The Lake Michigan UFO Incident That Was Witnessed By Hundreds Of People
Bettmann/Getty ImagesMichigan has long been a hotbed for UFO sightings. A similar incident in 1966 had residents searching the skies for extraterrestrial activity.
On March 8, 1994, nearly 300 people in Michigan called 911 to report eerie lights hovering in the sky. The bright, multi-colored orbs appeared over the water and were visible as far south as the Indiana state line as they danced erratically in the night sky.
The National Weather Service (NWS) also confirmed the presence of large, unknown objects over Lake Michigan that were clearly not planes. But as quickly as the lights appeared, they vanished. To this day, no one has been able to explain the 1994 Lake Michigan UFO incident.
Sightings were reported from Ludington, Michigan, down to the Indiana state line, 150 miles away. Cindy Pravda of Grand Haven was on the phone when she saw the lights and told her friend, “I got UFOs in the backyard.”
She reported watching the lights for roughly half an hour as they danced about. Similar accounts came in from residents of Holland. Joey Graves told the Detroit Free Press that he saw “six lights out the window above the barn across the street… They were red and white and moving.”
Holland police officer Jeff Velthouse and NWS meteorologist Jack Bushong corroborated these accounts during a phone conversation that has since been made public. On the call, Bushong confirmed that he saw “three and sometimes four blips” on the radar — “and they weren’t planes.”
The lights moved erratically at speeds not possible for any known aircraft. Bushong said, “They were from five to 12,000 feet [in the air] at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I’m doing severe weather.”
The objects appeared to come together and separate repeatedly in a seemingly endless cycle of “hovering, then jumping” and moving “about 20 miles in each jump.”
Bushong said that at their highest, the objects reached 60,000 feet and continued to move in strange patterns until they reached the south end of Lake Michigan — and then, they were gone.
