5) These "flying saucer flaps" or "UFO waves" have happened several times over the years and they all, to a high degree, follow the 1966 pattern: well-publicized sightings bring other sighting reports forward and the media and public is intrigued. The experts pontificate and political cartoonists poke fun or make clever allegories to current events, and people write letters to the editor and drive their local sheriff's department crazy with calls to reporting UFOs. There are jokes and fun made, and hoaxes involving lighted balloons. Then, some explanation is put forward -- temperature inversions, hoaxes, mis-identification of aircraft or astronomical bodies, hoaxes, or luminous marsh gas -- and then the whole thing sort of dies down. Mass hysteria, secret government aircraft, or interplanetary/inter-dimensional invasion? Who knows? No real physical proof emerges, save a few blurry photos and occasionally disputed and inconclusive landing traces or some such physical traces. Eventually, the whole thing gets sort of laughed off. These flaps have occurred most notably in 1947, 1950, 1952, 1957, 1966, and in 1973. These heavily-publicized flap conditions have not occurred again since 1973, but sighting reports have never stopped, though occasional mini-flaps pop up, such as one in Michigan along the Lake Michigan shore in 1994, or in the Hudson River valley of New York state in the mid 1980s. The classic "flaps" or "waves" (usually lasting a few weeks) are periods of either heightened activity or heightened media coverage -- it's hard to separate the two or know where one ends and the other begins. But there are many sighting reports for non-flap years, too. (There was a flap in the spring of 1897, too! It followed many of the same patterns, except that newspapers and people of the time figured that some inventor had solved the problem of "aerial navigation" and was "skylarking" over the midwestern United States. They didn't call them UFOs then -- the newspapers were full of "airship" stories. The term "flying saucer," by the way, was coined by a newspaper reporter in 1947, during the flap that brought the UFO mystery into public and media consciousness.)
For the period from early March, 1966, through about the beginning of May, I found several hundred separate sightings reported to the press, somewhere in the range of 300 or so. My visits to the CUFOS (The Center for UFO studies, in Chicago) files yielded quite a few more, though I made it through maybe one-tenth of their files for this same period. As I said, many of these sightings are either vague by their nature or in the way they were reported -- a few newspapers simply say that a local perrson called in and reported a UFO. But there are many where there is a enough detail or strange elements that the report deserves more looking into.
So there's all these news clippings. That's how the whole thing is measured on the public, media level. Eventually, however, I was able to contact some of the people involved and quite a few people from that time period, and a few others, who reported sightings. I wanted to see if the news reports were at all accurate. And in almost all the cases where I have talked to the witnesses, the public record that exists is essentially accurate. Most of the people I talked to were reluctant to come to any conclusions about what they saw, but all agreed that what they saw was strange and unlike anything they had seen before or since. I have not encountered anyone who told me emphatically that they saw a ship from outer space. To the contrary, as Hynek would later write in his seminal 1972 book, The UFO Experience, the witnesses themselves did not seek publicity and often regretted and resented the publicity they received. They had an experience that puzzled them. They saw something that they could not identify.
Two people I interviewed told me a story that never made the press. They were driving along a rural highway near Lake Superior one night in the spring of 1966, when a lighted object swooped down over their car and followed them at a very low altitude (about 100 or so feet of the ground) for several miles. It had lights that seemed to rotate in a circle -- red, blue, and white. They, and the other three passengers in the car, were utterly terrified. The driver (the mother of the family) particularly recalls thinking that she was driving so fast that she was putting her family at risk -- but several of her kids were screaming to keep going and to drive faster. The experience deeply impressed them, to say the least. As if to make it clear that it wasn't an airplane or jet, the disc-shaped object "suddenly just flipped over, left to right as we were looking at it and dipped a bit in altitude and flew off over Lake Superior." They made no official report, but word of their experience got around in the small town they lived in. Besides the sighting itself, which they "will remember for the rest of their lives on this earth," both family members I talked to recalled the sting of ridicule that they received from people in town and even from a few family friends.
Several years ago I talked to a couple who had seen a strange object pass over their rural farmhouse. They are in their 80's now, and this incident happened sometime in the mid 1980's. It was nearing dusk when they returned home from visiting friends. Stepping out of their car, they noticed two bright lights, like car headlights, that seemed to be hovering over a tree on the edge of their farm property a couple hundred yards away. The lights had an orange-ish white cast. They wondered what it might be. It seemed to just sit there, not changing position or appearance. After what they guessed was perhaps 10 minutes or so, the lights began to move towards them in a steady glide, "almost like a Zeppelin." It made a "minimal" sound, a sort of whirring noise, and it passed right over head at what they guessed was the height of a small airplane. It was "torpedo-shaped," but sort of wide and a little flat, they thought. It's slow speed struck them as odd, too.
