1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,000 We've been chasing lights down all over down that way. 2 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:10,000 What do they look like? 3 00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:12,000 I don't know. 4 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:14,000 We've got a report. 5 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:16,000 I don't know. 6 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:18,000 I don't know. 7 00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:20,000 I don't know. 8 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:22,000 I don't know. 9 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:24,000 I don't know. 10 00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:26,000 I don't know. 11 00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:28,000 I don't know. 12 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:30,000 I don't know. 13 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:36,000 We've got a report of something going through the air with lights on it horizontally. 14 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:40,000 Three to four lights. 15 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:48,000 Going at a high rate of speed up and down and all over the sky. 16 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:50,000 What did I see that night? 17 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:57,000 What did I see going 72,000 miles per hour at least? 18 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:11,000 This is tough for a scientist to admit and so I'm just going to have to say the way they acted even though intelligent they didn't act human. 19 00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:02,000 When I was a kid people made fun of me. 20 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:06,000 They used to say it could only happen to Jack. 21 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:19,000 I was like the epitome of coincidences and strange ones. 22 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:24,000 I grew up in Muskegon which is in West Michigan and it's a beautiful area. 23 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:30,000 You got the four seasons. 24 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:34,000 So this was my childhood home right here. 25 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:42,000 I can remember standing right out front being three and four years old being very curious about the world. 26 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:53,000 Even as far back as I can remember I was very interested in astronomy and science and then of course weather too. 27 00:02:53,000 --> 00:03:00,000 I started learning how to read weather maps at about five, six years old. 28 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:03,000 My parents lived on Lake Michigan. 29 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:08,000 I could see the storms rolling across Lake Michigan. 30 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:16,000 So I learned that I wanted to be a meteorologist ever since I was six years old. 31 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:22,000 On March 8th, 1994 I was 29 going on 30. 32 00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:31,000 I had been at the Muskegon National Weather Service for three years at that point. 33 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:39,000 That was the 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift and I was alone on duty for the night which is not unusual. 34 00:03:39,000 --> 00:03:42,000 Temperatures were around 20 degrees. 35 00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:51,000 It was a light wind and we had very good visibility probably easily 80 miles. 36 00:03:51,000 --> 00:03:57,000 I wasn't expecting that there was going to be anything going on that night because there was nothing going on weather-wise. 37 00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:00,000 It was a very, very clear cold night. 38 00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:16,000 That night it was very clear. 39 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:25,000 I was in the kitchen talking to my friend Edna and we had a corded phone at the time. 40 00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:28,000 I liked to pace when I'm on the phone. 41 00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:33,000 My husband was in the basement watching TV downstairs on the couch. 42 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:35,000 It was about nine o'clock at night. 43 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:05,000 I walked to my kitchen window. 44 00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:13,000 That's when I saw the lights and the glow, the light that was outside was so bright. 45 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:16,000 I thought it was a huge full moon. 46 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:18,000 I did a double take. 47 00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:20,000 No, I saw four lights. 48 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:22,000 That can't be a full moon. 49 00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:26,000 So I said, Edna, I think there's UFO in my backyard. 50 00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:31,000 The lights were in a straight line. 51 00:05:33,000 --> 00:05:35,000 They were stationary. 52 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:38,000 They were just above our tree line in our pasture. 53 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:45,000 The one to the far left moved slowly across the tree line. 54 00:05:45,000 --> 00:05:49,000 Then slowly came back into formation again. 55 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:54,000 And the other one to the far right would be to the west. 56 00:05:54,000 --> 00:05:57,000 We're starting to slowly move. 57 00:05:57,000 --> 00:05:59,000 And it was gone. 58 00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:02,000 It was just gone in a flash. 59 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:04,000 So now I'm left with three. 60 00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:10,000 I never saw a ship or ships. 61 00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:14,000 The lights were so bright I could never see beyond them. 62 00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:28,000 I watched them totally for about a half hour. 63 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:31,000 I wish I had a camera back then. 64 00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:34,000 We didn't have cell phones that could take a picture. 