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Lake Michigan UFO

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Case File: Lake Michigan UFO
Location: Muskegon, Michigan
Date: March 8, 1994
Description: The UFO (or UFOs) has been described somewhat differently by various witnesses. Some described it as being cylinder-shaped, made of a chrome material, with lights coming out of the bottom. Others said it consisted of three to six bright lights, oscillating in a circle, with blue, red, white, and/or green colors. Some described it as consisting of three or four bright lights in a horizontal line. And others described it as solid, smooth, extremely reflective, and made of highly polished metal. They were seen traveling at high rates of speed and moving in different directions in the sky.

Case[]

History: On the evening of March 8, 1994, hundreds of witnesses reported seeing strange lights and objects hovering in the skies along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Many of them called their local police departments to report the lights. Officers spent hours trying to chase them down.
That evening, a dispatcher for the Ottawa County Central Dispatch contacted twenty-nine-year-old meteorologist Jack Bushong of the National Weather Service in Muskegon, Michigan. He asked Jack to check his weather radar and see if he could spot anything that would confirm these sightings. Jack says it is tough for him as a scientist to admit what he saw on the radar that night. He saw objects moving at incredible speeds. The way the objects acted, it appeared that they were intelligent. However, they did not act "human."
That night, Jack was working the 4pm to 12am shift alone. The temperature was around twenty degrees Fahrenheit. There was a light wind and good visibility about eighty miles out. He did not expect anything to happen that night because nothing was going on weather-wise. It was a very fair, clear, and cold night.
Cindy Pravda lived in Grand Haven, Michigan, fourteen miles south of Muskegon. She remembers that it was very clear that night. That evening, she was in the kitchen, talking to her friend, Edna, on the corded phone. She says she liked to pace and walk around while on the phone. Her husband was in the basement watching TV. At around 9pm, she walked to the kitchen window and noticed lights outside.
Cindy says the glow of the light was so bright that she thought there was a huge full moon. She did a double take. She saw four lights and realized that it could not be the full moon. She said to Edna, "I think there's a UFO in my backyard." She noticed that the lights were in a straight line. They were stationary. They were just above the tree line in her pasture.
According to Cindy, the light to the far left moved slowly across the tree line, then slowly came back into formation. The other one that was to the far right (the west) started slowly moving. Then, in a flash, it was gone. The other three lights remained. She says she never saw an airship or airships. The lights were so bright that she could not see beyond them.
Cindy watched the lights for about half an hour. Eventually, the other three disappeared. She wishes that she had a camera back then because she would have taken a picture of the lights. What surprised her the most was that there was no sound from the lights. Her horse was out in the field, grazing and nodding off. It apparently did not even notice that there were lights above its head.
Another witness, Holly Graves, says what stood out the most to her was that there was no sound coming from the object. It was silent. Her sighting occurred in Holland, twenty-two miles to the south. At the time, her daughter Michelle was ten, and her son Joey was fourteen. At around 9:30pm, she and her husband, Daryl, went to bed, while the kids stayed in the living room.
Suddenly, Joey started screaming, saying, "You gotta see this. Come in here. You gotta see this". He said there were six lights in the sky above a barn across the street. The lights were red and white and moving. Holly says their whole living room was so bright, it was like a spotlight was shining in it. She was so shocked by the lights that she called 911: "We were just wondering, have you heard anything about these lights that are flickering up here? It's like a group. It looks like a string of Christmas lights that's way up in the sky…And we wondered if you'd heard about it."
The dispatcher told Holly that he had not heard anything about the lights. She told him, "You might wanna have someone take a look. It's different. I've never seen anything like this. I don't know. It's strange, but it's right out east, southeast. It's way up." Her kids can be heard screaming in the background on the 911 tape. While the call was being made, Daryl suggested they go outside.
Once outside, Holly noticed the object moving very slowly in the sky across the street. She says it was not like a plane, a blimp, or anything else she has ever seen. She describes it as being made of "chrome" material and shaped like a cylinder. It had lights on the bottom that were spinning around in a clockwise motion. It had no windows.