The years have dulled some of their recollections and sense of detail. But the experience left them puzzled, intrigued, and mystified. They can't imagine what it could have been, and nothing they've seen or heard about since then really matches its description. They hope to see it again (I'm currently transcribing the interview I recorded with them, and will post a few quote from it soon) and have often walked from their barn to the house with their eyes to the sky with the hopes that they might see it again. They've talked about it many times over the years. It left them with a sense of wonder, and a sense that their may be more to our world than we understand at the present. They were distinctly intrigued by the experience. The woman, especially, had the sense that while it hovered over the tree, it was waiting until it was dark enough before it glided over them. All of these after-effects, impressions, and feelings, I've found, are common to people who have had this experience. All of the people I've talked to share many of these impressions and thoughts. They don't jump to any conclusions. They are left with a sense of mystery and wonder.
Their experience isn't one of the more dramatic, but the case files that have been quietly collected by researchers and a few small organizations are full of experiences just like this one. Then of course, there are the more dramatic ones, which Hynek classified as varying degrees of "high strangeness," which, if we are to believe our reporters, essentially rule out more prosaic explanations. Stars, planets, temperature inversions, and statically ignited marsh gas don't have a series of blinking lights, shine a spotlight on you, hover over your car, and terrify you -- at least none of the stars, planets, or temperature inversions that I've seen or heard of. And there are the cases of vehicles stalling when one of these strange objects approach -- just like what happens to Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the title of which was taken from the sighting classification system in Hynek's seminal book.
So, since the summer of 1999 I've continued with this research, collecting the necessary books and looking into local and state newspaper archives. In more recent years I have gotten to know a researcher in my town, and also visited the extensive archives of the Center for UFO Studies, near Chicago. The book I'm working on will cover the events from the spring of 1966 -- from the sightings and heavy-duty media coverage, to the Air Force investigation and the continuing flap. Unlike many of the dry and somewhat abstract books that report sightings and cover the subject, I hope that what I assemble will be a compelling and interesting narrative. Most things are a lot more enjoyable to read when they follow the arc of storytelling -- and the cool thing is that it's all right there. I don't have to make anything up! Fact may actually be stranger than fiction. Whatever it was, something strange and mysterious occurred in southern Michigan almost 50 years ago. Whether it was actually visitors from other worlds or not is less interesting to me than the distinct flavor and impression of a increasingly long ago time and place, and the words of the people who were there. Though I also need not hide the fact that I think something truly mysterious is going on.
I talked to one person who was there that night at the rural farmhouse near Dexter where a family and their neighbors and local police and sheriff's deputies gathered to watch strange lights in a swampy hollow. He clearly recalls the distinct row of lights hovering silently in the field, and how at one point, after not being able to see it for a short while, it reappeared a considerable distance away. He doesn't think it was a spaceship from another world - he's highly skeptical of such things. He thinks it might have been some sort of military test vehicle. Whatever it was, he knows it wasn't swamp gas.
**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
The "swamp gas" sightings are amongst the most publicized in UFO history. They also served as a catalyst for a series of events that would eventually get the Air Force out of the UFO business -- at least in the public relations capacity that Project Blue Book had functioned in for much of its 22 year life span. Within days of the Dexter and Hillsdale sightings, and the heavy news coverage, then Michigan senator Gerald R. Ford called for congressional hearings. These hearings were held in early April of 1966, and served less as an investigation into the sightings and more into a probe as to how the Air Force was handling the situation. Dr. Hynek was there, and was one of several who suggested that an independent group of scientists look into the UFO question. By the end of the year the "Colordo Project" or "Condon Committee" was in the works in the form of a contract given to the University of Colorado to conduct an investigation into the UFO phenomenon. Physicist Edward Condon was appointed to head the group. He treated the whole thing as just short of a joke. Several of the academics involved in the project resigned over the handling of the project.
The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects was released in January, 1969, and was soon published by The New York Times. Despite the fact that close to one-third of 103 sighting cases examined in the report were labeled as "unidentified" -- and how cases were selected and investigated is a whole other story -- Condon wrote in his summation of the 961 page report that the "general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that that further study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. . . We know of no reason to question the finding of the Air Force that the whole class of UFO reports so far considered does not pose a defense problem."