65 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:45,000 What surprised me most was there was no sound from the UFO. 66 00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:53,000 My horse was out in the field and she was grazing and knotting off. 67 00:06:53,000 --> 00:06:56,000 She didn't even know they're above her head. 68 00:06:56,000 --> 00:06:59,000 Not a sound. 69 00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:02,000 That's the thing that stands out the most to me. 70 00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:04,000 Dead silent. 71 00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:24,000 In 1994, I was married. 72 00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:28,000 My daughter was 10 and my son was 14. 73 00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:32,000 Then my husband Darrell and I had retired to bed. 74 00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:34,000 And the kids were in the living room. 75 00:07:55,000 --> 00:07:58,000 Joey started screaming. 76 00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:00,000 You gotta see this. 77 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:02,000 Come in here. You gotta see this. 78 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:05,000 Our whole living room was like a spotlight. 79 00:08:05,000 --> 00:08:07,000 It was so bright. 80 00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:16,000 I'm on one. 81 00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:19,000 We were just wondering, have you heard anything about these lights 82 00:08:19,000 --> 00:08:22,000 that are flickering up here? 83 00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:24,000 It's like a group. 84 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:28,000 It looks like a string of crispy bites was way up in the sky. 85 00:08:28,000 --> 00:08:31,000 And we wondered if you had heard anything about it. 86 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:34,000 Well, you might have heard from me. 87 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:37,000 It's different. I've never seen anything like it. 88 00:08:37,000 --> 00:08:40,000 I don't know. It's strange. 89 00:08:40,000 --> 00:08:44,000 But it's right out east-south east. It's way up. 90 00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:50,000 You can hear my kids screaming in the background on the 911 tape. 91 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:54,000 So my husband Darrell said, let's go outside. 92 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:01,000 And this thing is roughly 300 feet. 93 00:09:01,000 --> 00:09:04,000 It was right across the street. 94 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:10,000 And it wasn't doing anything but going as slow as it possibly could. 95 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:15,000 It was not like a plane. It was not like a blimp. 96 00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:18,000 It was not like anything I've ever seen. 97 00:09:18,000 --> 00:09:22,000 It was, I said, a chrome material. 98 00:09:22,000 --> 00:09:26,000 It was a cylinder shape. 99 00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:32,000 And they were going around in a circle, saw no windows, 100 00:09:32,000 --> 00:09:36,000 anything like that, and it had lights coming out of the bottom. 101 00:09:38,000 --> 00:09:43,000 It's just like a circle of a lot of different lights flickering. 102 00:09:44,000 --> 00:09:48,000 I said to Darrell, what is that? 103 00:09:48,000 --> 00:09:52,000 And he said, Holly, it's a UFO. 104 00:09:57,000 --> 00:10:01,000 We stood out there for about, I want to say, 15, 20 minutes 105 00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:04,000 before Officer Veldhaus got there. 106 00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:11,000 I was in my patrol vehicle when I received a 911 call 107 00:10:11,000 --> 00:10:16,000 to respond to the residents of Holly Graves and her family. 108 00:10:17,000 --> 00:10:21,000 My thought on UFOs was skeptical. 109 00:10:21,000 --> 00:10:26,000 I was trying to think of any kind of explainable situation 110 00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:29,000 I was going on, whether it was somebody's shining lights 111 00:10:29,000 --> 00:10:33,000 or maybe something was on fire. 112 00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:38,000 I was met outside by Holly Graves and her husband. 113 00:10:45,000 --> 00:10:50,000 I saw two lights and they were both moving in a southwest direction 114 00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:53,000 and they were consistent with the flight, 115 00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:56,000 maybe of an aircraft of some sort. 116 00:10:56,000 --> 00:10:59,000 They were that high in the sky. 117 00:10:59,000 --> 00:11:02,000 The lights went from white to green 118 00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:05,000 and they were fairly close together. 119 00:11:05,000 --> 00:11:10,000 As I watched them, the one light caught my attention 120 00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:14,000 and it moved from the other light in a quick manner 121 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:16,000 and kept going southwest. 122 00:11:16,000 --> 00:11:21,000 That was noticeable to me, different than any normal aircraft 123 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:22,000 that I've seen. 124 00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:26,000 Officer Veldhaus and my husband stood in the front yard 125 00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:30,000 for another 10 minutes or so 126 00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:33,000 and then Officer Veldhaus left. 127 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:39,000 At that point, I heard Darryl scream. 128 00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:47,000 He said it just, bam, broke up into five before it disappeared. 129 00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:58,000 As I was trying to follow the lights, 130 00:11:58,000 --> 00:12:02,000 we were getting more calls through 131 00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:04,000 Ottawa County Central Dispatch. 132 00:12:04,000 --> 00:12:06,000 I'm on one. 133 00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:08,000 There's probably four or five lights 134 00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:10,000 and they were all flashing right in the road from the top 135 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:12,000 all the way down to the bottom. 136 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:14,000 It took off real fast. 137 00:12:14,000 --> 00:12:17,000 There were four lights and they were breaking back and forth 138 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:20,000 and there's no way, I mean, the plane's not that wide. 139 00:12:21,000 --> 00:12:23,000 And then it started, and it went down to three lights 140 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:25,000 and it started spinning around. 