UFO sightings have fascinated people for years, with productions like 1938’s War of the Worlds and sightings of “unidentified flying objects” like Kenneth Arnold’s famed 1947 sighting of a “flying saucer” near Mt. Renier in 1947, shaping people’s beliefs that Earth has been visited by beings from deep in space.
Most of the time, these ultimately have a logical explanation. But in recent years, UFO fever has been at an all-time high, fueled by the Pentagon releasing UFO videos in 2020 and President Trump’s recent push to release more files on aliens and UFOS.
With aliens top of mind these days, we’re going back 60 years to look at Michigan’s most famous alien sighting, one so credible that the Air Force conducted an investigation in the area.
Dexter, Michigan, 1966 UFO Sighting
The story goes that a farmer named Frank Mannor, along with his wife and son, saw a “strange light”, described as red, then blue and white, land in a swamp. Before he could investigate, the object took off, with Frank describing it as resembling a shooting star. Left behind was a circle on the ground. They called the police and reported what they saw.
A police officer’s rendition of what was seen that night. / Nelson Rivera (Prufon)
A police officer’s rendition of what was seen that night. / Nelson Rivera (Prufon)
The thing is, they weren’t the only ones who’d seen it. Police officers had also seen the lights, with one snapping photos of them in the sky, and Hillsdale College students reported lights over their dorms; together, ~40 people reported seeing the lights.
READ MORE: 11 Bigfoot Sightings Reported in West Michigan
The story took off, and the sheriff reached out to Congressman Weston Vivan, who got the Air Force to send out a physicist who was involved in investigating UFO sightings (Project Blue Book), Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
Once Hynek got involved, it became a media frenzy, drawing so much attention that Walter Cronkite covered it in a CBS report, “Friend, Foe, or Fantasy”, bringing the UFO sighting to national attention, as you can see above. But Hynek and the Air Force’s conclusion was one so absurd that it led Congressman Gerald R. Ford to request a congressional hearing for a proper investigation, deeming Hynek’s explanation as “flippant”.
Swamp Gas
Dr. Hynek concluded that people did, in fact, see something at night, but what they saw was a rare phenomenon called “swamp gas” that occurs during a spring thaw. Per Hillsdale Historical Society:
Rotting vegetation produces marsh gas, which can be trapped by ice and winter conditions. When a spring thaw occurs, the gas may be released in some quantity.
Dr. Hayek claimed in his official press conference that this can gas can light up, sometimes make a sound, and sometimes gather into a ball and float away. He even dismissed the photos as “trails made as a result of a camera time exposure of the rising crescent moon…and the planet Venus”, according to reporting by Lara Zielin.
Lara recently made an insightful mini-documentary about the entire UFO sighting and interviewed Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey, who was the sheriff when the sighting occurred and accompanied Dr. Hayek during his investigation.
Ultimately, residents did not get the answers they were looking for and were insulted by Dr. Hayek, who dismissed what they had all seen with their own eyes. In the interview with Walter Cronkite, Frank Mannor expressed regret at ever mentioning the sightings.
He claimed beer bottles had been thrown at his car, and people would stand outside his home and call him a “nut.” Things had gotten so bad for him that he said if an alien landed in his yard and spoke to him, he would never tell anyone.
Reported UFO Sightings Over Michigan in 2023
More than three dozen UFO reports have been filed in Michigan in 2023, any many of them have purported photographic evidence. While some of these are easily explained away, not all of them are.
Gallery Credit: jrwitl
UFO Pics Released By the U.S. Government