Project Blue Book ceased to be shortly thereafter, and the Air Force, who'd been doing the barest and most cursory job at examining reports, no longer had to deal with them -- at least publicly -- anymore.
To be continued.....perhaps on the blog feature!
Since then I've learned to question a lot of Keel's proclamations and conclusions, though I still love his moxie. But this excerpt was the reason that I rode my bike downtown one day and started looking through the microfilms from the spring of 1966. The excerpt told me that I did not need to live in New Mexico or New York or California or France in 1954 to research UFOs. It suggested that I could do it right here in my own little Michigan town.
I knew the dates of the Dexter and Hillsdale sightings in Michigan, and, sure enough, there were the Associated Press and United Press International articles about these sightings that occurred on March 20th and 21st, 1966, respectively. There were various follow-up articles all week leading up to the Detroit press conference on Friday, March 25th, in which J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force consultant, in a carefully worded statement, said that what had been seen in these two locales was most likely luminescent swamp gas. Those who had seen the phenomena heartily disagreed with this assessment. Many articles and editorials expressed the growing sense that the Air Force's handling of the events had been a "whitewash."
These events are among the most publicized in UFO history -- the press conference was the largest that Detroit Press club had hosted up to that time. Hynek himself, along with Donald Keyhoe and others, often wondered why these sightings garnered so much publicity. Timing is everything -- and that's another, longer story. But one key ingredient was the sheer number of observers involved. When the rural Dexter family sighted an multi-lighted object hovering and slowly rising and descending in the swampy fields behind their home, they called local police and the sheriff's department. A crowd gathered, and part of this was due to the fact that there had been other sightings in the previous week in which most of the witnesses had been law enforcement personnel. Then, the following night a group of several dozen young women watched from their dormitory window, at Hillsdale College, about 50 miles from Dexter, as a dimly lighted object performed similarly over an arboretum nearby. They called the county Civil Defense director, who soon joined them for the extended viewing. In both cases, it seems that the object or lights were visible for several hours.
As I scrolled through microfilm reels for the spring of 1966 at my local library, I found that other sightings had been reported to law enforcement agencies and to the newspaper in my town in the month or so that followed the events in the Ann Arbor (Dexter is about 15 miles northwest of Ann Arbor) and Hillsdale areas. Some of these sightings were vague, of the lights in the sky variety, while others were far more intriguing. I had known, too, that another sighting had occurred in my area about 10 days after the "main events" in the other areas -- and there it was, too, cast in newsprint. It was the story of a man, driving home from work late at night, who encountered a lighted object hovering over a country road. Even though he'd been in a military airplane that had been shot down over Hungary, he "freely admitted that the encounter had frightened him more than anything else in his life," a local scientist and investigator noted.
Within a few weeks I took a drive to another town and looked through the newspaper on microfilm there, and then repeated this at other nearby libraries. The pattern from my own local paper was repeated over and over until some interesting facts emerged in my own investigation of the UFO mystery:
1) Just like in my local newspaper, other sightings emerged "out of the woodwork," so to speak, as the events in Dexter and Hillsdale were receiving heavy coverage. And just like in my local paper, many of the reports were vague and bore the stamp of public interest (I'll refrain from using the term "mass hysteria"), where local folks reported any odd light as a UFO and even went out stargazing in hopes of seeing a UFOs. But there were other reports that were detailed enough to suggest that, if the person wasn't making things up or totally mistaken, they had seen something out of the ordinary, indeed -- most of these good reports are from people who had no interest in UFOs at all, and simply had a sighting near their home or when they were driving. Many of these sightings contained little details and descriptions that form some of the underlying patterns of the UFO phenomenon.
2) Seemingly valid sightings were being reported from other states and other far-flung locales, though many of these, too, seemed concentrated in certain areas.
3) Many sightings were occurring in time clusters, as well, on certain dates. Many of these spikes mirrored and corresponded to the media coverage, but many seemingly detailed reports clustered around certain dates -- what Keel, who talks about all this stuff in his book, called "flap dates."
4) Eventually, I even found sighting reports in Michigan and elsewhere that pre-dated the Dexter and Hillsdale events by several days and weeks.