141 00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:27,000 Like, it was a circular motion. 142 00:12:27,000 --> 00:12:29,000 So it's going to go up and down 143 00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:32,000 and then it went to two lights into the same thing 144 00:12:32,000 --> 00:12:35,000 and that was one and it just spinned in a circle. 145 00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:37,000 They were just kind of hanging there. 146 00:12:37,000 --> 00:12:39,000 They came up as a group and then they kind of split them. 147 00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:47,000 I contacted the Ottawa County Central Dispatcher 148 00:12:47,000 --> 00:12:50,000 to try and locate a radar service 149 00:12:50,000 --> 00:12:53,000 to determine what it was that people were reporting. 150 00:12:53,000 --> 00:12:58,000 And he, in turn, contacted Muskegon Weather Service. 151 00:13:04,000 --> 00:13:06,000 Around 10 p.m. that night, 152 00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:10,000 I got a phone call from the Ottawa County 911 Dispatch. 153 00:13:17,000 --> 00:13:22,000 You get anything weird down in the Southern Ottawa County area? 154 00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:25,000 And the reason I asked is we're getting a whole bunch of calls 155 00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:30,000 with some strange lights in the Southern Ottawa Northern Allagan County 156 00:13:30,000 --> 00:13:32,000 right here in Holland City area. 157 00:13:32,000 --> 00:13:33,000 Strange light? 158 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:34,000 Yeah. 159 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:36,000 We had about 60 UFO calls. 160 00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:37,000 Oh, okay. 161 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:39,000 And said, you're like, oh, come on, 162 00:13:39,000 --> 00:13:41,000 there's got to be something more to this. 163 00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:42,000 Yeah. 164 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:46,000 When he said something about UFOs 165 00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:49,000 or being seen across the skies, 166 00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:51,000 I thought, oh boy, you know, 167 00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:53,000 a lot of people are drinking out tonight. 168 00:13:53,000 --> 00:13:57,000 But I was not going to say just blow them off 169 00:13:57,000 --> 00:14:00,000 and say, no, I can't see something like that. 170 00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:01,000 I was going to take a look. 171 00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:04,000 I was actually interested in myself. 172 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:08,000 As a radar operator, we had to learn 173 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:14,000 not just learning how to look at atmospheric phenomena on the radar, 174 00:14:14,000 --> 00:14:16,000 but how the radar actually works, 175 00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:18,000 what can actually fool the radar. 176 00:14:18,000 --> 00:14:22,000 So we're rigorously trained because we're putting out 177 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:25,000 severe weather warnings and tornado warnings 178 00:14:25,000 --> 00:14:28,000 based on what we see with the radar. 179 00:14:28,000 --> 00:14:30,000 I'm looking at it in the vertical now, 180 00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:33,000 and there's a large return down there. 181 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:36,000 It's up about maybe a mile disappear, 182 00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:38,000 but it was up about 6,000 feet. 183 00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:40,000 It could have been in plane. 184 00:14:40,000 --> 00:14:41,000 But it was pretty big. 185 00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:43,000 Wait a minute. 186 00:14:43,000 --> 00:14:47,000 And I assumed it was an aircraft at about 6,000 feet, 187 00:14:47,000 --> 00:14:49,000 which was not unusual. 188 00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:52,000 It was moving at around 100 miles an hour, 189 00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:54,000 which again was not unusual. 190 00:14:54,000 --> 00:14:57,000 Now, to find an aircraft in the dark like this 191 00:14:57,000 --> 00:15:00,000 would be like being in the basement 192 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:03,000 and you have a flashlight and you're looking for that fly 193 00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:05,000 that's flying around, 194 00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:07,000 and you only have that focused beam. 195 00:15:07,000 --> 00:15:09,000 And once you might be able to catch it, 196 00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:11,000 you might be able to follow it, 197 00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:13,000 but a lot of times you could lose it. 198 00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:15,000 Oh, it moved. 199 00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:16,000 There's something big down there. 200 00:15:16,000 --> 00:15:18,000 Wait a minute. That's really strange. 201 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:21,000 Yeah, right down here south-havings. 202 00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:26,000 It's moving towards the west-south-west. 203 00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:28,000 It looks like a big blob. 204 00:15:28,000 --> 00:15:31,000 Yeah, that's the way it was explained to us. 205 00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:33,000 This is weird. 206 00:15:33,000 --> 00:15:36,000 It looks like it's steady right now. 207 00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:40,000 For a brief moment of about 15 seconds, 208 00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:42,000 it just stopped and hovered, 209 00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:44,000 which is highly unusual. 210 00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:47,000 So right away I knew something was not right. 211 00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:49,000 Either it was at that point I thought, 212 00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:54,000 okay, it could be a blimp, a balloon, or something like that. 213 00:15:54,000 --> 00:15:57,000 But to be flying at night in the dead of winter 214 00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:00,000 was highly unusual too. 215 00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:02,000 It's gone up. 216 00:16:02,000 --> 00:16:07,000 I'm getting it now at about 12,000 feet. 217 00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:08,000 Oh. 218 00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:13,000 You know, after that, it seemed like everything just went crazy. 