On the 911 call, Holly said, "It's just like a circle of a lot of different lights flickering." While standing outside, she asked Daryl what the object was. He responded, "Holly, it's a UFO." They stood outside for about fifteen minutes before Officer Jeffrey Velthouse arrived.
Officer Velthouse was in his patrol vehicle when he received the call to respond to Holly's house. When he heard about their UFO sighting, he was skeptical. He was trying to think of any kind of explanation for it. He wondered if someone was shining lights or if something was on fire. At 9:43pm, he arrived at Holly's house and met with her and Daryl.
When Officer Velthouse looked up, he saw two lights high in the sky, and they were both moving in a southwest direction towards Lake Michigan. He says their movement was consistent with that of an aircraft. They were fairly close together, and their colors went from white to green. As he watched them, one of the lights caught his attention. It quickly moved away from the other light and kept going southwest. He says it was different from any other aircraft he has ever seen.
Holly says that Daryl and Officer Velthouse stood in the front yard for another ten minutes. Then, Officer Velthouse left to try and follow the lights. Shortly afterward, she heard Daryl scream. He told her that the object suddenly broke up into five separate lights before disappearing.
As Officer Velthouse went to follow the lights, more calls came into Ottawa County Central Dispatch. One 911 caller said, "There's four or five lights, and they're all flashing right in a row from the top all the way down to the bottom…It took off real fast."
Another caller said, "There was four lights, and they were blinking back and forth. And there's no way…I mean, a plane is not that wide. And then it started…And then it went down to three lights. And then it started to turn around. Like, I mean, it was a circular motion. Then it started going up and down, and then it went to two lights and did the same thing. And now it's one, and it's spinning in a circle. They're just kinda hanging there. They came up as a group, then they kind of split."
Officer Velthouse contacted Ottawa County Central Dispatch and asked them to locate a radar service in hopes of identifying what it was that people were reporting. The dispatcher, in turn, contacted the Muskegon Weather Service. Jack received the call at around 10pm. The dispatcher asked Jack if he was seeing anything weird on his radar in the southern Ottawa County area.
The dispatcher then told Jack about the calls they had been receiving about people seeing lights and objects in the southern Ottawa and northern Allegan County regions. He said they had received about 60 calls. Jack was initially skeptical about the sightings. But he was not going to blow them off, as he was interested in what they were seeing.
As a radar operator, Jack learned how the radar works and what can "fool" it. That night, he took manual control of it, waving its beam back and forth across Ottawa County, looking for any objects. He says it is like using a spotlight. He had two cranks to bring it either up or down or side to side. When he first saw the object, it was alone.
Jack told the dispatcher, "I'm looking at it in the vertical right now, and there's a large return down there. It's up about maybe…oh, now it disappeared, but it was up about 6,000 feet. It could have been a plane, but it was pretty big." He assumed it was an aircraft that was at 6,000 feet and moving 100 miles per hour, which is not unusual.
Jack says it is not easy to find an aircraft in the dark through radar. During the call, he said, "There's something big down there…That's really strange. Yeah, it was right down near South Haven. Okay, it's moving towards the west-southwest, and it looks like a big blob." The dispatcher said, "Yeah, that's the way it was explained to us." Jack says that for about fifteen seconds, the object stopped and hovered, which is highly unusual. Right away, he knew something was not right.
At that point, Jack thought it was a blimp, a balloon, or something similar. But to be flying at night in the dead of winter was highly unusual as well. Shortly after it stopped moving, the object shot up by about 6,000 feet. In the call, he said: "It's gone up. I'm getting it now at about 12,000 feet." He says that after that, it seemed like everything just went crazy.