5) These "flying saucer flaps" or "UFO waves" have happened several times over the years and they all, to a high degree, follow the 1966 pattern: well-publicized sightings bring other sighting reports forward and the media and public is intrigued. The experts pontificate and political cartoonists poke fun or make clever allegories to current events, and people write letters to the editor and drive their local sheriff's department crazy with calls to reporting UFOs. There are jokes and fun made, and hoaxes involving lighted balloons. Then, some explanation is put forward -- temperature inversions, hoaxes, mis-identification of aircraft or astronomical bodies, hoaxes, or luminous marsh gas -- and then the whole thing sort of dies down. Mass hysteria, secret government aircraft, or interplanetary/inter-dimensional invasion? Who knows? No real physical proof emerges, save a few blurry photos and occasionally disputed and inconclusive landing traces or some such physical traces. Eventually, the whole thing gets sort of laughed off. These flaps have occurred most notably in 1947, 1950, 1952, 1957, 1966, and in 1973. These heavily-publicized flap conditions have not occurred again since 1973, but sighting reports have never stopped, though occasional mini-flaps pop up, such as one in Michigan along the Lake Michigan shore in 1994, or in the Hudson River valley of New York state in the mid 1980s. The classic "flaps" or "waves" (usually lasting a few weeks) are periods of either heightened activity or heightened media coverage -- it's hard to separate the two or know where one ends and the other begins. But there are many sighting reports for non-flap years, too. (There was a flap in the spring of 1897, too! It followed many of the same patterns, except that newspapers and people of the time figured that some inventor had solved the problem of "aerial navigation" and was "skylarking" over the midwestern United States. They didn't call them UFOs then -- the newspapers were full of "airship" stories. The term "flying saucer," by the way, was coined by a newspaper reporter in 1947, during the flap that brought the UFO mystery into public and media consciousness.)
For the period from early March, 1966, through about the beginning of May, I found several hundred separate sightings reported to the press, somewhere in the range of 300 or so. My visits to the CUFOS (The Center for UFO studies, in Chicago) files yielded quite a few more, though I made it through maybe one-tenth of their files for this same period. As I said, many of these sightings are either vague by their nature or in the way they were reported -- a few newspapers simply say that a local perrson called in and reported a UFO. But there are many where there is a enough detail or strange elements that the report deserves more looking into.
So there's all these news clippings. That's how the whole thing is measured on the public, media level. Eventually, however, I was able to contact some of the people involved and quite a few people from that time period, and a few others, who reported sightings. I wanted to see if the news reports were at all accurate. And in almost all the cases where I have talked to the witnesses, the public record that exists is essentially accurate. Most of the people I talked to were reluctant to come to any conclusions about what they saw, but all agreed that what they saw was strange and unlike anything they had seen before or since. I have not encountered anyone who told me emphatically that they saw a ship from outer space. To the contrary, as Hynek would later write in his seminal 1972 book, The UFO Experience, the witnesses themselves did not seek publicity and often regretted and resented the publicity they received. They had an experience that puzzled them. They saw something that they could not identify.
Two people I interviewed told me a story that never made the press. They were driving along a rural highway near Lake Superior one night in the spring of 1966, when a lighted object swooped down over their car and followed them at a very low altitude (about 100 or so feet of the ground) for several miles. It had lights that seemed to rotate in a circle -- red, blue, and white. They, and the other three passengers in the car, were utterly terrified. The driver (the mother of the family) particularly recalls thinking that she was driving so fast that she was putting her family at risk -- but several of her kids were screaming to keep going and to drive faster. The experience deeply impressed them, to say the least. As if to make it clear that it wasn't an airplane or jet, the disc-shaped object "suddenly just flipped over, left to right as we were looking at it and dipped a bit in altitude and flew off over Lake Superior." They made no official report, but word of their experience got around in the small town they lived in. Besides the sighting itself, which they "will remember for the rest of their lives on this earth," both family members I talked to recalled the sting of ridicule that they received from people in town and even from a few family friends.
Several years ago I talked to a couple who had seen a strange object pass over their rural farmhouse. They are in their 80's now, and this incident happened sometime in the mid 1980's. It was nearing dusk when they returned home from visiting friends. Stepping out of their car, they noticed two bright lights, like car headlights, that seemed to be hovering over a tree on the edge of their farm property a couple hundred yards away. The lights had an orange-ish white cast. They wondered what it might be. It seemed to just sit there, not changing position or appearance. After what they guessed was perhaps 10 minutes or so, the lights began to move towards them in a steady glide, "almost like a Zeppelin." It made a "minimal" sound, a sort of whirring noise, and it passed right over head at what they guessed was the height of a small airplane. It was "torpedo-shaped," but sort of wide and a little flat, they thought. It's slow speed struck them as odd, too.