219 00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:15,000 Oh, my God. What is that? 220 00:16:15,000 --> 00:16:17,000 They were going together and coming apart. 221 00:16:17,000 --> 00:16:19,000 Yeah, well, it's... 222 00:16:19,000 --> 00:16:21,000 There's three. 223 00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:23,000 They're separated by about... 224 00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:26,000 It's like about 5,000 feet in height. 225 00:16:26,000 --> 00:16:28,000 They're very strong returns. 226 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:30,000 They're spiking, so it's... 227 00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:32,000 They're something pretty solid. 228 00:16:32,000 --> 00:16:35,000 Not precipitation or anything, especially up at that height. 229 00:16:35,000 --> 00:16:41,000 In all aspects, the objects looked like an aircraft. 230 00:16:41,000 --> 00:16:44,000 It just did not act like an aircraft. 231 00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:46,000 We know it was solid. 232 00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:48,000 It was smooth. 233 00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:53,000 It seemed extremely reflective, very high-polished metal. 234 00:16:53,000 --> 00:16:58,000 We can detect that by the amount of energy coming back in the echo. 235 00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:26,000 The huge returns. I've never seen anything like this. 236 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:29,000 Not even when I'm doing storms. These aren't storms. 237 00:17:29,000 --> 00:17:32,000 They're just popping up all over the place. 238 00:17:37,000 --> 00:17:41,000 The northernmost one would jump 20 miles hover. 239 00:17:41,000 --> 00:17:45,000 The other two would jump 20 miles 240 00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:48,000 and then make that triangular formation again, 241 00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:52,000 and that would hover there for a few seconds. 242 00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:56,000 Think of anything in nature that would play follow the leader like that. 243 00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:00,000 It was almost as if it wanted to be seen. 244 00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:04,000 I was spooked. I was creeped out. 245 00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:06,000 I was nervous. I was shaking. 246 00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:11,000 These are all up around about between 7 and 12,000 feet. 247 00:18:11,000 --> 00:18:14,000 This is strange. 248 00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:18,000 They look like they're all moving toward the south, towards Chicago. 249 00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:24,000 They're about over the center of Lake Michigan, three of them in a triangle, 250 00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:27,000 just off the coast of Bury County. 251 00:18:35,000 --> 00:18:39,000 Once it got to that one area in southern Lake Michigan, 252 00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:43,000 it stopped at Hubbard. It stayed there for a while. 253 00:18:44,000 --> 00:18:48,000 I watched them for two, three hours, 254 00:18:48,000 --> 00:18:54,000 and they were met up by dozens and dozens of other objects I could see. 255 00:18:54,000 --> 00:19:03,000 They were doing incredible feats, like going from lower, say, like at 4,000 or 5,000 feet 256 00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:08,000 to going as high as 55,000 feet within a matter of seconds, 257 00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:12,000 which none of our military aircraft can do at all. 258 00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:18,000 At one point, I saw it move 20 miles out over Lake Michigan in less than a second, 259 00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:21,000 so it's moving at 72,000 miles an hour. 260 00:19:21,000 --> 00:19:26,000 At that speed, you can fly from New York to LA in about two minutes, 261 00:19:26,000 --> 00:19:31,000 and there's just no technology I know of that can go that fast. 262 00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:38,000 I know it wasn't swamp gas because the weather radar would actually not be able to see swamp gas. 263 00:19:38,000 --> 00:19:43,000 I knew that they were not a super-refraction of the radar beam 264 00:19:43,000 --> 00:19:49,000 or a bounce back of the radar back down to the Earth because of their movements and their speeds, 265 00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:56,000 but also because by raising the radar antenna to the many degrees that I did up, 266 00:19:56,000 --> 00:20:01,000 that eliminates all super-refraction possibilities. 267 00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:08,000 Later on, I found out that that was the only clear area of no ice. 268 00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:14,000 It was absolutely the northernmost point that you get without going into solid sheets of ice. 269 00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:17,000 They were out over open water. 270 00:20:19,000 --> 00:20:26,000 It was a rendezvous point for other objects from coming in from other directions. 271 00:20:26,000 --> 00:20:31,000 All right, well, if we get any more, we'll let you know also. 272 00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:33,000 Okay, let me... 273 00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:35,000 Yeah, please do. 274 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:36,000 Thank you. 275 00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:37,000 Bye-bye. 276 00:20:37,000 --> 00:20:41,000 Once I got off the phone with 911 dispatcher, 277 00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:45,000 I called my wife and told her all about what I had seen, 278 00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:52,000 and I said, can you go out and take a look to the southern sky and see if you see anything? 279 00:20:52,000 --> 00:20:55,000 It was late at night. It was the dead of winter. 280 00:20:55,000 --> 00:20:57,000 She actually was too afraid to go out. 281 00:20:57,000 --> 00:20:59,000 She said, yes, she was great. 282 00:20:59,000 --> 00:21:03,000 I said, I'm not going out there by myself. 