Two other objects appeared near the first one. During the call, the dispatcher said, "They were going together and coming apart." Jack responded, "Yeah…Well there's three. They're separated by about 5,000 feet in height. They're very strong returns. They're spiking, so there's something pretty solid. It's not precipitation or anything, especially up at that height." He says, in almost all aspects, the objects looked like aircraft (other than the fact that aircraft show up as pinpoints on radar). But they did not act like aircraft.
Jack describes the objects as solid and smooth. They seemed extremely reflective and made of highly polished metal. He determined that based on the amount of energy coming back in the echo. During the call, the dispatcher told Jack that an officer in Holland had seen "three or four" objects in the sky. Jack told the dispatcher that he was seeing three, and they were in a triangle formation on his radar.
The officer told the dispatcher that the objects had green and red lights and did not look like airplanes. They would repeatedly come together and then separate. Jack said to the dispatcher, "These are huge returns. I've never seen anything like this. Not even when I'm doing storms. These aren't storms. They're just poppin' up all over the place."
Jack says one of the objects was initially situated closer to him, near South Haven. Another one was on the shore of Lake Michigan, and the third one was near Decatur. They were all separated by about twenty miles. But then they started moving.
Jack says the northernmost object would jump twenty miles and hover. Then, the other two would jump twenty miles, make the triangular formation again, and hover there for a few seconds. He cannot think of anything in nature that would play "follow the leader" like that. He says it was almost as if the objects wanted to be seen. He remembers feeling "spooked" and "creeped out," and was nervous and shaking.
During the call, Jack told the dispatcher that the objects were between 7,000 and 12,000 feet in the air. At one point, it looked like they were moving south, towards Chicago. They then hovered in a triangle formation over the center of Lake Michigan, off the coast of Berrien County.
Jack says that once the objects got to an area in southern Lake Michigan, they stopped, hovered, and stayed there for a while. He watched them for about two hours. During this time, they were met by dozens of other objects. He says they were doing incredible feats. For example, they would go from 4,000 to 55,000 feet in a matter of seconds. According to him, no known military aircraft can do that.
At one point, Jack saw the objects move twenty miles out over Lake Michigan in less than a second, which would mean they were moving at 72,000 miles per hour. He says that at that speed, you can fly from New York to Los Angeles in about two minutes. There is no technology he knows of that can go that fast. And a human pilot could not survive moving at that speed. He also saw an object move from South Haven to ten miles offshore in about ten seconds.
Jack knew the objects were not swamp gas because the radar could not detect that. He says they were not a super-refraction of the radar beam or a bounce-back of the radar back down to earth because of their movements and speeds, but also because when he raised the radar antenna so many degrees up, it eliminated all super-refraction possibilities.
Jack later found out that the southern part of Lake Michigan was the only area that was clear of ice. So, the objects were out over open water. According to him, that area was a rendezvous point for other objects that were coming in from other directions.
Once Jack got off the phone with the dispatcher, he called his wife and told her about what he had seen. He asked her to look at the southern sky and see if she could see anything. However, she told him she was too afraid to go outside by herself. She was "creeped out," as it was late at night in the dead of winter.
Jack also called the FAA control tower at the Muskegon County Airport and asked if they had seen anything. An air traffic controller told him that he had observed three aircraft flying in formation off in the distance, but they did not have a transponder code.
Jack stayed at the station until about 2am to watch the objects. He says one by one, they began to disappear until they all faded away. He told the person who came in for the next shift about the objects, but the coworker did not seem as interested. While driving home that night, "everything" was going through Jack's mind. He was in disbelief about what he had seen. He says he had to change how he thought about everything – that there is more "out there" than we will ever know.
At around 8am the next morning, March 9, 1994, Michael Walsh, a journalist for The Muskegon Chronicle, started getting calls from citizens who had seen the objects the night before. He called the dispatch operator in Ottawa County and asked for a copy of the 911 calls from the previous night. When he listened to the tapes, he was shocked.
One caller said, "Is there any Air Force airplanes or helicopters flying around in Allegan or Ottawa County tonight?" Another caller said, "It's not a real emergency. We're calling about the UFOs we saw…They're out there. They ain't airplanes."
