Post by Joanna on Feb 4, 2015 21:29:20 GMT -5
Documents Confirm Michigan UFO Sightings
The moon was abnormally large and bright one summer night in 1978, Ken Sieg recalls. A Monroe County deputy sheriff at the time, Sieg and his partner, Al Maus, had parked their cruiser at Stony Point to write reports when Sieg saw something shimmering over Lake Erie. There was just one problem ....
“Kenny, the moon is over here,” Maus said at the time, pointing to the moon over the Fermi nuclear power plant, not the lake.
Whatever the object hovering above the lake was, it was too shiny to be the moon. According to Sieg: “The next thing my partner says is ‘Turn the car on, put it in gear and let’s get the hell out of here.'"
Out of this World. Nineteen seventy-eight was an odd year for Monroe County. Between March and May, there were at least 12 UFO sightings reported to authorities, ranging from flashing lights to a large gray machine with a tail similar to those on Viking ships, according to The Monroe News archives. This number of sightings in such a short time span is second only to those of 1966, when 14 of 16 sightings were reported in March, according to the archives.
From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated UFO sightings, in what was called Project Blue Book, which consisted of 12,618 accounts spanning nearly 130,000 pages. The project was discontinued after a committee formed at the request of President Gerald Ford concluded UFOs weren’t a threat to national security. On January 12, all these documents were made available online at www.theblackvault.com, including some of the sightings in Monroe County. The documents were uploaded by UFO enthusiast John Greenewald.
“With all the decades of time the government has put into this investigation, they wouldn’t have done this much if they thought something wasn’t there,” said William Konkolesky, director of the Michigan Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a civilian research organization. Michigan MUFON receives about 250 UFO sightings submitted to its database each year, with records beginning in 1995. Combining those reports with The Monroe News archives and The Black Vault reports, 71 sightings have been recorded in the county.
The earliest report in the county comes from The Black Vault, dated June 21, 1949. The report indicates a UFO was seen flying among several Naval aircraft over Monroe. It was described as having a disk-like top with a heavy center section, traveling southwest. It disappeared in two seconds, leaving a vapor trail. An explanation was not given for the phenomenon, but it was suggested that it could have been a new model jet. Konkolesky said most of the reports were “given excuses that were unbelievable.”
One of the more famous cases in Michigan would involved multiple sightings of strange lights in Dexter, Hillsdale and Milan. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book’s scientific consultant, investigated the cases and dismissed the sightings in Hillsdale and Dexter as “marsh gas,” which escapes the ground and can ignite for a moment.
In Milan, Dr. Hynek dismissed the sightings as the planet Venus, according to a 173-page report on The Black Vault.
“All sorts of people see something and they’re all supposed to think its swamp gas?” Konkolesky said of the investigation, which caused enough of an uproar that President Ford called for the formation of the committee. “The government is still trying to hide stuff. It’s highly interested in this phenomenon.”
Earlier in March, 1966, the Selfridge Air Force Base in Mount Clemens dispatched two F-105 jets after seven law enforcement agencies in the area reported seeing two objects flying in formation toward the northwest. Konkolesky observed if the government knew something substantial about UFOs, it would never be released to the public, which may be the reason there is no mention of the 1947 Roswell, N.M., crash in Project Blue Book. “I think if the US government was to say UFOs were real, and if they weren’t on top of it, we wouldn’t be recognized as a super power,” he said. “They’d have to say there is a civilization greater than us; there’s no value in releasing that information.”
UFO Hot Spot? While the government may have wanted to keep this phenomenon under the radar, Hollywood was determined to make it a blip. In 1974, film crews arrived in Milan and Dexter to shoot a documentary about the 1966 UFO sightings in the area, including one by Milan Patrolman John Stewart, who reported seeing a large, bubble-shaped UFO hovering over the business district March 17, 1966. The documentary, called UFOs: It has Begun, was narrated by Rod Serling and released in 1979. Milan didn’t make the final cut, but Hillsdale and Dexter did.
It is uncertain why sightings in the area were clustered in certain years, but Monroe County may be a hot spot because of Fermi. One theory suggests UFO sightings increase near nuclear power plants because extraterrestrial technology can pick up the energy source from the plant, said Bobb Vergiels, district and community engagement coordinator for Monroe Public Schools. Vergiels is a former Monroe News reporter who had reported on some of the UFO phenomena around the county during his career from 1974 to 1984. He even had his own experience May 3, 1978. He was coming back from play practice at Ida High School and was traveling on Albain Road when he saw “a light in the sky brighter than any star,” he related, noting three teenagers were parked on the side of the road watching the same object. “I noticed it because it was moving, but it wasn’t a jet because the lights weren’t blinking. Then I looked up and poof, the light just disappeared.”
Even before his experience, Vergiels believed the reports that came in and said they were made by credible people. Sieg, who now works part-time for Monroe County Community College as campus security, agrees. “Everyone I took a report from, they were never inebriated or anything,” he says. “The first thing they say is” ‘You’re going to think I’m nuts, but I have to tell someone.’ They believed it; who am I to say anything?”
As for Sieg and his partner, they chose not to tell anyone back at the office about their experience. “It’s something we remember, but I put it in the back of my mind,” he says. “If you went back and told people, they’d say, ‘You guys are crazy.’ They would kid around with you.”
Source: Alex Alusheff, The Monroe News, February 4, 2015.