283 00:21:03,000 --> 00:21:07,000 I did stay over and watch it a little bit more, 284 00:21:07,000 --> 00:21:13,000 and one by one, they would disappear until they all just kind of faded away. 285 00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:21,000 The next shift that came in after me, he didn't really get excited like I was. 286 00:21:21,000 --> 00:21:25,000 Really didn't know what to think of it because he hadn't seen the whole thing. 287 00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:31,000 Driving home that night, everything was going through my mind, 288 00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:35,000 and I couldn't believe what I had seen. 289 00:21:36,000 --> 00:21:43,000 My whole idea as a scientist of what's out there, 290 00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:47,000 it was like just a huge change in the way I had to think 291 00:21:47,000 --> 00:21:50,000 that there's more out there than we all know. 292 00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:54,000 I was like, oh, I'm going to be there. 293 00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:02,000 Probably around eight in the morning, we started getting direct calls, 294 00:22:02,000 --> 00:22:04,000 which were coming into me, 295 00:22:04,000 --> 00:22:10,000 and these are citizens who saw something strange and wanted to report it. 296 00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:18,000 So I got the idea of calling the dispatch operator in Ottawa County, 9-1-1, 297 00:22:18,000 --> 00:22:23,000 and saying, how long would it take to get a copy of these calls? 298 00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:27,000 And he said, I'll have it for you in an hour. 299 00:22:28,000 --> 00:22:33,000 So I picked it up, and this is back in 1994. 300 00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:40,000 Popped it into the cassette device, and it knocks your socks off. 301 00:22:41,000 --> 00:22:42,000 9-1-1. 302 00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:45,000 This is a non-emergency, so feel free to cut me off if something comes in. 303 00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:49,000 And I feel kind of silly calling, but is there any Air Force airplanes 304 00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:53,000 or helicopters flying around in Algin or Ottawa County tonight? 305 00:22:54,000 --> 00:22:58,000 I don't know if you guys do anything on UFOs at all. 306 00:22:59,000 --> 00:23:02,000 It's not a really emergency. We just called up all the UFOs. 307 00:23:03,000 --> 00:23:05,000 They're out there, making airplanes. 308 00:23:08,000 --> 00:23:13,000 These people saw something that either frightened or amazed them. 309 00:23:13,000 --> 00:23:18,000 You can hear the sincerity in their voices. You can hear the amazement. 310 00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:21,000 I think that's very compelling. 311 00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:28,000 But also, there was a 9-1-1 dispatch recording with a National Weather Service radar operator. 312 00:23:28,000 --> 00:23:34,000 He alone and the dispatcher set this apart from so much other UFO stuff that I've seen. 313 00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:40,000 I listened to five or ten minutes of it, and I called the news desk and said, 314 00:23:40,000 --> 00:23:47,000 We got a major story. I got back to the newsroom, batted out a story, and got it on the wire. 315 00:23:56,000 --> 00:24:02,000 When the event happened on March 8th, I had no idea it was recorded. 316 00:24:03,000 --> 00:24:09,000 The tape was immediately given to my boss and to my boss's boss. 317 00:24:11,000 --> 00:24:14,000 And that's when just everything broke loose. 318 00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:31,000 Residents in places like Grand Haven, Holland and other Lakeshore towns reported seeing the strange phenomenon in the night sky. 319 00:24:31,000 --> 00:24:34,000 This was definitely brighter than anything I've ever seen before. 320 00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:38,000 Flash in green lights, and once in a while you'd see like a red. 321 00:24:38,000 --> 00:24:40,000 About ten seconds at just which. 322 00:24:40,000 --> 00:24:46,000 Were they watching us? Were they taking samples of the atmosphere? You know, what were they doing? 323 00:24:47,000 --> 00:24:56,000 The March 8th, 1994 sighting of UFOs in southwestern Michigan is really one of the big cases historically, 324 00:24:56,000 --> 00:25:00,000 not just for Michigan, but for UFOs, period. 325 00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:07,000 Meet the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, International Investigators of Strange Sights in the Skies. 326 00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:10,000 They're trying to find just what's haunting the Great Lakes State. 327 00:25:12,000 --> 00:25:17,000 MUFON is the world's largest civilian UFO research organization. 328 00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:23,000 We've been around for over 50 years, and we have over 4,000 members in over 40 countries. 329 00:25:23,000 --> 00:25:27,000 We take UFO reports that people send in to us. 330 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:34,000 We can identify usually between 80 to 95% of what comes in to us every year. 331 00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:38,000 And the ones that we can identify are the interesting ones that keep us going. 332 00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:46,000 Michigan is one of those states where we just happen to have more UFO sightings reported to us than many of the other states. 333 00:25:46,000 --> 00:25:48,000 We're always in the top ten. 334 00:25:48,000 --> 00:25:57,000 But this UFO event in March of 1994, we're talking over 300 witnesses to UFOs in a single night. 335 00:25:58,000 --> 00:26:03,000 This was not just on the west side of the state. Michigan's got 82 counties, 336 00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:08,000 and 42 counties had UFO sightings that night of March 8th. 337 00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:12,000 MUFON officials say this is the hottest UFO case in the country right now, 338 00:26:12,000 --> 00:26:18,000 not only because of the mass sightings, but the fact that these objects have actually been tracked on radar. 339 00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:22,000 You can't see nothing happen that night. It's scientific. 340 00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:28,000 Here is an instrument recording something that is undeniable. 341 00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:37,000 I learned about the sighting when a friend from Flint, Michigan, called me. 342 00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:45,000 I called the headquarters of MUFON and I was put in charge of investigating this case. 343 00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:50,000 I got in the car as quickly as I could driving to Holland. 