Walsh says the witnesses saw something that either frightened or amazed them. He could hear the sincerity and amazement in their voices. He felt that was very compelling. He also heard the call between Jack and the 911 dispatcher. Walsh says that call set this case apart from so many other UFO cases he has seen. After listening to just a few minutes of the call, he realized that he had a major news story. Soon, several newspapers began reporting on the sightings, with many citing Jack's call as "proof."
Initially, Jack did not realize that his call with the dispatcher had been recorded. The tape was immediately given to his boss and his boss's boss. He says that is when everything "broke loose." Several news stories reported Jack's radar sightings. Several witnesses were interviewed by local TV stations. One witness said the lights were brighter than anything he had ever seen before. Another witness said the lights were flashing green, but once in a while, he would see a red light. Yet another witness said that after about ten seconds, the lights quickly flew away.
Over the following days, several reporters and paranormal investigators came to Michigan to try and track down witnesses. William Konkolesky, Michigan Director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), says this case is one of the biggest in UFO history. There were over 300 witnesses in a single night.
Most of the sightings occurred along 200 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, from Ludington south to the Indiana border. Interestingly, the sightings did not occur only on the west side of the state. Of Michigan's eighty-two counties, forty-two of them had sightings that night. Some of the sightings were as far north as Michigan's upper peninsula. And some of the sightings occurred as late as March 11, three days after the main event. Konkolesky says the radar recordings helped give the sightings credibility.
Virginia Tilly, a retired MUFON investigator, learned about this case when a friend from Flint, Michigan, called her. She was soon put in charge of investigating it. She drove to Holland and interviewed at least twenty witnesses. Witness Holly Graves says Tilly put her and her family in separate rooms and had them draw pictures and write about their sighting.
Holly says that soon after their sighting, reporters began harassing her family. One day, reporters showed up at her daughter Michelle's school, wanting to talk to her. Her son Joey's classmates made fun of him, calling him the "UFO boy." She also heard her neighbors talking badly about them on the radio, suggesting that she and her husband, Daryl, were doing drugs with their children in their backyard.
One witness, Scott Ruiter, said he saw the objects the night before everyone else. At 10:30pm on March 7, he was driving in Grand Haven Township when he saw five objects in the sky. He initially thought they were airplanes. Their lights blinked in synchronicity. He tried to follow them, but they disappeared after he arrived home in Grand Rapids. He initially did not come forward because he was afraid people would think he was crazy. However, he felt relieved when others came forward and the radar information was released.
Workers at a nuclear power plant near Bridgman also reported seeing the objects on the night of March 7. According to them, the objects moved erratically throughout the sky, disappeared, and reappeared repeatedly. Sometimes, the objects would have a "rainbow" of different colored lights. At one point, one of the objects shot beams of light down onto the water. One worker, John Crimaldi, said he had seen objects in the area for a month before the main event.
Another witness that came forward was legal assistant Randee Murphy. On the evening of March 8, she and her husband observed a "huge" shape for about two minutes. It flew slowly, about 100 feet above the woods outside their home in Ada Township. According to Randee, the object had four lights and made a soft, whirring noise. She said it sounded like a single jet engine. Their sighting occurred shortly before Officer Velthouse's.
Yet another witness who came forward was Lee Lamberts, sports editor for the Holland Sentinel. Around the same time as Officer Velthouse's sighting, Lee saw "intense lights" flying in a boomerang-shaped formation behind Holland High School. According to him, the formation stayed "perfect" and sounded like a jet. He noted there were between six and ten lights in the formation. It was flying about 100 feet in the air and was moving slowly.
Journalist Michael Walsh says this case quickly went nationwide and then worldwide. After the event, he was contacted by dozens of people throughout the state. Two of them were pilots from major airlines who were flying over Lake Michigan to Chicago's O'Hare Airport that night. Both of them separately described a very bright, cylindrical object going in front of them and then disappearing at a phenomenal rate of speed. Both did not want their names or carriers used due to the stigma associated with reporting UFO sightings.