The years have dulled some of their recollections and sense of detail. But the experience left them puzzled, intrigued, and mystified. They can't imagine what it could have been, and nothing they've seen or heard about since then really matches its description. They hope to see it again (I'm currently transcribing the interview I recorded with them, and will post a few quote from it soon) and have often walked from their barn to the house with their eyes to the sky with the hopes that they might see it again. They've talked about it many times over the years. It left them with a sense of wonder, and a sense that their may be more to our world than we understand at the present. They were distinctly intrigued by the experience. The woman, especially, had the sense that while it hovered over the tree, it was waiting until it was dark enough before it glided over them. All of these after-effects, impressions, and feelings, I've found, are common to people who have had this experience. All of the people I've talked to share many of these impressions and thoughts. They don't jump to any conclusions. They are left with a sense of mystery and wonder.
Their experience isn't one of the more dramatic, but the case files that have been quietly collected by researchers and a few small organizations are full of experiences just like this one. Then of course, there are the more dramatic ones, which Hynek classified as varying degrees of "high strangeness," which, if we are to believe our reporters, essentially rule out more prosaic explanations. Stars, planets, temperature inversions, and statically ignited marsh gas don't have a series of blinking lights, shine a spotlight on you, hover over your car, and terrify you -- at least none of the stars, planets, or temperature inversions that I've seen or heard of. And there are the cases of vehicles stalling when one of these strange objects approach -- just like what happens to Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the title of which was taken from the sighting classification system in Hynek's seminal book.
So, since the summer of 1999 I've continued with this research, collecting the necessary books and looking into local and state newspaper archives. In more recent years I have gotten to know a researcher in my town, and also visited the extensive archives of the Center for UFO Studies, near Chicago. The book I'm working on will cover the events from the spring of 1966 -- from the sightings and heavy-duty media coverage, to the Air Force investigation and the continuing flap. Unlike many of the dry and somewhat abstract books that report sightings and cover the subject, I hope that what I assemble will be a compelling and interesting narrative. Most things are a lot more enjoyable to read when they follow the arc of storytelling -- and the cool thing is that it's all right there. I don't have to make anything up! Fact may actually be stranger than fiction. Whatever it was, something strange and mysterious occurred in southern Michigan almost 50 years ago. Whether it was actually visitors from other worlds or not is less interesting to me than the distinct flavor and impression of a increasingly long ago time and place, and the words of the people who were there. Though I also need not hide the fact that I think something truly mysterious is going on.
I talked to one person who was there that night at the rural farmhouse near Dexter where a family and their neighbors and local police and sheriff's deputies gathered to watch strange lights in a swampy hollow. He clearly recalls the distinct row of lights hovering silently in the field, and how at one point, after not being able to see it for a short while, it reappeared a considerable distance away. He doesn't think it was a spaceship from another world - he's highly skeptical of such things. He thinks it might have been some sort of military test vehicle. Whatever it was, he knows it wasn't swamp gas.
**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
The "swamp gas" sightings are amongst the most publicized in UFO history. They also served as a catalyst for a series of events that would eventually get the Air Force out of the UFO business -- at least in the public relations capacity that Project Blue Book had functioned in for much of its 22 year life span. Within days of the Dexter and Hillsdale sightings, and the heavy news coverage, then Michigan senator Gerald R. Ford called for congressional hearings. These hearings were held in early April of 1966, and served less as an investigation into the sightings and more into a probe as to how the Air Force was handling the situation. Dr. Hynek was there, and was one of several who suggested that an independent group of scientists look into the UFO question. By the end of the year the "Colordo Project" or "Condon Committee" was in the works in the form of a contract given to the University of Colorado to conduct an investigation into the UFO phenomenon. Physicist Edward Condon was appointed to head the group. He treated the whole thing as just short of a joke. Several of the academics involved in the project resigned over the handling of the project.
The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects was released in January, 1969, and was soon published by The New York Times. Despite the fact that close to one-third of 103 sighting cases examined in the report were labeled as "unidentified" -- and how cases were selected and investigated is a whole other story -- Condon wrote in his summation of the 961 page report that the "general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that that further study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. . . We know of no reason to question the finding of the Air Force that the whole class of UFO reports so far considered does not pose a defense problem."
Project Blue Book ceased to be shortly thereafter, and the Air Force, who'd been doing the barest and most cursory job at examining reports, no longer had to deal with them -- at least publicly -- anymore.
To be continued.....perhaps on the blog feature!