344 00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:57,000 I interviewed 20 or 30 people who were direct witnesses. 345 00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:06,000 They put us all in separate rooms and had us all draw pictures and write our story. 346 00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:08,000 How did you know it was something unusual? 347 00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:15,000 I saw the bottom. It was metal. It had lights on it. 348 00:27:16,000 --> 00:27:23,000 I've had nationwide stories before, but nothing like this. This went worldwide. The reaction was immediate. 349 00:27:23,000 --> 00:27:29,000 For two weeks now, the big question in much of Western Michigan has been, oh my God, what is this? 350 00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:36,000 After the event, I was contacted by dozens of people from throughout the state. 351 00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:46,000 I had calls, I remember, from two pilots, both from major airlines who were coming in over to O'Hare, over Lake Michigan. 352 00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:57,000 Both of them separately verified this very bright, cylindrical object, going in front of them across Lake Michigan, 353 00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:01,000 and then just disappearing at a phenomenal rate of speed. 354 00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:12,000 Both of them did not want their names used, did not want their carriers used, because there was so much prejudice, perhaps. 355 00:28:12,000 --> 00:28:21,000 I think there had been a stigma attached to people who claimed to have seen UFOs, because it may suggest that they're mentally ill. 356 00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:24,000 You're silly, you're drunk, you're crazy. 357 00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:41,000 Soon after the event occurred, I walked into the weather office, and the guys had taken paper plates stacked and stapled like flying saucers, 358 00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:46,000 and they put about 50 of them hanging from the ceiling on strings. 359 00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:51,000 Just put my hands on my face and thought, oh no. 360 00:28:53,000 --> 00:29:00,000 When it came to this event, I knew people might not believe me, and what I had seen might sound crazy. 361 00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:10,000 I did not want to be thought of as somebody, especially as a scientist, as somebody with a mental illness. 362 00:29:12,000 --> 00:29:23,000 The National Weather Service, they did not want to be known as the UFO Reporting Center, so they tried to make it go away in a hurry. 363 00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:29,000 Meteorologists with the National Weather Service set a temperature inversion. 364 00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:38,000 A layer of warm air a few thousand feet above the Earth's surface could have been the culprit for the strange returns on radar, something called ground clutter. 365 00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:44,000 At this point, I was told not to talk or give interviews to anybody. 366 00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:50,000 I was very anxious, because I worked my entire life for that job. 367 00:29:51,000 --> 00:30:06,000 If I had disobeyed an order and talked to the press about it, I have no doubt in my mind that they would have tried to fire me or actually ruin the future in my career. 368 00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:13,000 My supervisor, Leo, had to toe the line. 369 00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:23,000 And in fact, when I talked to him later about what this was doing to my career, Leo was the one that said, Jack, you got to get out of Michigan. 370 00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:34,000 I knew I had to hurry up and get a job to wherever I could, based solely because of this UFO event. 371 00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:42,000 But I was depressed to have to leave some such good friends, childhood friends, and my family. 372 00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:45,000 That was the impact of my career, yes. 373 00:30:45,000 --> 00:31:04,000 I almost put it behind me because I didn't think we were going to ever be able to learn anymore. 374 00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:10,000 But I did want vindication for this because there were jokes. 375 00:31:11,000 --> 00:31:14,000 What I saw, this was a life altering event. 376 00:31:15,000 --> 00:31:17,000 It's something you just don't forget. 377 00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:23,000 How much brain space is occupied in 30 years? 378 00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:28,000 It was enough to where I gave myself headaches thinking about it. 379 00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:37,000 Literally headaches, trying to just really focus and try to figure it out because it's such a mystery. 380 00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:42,000 I was just like, I'm going to get out of here. 381 00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:08,000 Today, a highly anticipated report from the U.S. intelligence community zeroes in on unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAPs, commonly known as UFOs. 382 00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:14,000 This report had lots of input from the military. It was released by the office of the director of national intelligence. 383 00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:23,000 They did find more than 140 reports dating back to 2004 where investigators could not find an explanation. 384 00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:29,000 Pilots said they saw objects that moved at exceptional speed and agility. 385 00:32:29,000 --> 00:32:33,000 My God, they're all going against the wind. The winds are 100. 386 00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:40,000 We have people like Navy pilots, former CIA directors coming forward and saying, yeah, there are things that we don't really understand. 387 00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:50,000 An incident in Puerto Rico where an object was tracked buzzing an airport, then flying into the water, popping back out before appearing to split into two and disappearing. 388 00:32:51,000 --> 00:32:57,000 This is a technology that we don't completely understand, and it seems to be defying our understanding of physics. 389 00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:02,000 The larger question is, is this alien life remains unanswered? 