Walsh notes that people who report UFO sightings are often assumed to be "mentally ill." Jack says that soon after the event occurred, some of his coworkers made fun of him by hanging about fifty UFOs made out of paper plates around the office. He was upset about that. He knew that some people would not believe him and think he was "crazy." He did not want people to think he was mentally ill, especially since he was a scientist.
Jack says the National Weather Service did not want to be known as the "UFO reporting center." So they tried to make this case go away in a hurry. They claimed there was no connection between the UFO sightings and the radar tracks. They said their radar is supposed to track rain and snow, not airplanes or other flying objects.
The National Weather Service suggested that the objects on the radar could have been metallic foil on a military plane. They also theorized that a temperature inversion – 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. When radar beams bend down towards the surface of the earth, they can receive echoes from objects close to the ground (such as a temperature inversion). This is known as "ground clutter." Jack, however, says the fact that the objects reached almost 60,000 feet in altitude disqualifies this theory.
Following the event, Jack was told not to talk to anyone or give interviews about what he had seen that night. He was anxious because he had worked his entire life for his job and did not want to lose it. He believes that if he had talked to the press about the case, he would have been fired or had his career ruined. At one point, he talked to his supervisor, Leo Grenier, about his situation. Leo told him that he had to "get out of Michigan."
Five months after the event, Jack moved from his home in Michigan to take a new job with the National Weather Service in Atlanta, Georgia. He says he was upset because he had to leave his family and friends behind. But he tried to put the incident behind him because he did not think he would ever learn anything more about it. Still, he wanted to be vindicated. He says it was a "life-altering event." It is something he will never forget. He just wants to figure out what really happened that night.
In 2016, after working for the National Weather Service for twenty-two years, Jack retired. In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report regarding UFOs. They found more than 140 UFO reports dating back to 2004 for which investigators could not find an explanation.
In the reports, military pilots talked about seeing objects that moved with exceptional speed and agility. Other reports have come out from former Navy pilots and CIA directors about UFOs that they have been unable to explain. One incident occurred in Puerto Rico, where an object was tracked "buzzing" past an airport, flying into the water, and popping back out, before appearing to split into two and disappearing. Andre Carson, a member of the Intelligence Committee, says that some of these sightings involve technology that they do not understand, which appears to defy our understanding of physics.
Jack says it seems that after all these years, the U.S. government and military are taking UFO sightings more seriously. And that has made him re-examine his own UFO experience and become more comfortable talking about it. In 2021, he returned to Michigan to further investigate the strange objects he had seen nearly thirty years earlier. He planned to interview witnesses to see if their sightings matched up with the radar data.
Jack met with Virginia Tilly of MUFON, who had interviewed several witnesses. She had tried to reach out to him before but was told he was unavailable or not allowed to speak to her. She says there are very few cases that have the kind of documentation that goes with this case. She feels the case is much bigger than any of the others she has worked on.
Jack and Tilly discussed a couple who had seen the UFO that night. They were camping on Lake Michigan near Benton Harbor. After midnight, the wife woke up and saw a tall tower of water. They said it looked like a huge waterfall that went up into the sky. It was at least twenty feet wide. It was lit from behind and above. They saw it as they were looking towards the southwest, towards Chicago. They were so frightened that they grabbed a couple of their things that were lying nearby and ran up the stairs away from the lake.
Jack says that the couple's sighting is corroborated by what he saw on the radar from 11pm to well after midnight. He had the objects at 6,000 feet in the same area as this sighting. He notes that a lot of UFO events occur around large bodies of water. The Great Lakes seem to be a "hotspot." They are the largest freshwater area on Earth. He thinks that the UFOs were looking for water and found it at the spot where the couple had witnessed the waterfall.
After meeting with Tilly, Jack met with Holly Graves and Officer Velthouse, who described their sighting to him. Officer Velthouse thinks that if the radar data did not exist, then people would probably dismiss his sighting as "unbelievable."