390 00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:16,000 After all these years, it seems like the U.S. government and the military has finally taken UFO sightings more seriously, and that's made me reexamine my own UFO experience. 391 00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:28,000 I've been dreaming about this for 27 years. 392 00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:45,000 What I'm hoping to get out of the eyewitnesses is to get more information out of them and actually see exactly where they were so that I can tie together what I was seeing with the people on the ground, 393 00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:57,000 with the radar. When you have both radar confirmation and ground-based eyeball confirmation, that's the proof that there was a tornado on the ground. 394 00:33:58,000 --> 00:34:01,000 And so why not for UFOs? 395 00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:04,000 Virginia? 396 00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:05,000 Oh, Jack. 397 00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:06,000 Jack, Michelle, nice to meet you. 398 00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:08,000 For real, it's so nice to meet you. 399 00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:10,000 I have so many questions and I know you have. 400 00:34:10,000 --> 00:34:25,000 I knew of Virginia Tilley. She did a thorough job of finding these witnesses on the ground, but of course she didn't have a really good, detailed account of what I saw on the radar. 401 00:34:25,000 --> 00:34:27,000 I know you've been investigating this the whole time. 402 00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:29,000 Believe it or not, I tried to reach you. 403 00:34:29,000 --> 00:34:30,000 Oh, you did? 404 00:34:30,000 --> 00:34:33,000 I did. I tried actually several different times. 405 00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:34,000 Really? 406 00:34:34,000 --> 00:34:38,000 And I was always told you weren't available or you weren't allowed to speak to me. 407 00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:40,000 No men in black, hey? 408 00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:42,000 No men in black? Oh, two men in black. 409 00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:43,000 None of those. 410 00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:50,000 There are very few, if any, that have the kind of documentation that goes with this case. 411 00:34:50,000 --> 00:34:54,000 This one I feel is much bigger than any of the others that I've investigated. 412 00:34:54,000 --> 00:34:56,000 No kidding, the absolute top one? 413 00:34:56,000 --> 00:34:57,000 I would think so. 414 00:34:57,000 --> 00:34:58,000 Really? 415 00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:01,000 There's a lot of gaps I'd like to see filled up. 416 00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:10,000 I'm really interested in this couple you were talking about that had a vantage point from Lake Michigan around the time when I was seeing it on radar. 417 00:35:10,000 --> 00:35:15,000 This was one of the most unusual things I've ever heard. 418 00:35:15,000 --> 00:35:19,000 March 8th of 1994. 419 00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:30,000 Young couple that were camping out that night, a nice cold night, right on the lake after midnight. 420 00:35:30,000 --> 00:35:32,000 The wife woke up. 421 00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:40,000 There was a tall tower of water. 422 00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:43,000 They said it looked like a huge waterfall. 423 00:35:43,000 --> 00:35:49,000 Went up almost as high as what looked like the heights of the sky. 424 00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:52,000 At least 20 feet wide. 425 00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:58,000 It was lit behind and from above. 426 00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:02,000 And they're looking off towards the Chicago area, towards the southwest. 427 00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:09,000 They both were so frightened they grabbed a couple of quick things that were laying with them and they ran up the stairs. 428 00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:14,000 As fast as they could go. 429 00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:22,000 So what you're telling me completely correlates with what I saw on radar from say 11 o'clock through well after midnight. 430 00:36:22,000 --> 00:36:26,000 I was watching them til 2 in the morning on radar in the same place. 431 00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:29,000 I have them at 6,000 feet at that point. 432 00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:32,000 So it must have been a pretty tall waterfall then. 433 00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:36,000 That's incredible. 434 00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:41,000 A lot of these UFO events occur around great big bodies of water. 435 00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:45,000 The Great Lakes seems to be a hot spot, fresh water here. 436 00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:48,000 I've heard that so many times. 437 00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:55,000 The Great Lakes is the largest freshwater area in the entire planet. 438 00:36:55,000 --> 00:36:59,000 It's almost as if they were looking for open water and they found it right here. 439 00:36:59,000 --> 00:37:05,000 And so there has to be a connection. 440 00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:10,000 It always wanted to meet them. 441 00:37:10,000 --> 00:37:15,000 You know, being the radar guy, he said, I saw what I saw. 442 00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:18,000 So they see that we're not crazy. 443 00:37:18,000 --> 00:37:21,000 You know, what we saw was real. 444 00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:27,000 1994 sighting has affected me in a popularity kind of way. 445 00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:31,000 A lot of the inquiries too are sincere. 446 00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:36,000 But if the recording from the radar operator did not exist, 447 00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:39,000 it would affect me differently, I believe. 448 00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:44,000 It would be more adverse, probably, or more unbelievable to people. 449 00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:48,000 We saw it out in the East Sky. 450 00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:53,000 We could see, you know, the, I guess you would call it metallic. 451 00:37:53,000 --> 00:37:55,000 You could see that. 452 00:37:55,000 --> 00:38:00,000 I saw something that I've never seen before. 