Jack says that when he was seeing the objects on the radar between South Haven and Benton Harbor, Officer Velthouse and Holly were seeing them in Holland. They could not tell how far away or high these objects were. Jack, however, could see the heights and distances. According to him, it matched perfectly with what they were seeing.
Jack says the strangest thing he saw that night occurred while he was using the radar's beam to track an object. According to him, the object suddenly split into several objects. These objects then went into a triangle formation and rotated around each other in several different ways, both horizontally and vertically.
What Jack also found odd was that each triangle formation was lined up perfectly down the radar beam. If it was in any other position, he would not have been able to see it all in one beam. He claims there is no way something could do that unless it knew where the radar was. He says whatever the objects were, they had to be very intelligent. He wonders if they may have been communicating in some way.
Holly is certain that she saw a UFO that night. Jack says it is difficult to answer the question of what he saw because he does not want to come off as a "kook." But he feels that he has ruled out any other explanation. He believes it was technology that was much more advanced than anything created by humans. Journalist Michael Walsh notes that nobody can conclusively say that the objects were any kind of extraterrestrial craft. But, he also feels that we are not alone in the universe.
Witness Cindy Pravda says it feels gratifying to be a part of that evening. Holly is glad that she and her children were able to see it. She hopes that everyone gets a chance to see what they saw.
MUFON considers the sightings "unexplained." William Konkolesky of MUFON notes that when they receive reports of UFO sightings, they are only hearing from a small portion of the people who actually witnessed that UFO. He believes they have only received a fraction of the stories that happened on the night of March 8, 1994. He encourages people to tell their stories.
Jack hopes that witnesses will contact him and tell him what they saw that night. He says he will not give up his "obsession" with trying to figure out what he saw that night.
Background: Jack grew up in Muskegon, Michigan. Even as a child, he was very interested in astronomy, science, and weather. At age five, he learned how to read weather maps. His parents lived on the shores of Lake Michigan, so he could watch the storms rolling across it. At age six, he decided he wanted to be a meteorologist. He later graduated from Florida State. He started working for the National Weather Service in 1991. He first worked at their office in Grand Rapids before moving to Muskegon in early 1994.
As a radar operator, Jack had to learn not just about viewing atmospheric phenomena on the radar but also how the radar works and what can fool it. He says radar operators are rigorously trained because they are issuing severe weather and tornado warnings based on what they see on the radar.
The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is the world's largest civilian UFO research organization. It was established in 1969. There are over 4,000 members in 40 countries. They take UFO reports sent in by witnesses. They are usually able to identify between 80 and 95% of the UFOs that come to them every year. The ones that they cannot identify are the interesting ones that "keep them going."
Investigations: MUFON investigated the case, with Virginia Tilly as the lead investigator. She interviewed more than twenty people about their sightings. MUFON claims to have ruled out most earthly explanations, such as marsh gas, a small plane, a helicopter, an advertising blimp, a weather balloon, military aircraft, a satellite, a shooting star, and space debris.
William Scott of "Aviation Week and Space Magazine" has looked into the case and believes the objects may have been top-secret military aircraft. However, a journalist noted that the objects did not resemble any known military aircraft. He said the descriptions of the objects were consistent with blimps.
Leo Grenier, Jack's former boss, believes the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) knows what happened that night. However, he did not comment any further about his belief.
Jack decided to do his own investigation into the case. He found that several of the witnesses' stories matched up with what he had seen on the radar that night. He believes that the objects were some sort of advanced technology.
Extra Notes:

  • This case was first released on October 18, 2022 as a part of volume 3 of the Netflix reboot. It was released in the first part of a three-week Halloween event.
  • It was also profiled on the History Channel show UFO Hunters.
  • It was the largest UFO sighting in the United States in 1994.
  • It was noted that Michigan has more UFO sightings than most other states.
  • Some sources spell Daryl Graves' name as "Darrell."

Results: Unsolved
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