453 00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:06,000 The interesting thing to me about the two lights was one of them broke away from the other 454 00:38:06,000 --> 00:38:10,000 at a noticeably high speed. 455 00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:15,000 When I was seeing the objects between South Haven and Benton Harbor, 456 00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:20,000 and yet the witnesses, the police officer, was in Holland, 457 00:38:20,000 --> 00:38:23,000 they couldn't tell how far away or how high up. 458 00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:24,000 I could, though. 459 00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:29,000 I could see exactly how far away they were and how high up they were. 460 00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:33,000 And it matched perfectly with what they were seeing. 461 00:38:33,000 --> 00:38:36,000 Now I'm 100% sure we were seeing the same thing. 462 00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:39,000 There's no doubt about it. 463 00:38:39,000 --> 00:38:47,000 The strangest thing I saw that night was when I was using the beam of my radar to track the one object, 464 00:38:47,000 --> 00:38:50,000 and then it split into several objects, 465 00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:55,000 and they began to make triangles in different rotating patterns 466 00:38:55,000 --> 00:39:01,000 and also even rotating in the way that they were going from horizontal to vertical. 467 00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:10,000 But the one thing that was very odd was each triangle was lined up perfectly down the beam of the radar. 468 00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:15,000 If it was in any other position, I wouldn't have been able to see it all in one beam. 469 00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:23,000 There was no way something could do that unless it knew, you know, where the radar was. 470 00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:30,000 To get that, you have to be pretty intelligent. 471 00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:35,000 It almost made me wonder, are they communicating, you know, this way? 472 00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:50,000 I just keep having to say, what did I see that night? 473 00:39:50,000 --> 00:39:57,000 What did I see going 72,000 miles per hour at least, you know, in a second? 474 00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:00,000 What was it? 475 00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:02,000 What do you think you saw that night? 476 00:40:02,000 --> 00:40:05,000 It was a UFO. 477 00:40:05,000 --> 00:40:07,000 I know that. 478 00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:11,000 What do you think you saw that night? 479 00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:20,000 It's a tough question to answer because you don't want to look like a kook, you know, 480 00:40:20,000 --> 00:40:24,000 but I've checked off everything I could think of. 481 00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:33,000 But it looked like an extreme technology that seems like it's hundreds of years advanced, more advanced than what we have. 482 00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:42,000 Nobody can conclusively say these are any kind of extraterrestrial craft. 483 00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:51,000 Now, on the other hand, I look up at the universe and I see the night sky. 484 00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:58,000 And I have a feeling we're not alone in the vastness of this universe. 485 00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:09,000 It's been almost 30 years and it's so gratifying to me that I was a piece of that evening. 486 00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:14,000 When I look through here, it takes me back almost 30 years. 487 00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:17,000 My children were small. 488 00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:20,000 It's a UFO. 489 00:41:20,000 --> 00:41:24,000 I'm glad my babies got to see it. 490 00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:30,000 The two best things that ever happened in my life for my children. 491 00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:34,000 And this night ranks right under that. 492 00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:40,000 You know, it's even making me emotional here and I don't want to be emotional. 493 00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:46,000 I hope everybody in the world can see what we saw that night. 494 00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:53,000 When we get UFO reports in, it's understood that we're only getting a small portion of the group of people 495 00:41:53,000 --> 00:41:55,000 who may have seen something. 496 00:41:55,000 --> 00:42:01,000 We've only received a very small amount of the stories that have happened that night. 497 00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:03,000 There are a lot more. 498 00:42:03,000 --> 00:42:08,000 And I would encourage people to tell their story. 499 00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:11,000 This is a good time to do it. Why not? 500 00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:13,000 It's time we talk about it. 501 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:28,000 I'm hoping that there's going to be some witnesses that will try to contact me and give me their story about that March 8, 1994 event. 502 00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:34,000 Unless we finally figure out what this is and there's hard proof about it, 503 00:42:34,000 --> 00:42:39,000 I am not going to give up this obsession of mine to try to figure it out. 504 00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:44,000 I can see doing this the rest of my life. 505 00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:46,000 I'm not going to give up this obsession of mine to try and find out what this is and how it's going to be. 506 00:43:46,000 --> 00:43:52,000 I'm not going to give up this obsession of mine to try and find out what this is and how it's going to be. 507 00:43:52,000 --> 00:43:58,000 I'm not going to give up this obsession of mine to try and find out what this is and how it's going to be. 508 00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:03,000 I'm not going to give up this obsession of mine to try and find out what this is and how it's going to be. 509 00:44:03,000 --> 00:44:08,000 I'm not going to give up this obsession of mine to try and find out what this is and how it's going to be. 510 00:44:38,000 --> 00:44:43,000 I'm not going to give up this obsession of mine to try and find out what this is and how it's going to be.