Michigan U.F.O.s on Radar

by Charles Lear

The state of Michigan is best known to UFOlogists as the swamp gas state. This is because of Project Blue Book scientific consultant, J. Allen Hynek. He came up with the explanation that swamp gas was responsible for sightings that were reported there. That was way back in 1966. It caused a furor that led Michigan representative and House Minority Leader, Gerald Ford, to call for a hearing in Congress. The case is based on multiple witness testimonies, which include those of police officers, and is well represented in UFO literature. However, there is a more recent, and less well-known case that not only has multiple witnesses, but radar confirmation and a 911 dispatch tape as well.

On the night of March 8, 1994, meteorologist Jack Bushong was manning the National Weather Service office in Muskegon. He received a call from an Ottawa County dispatcher who’d been dealing with multiple reports of mysterious lights in the sky. The dispatcher wanted to know if there was anything on radar to confirm the reports.

On Sept. 3, 2020, Bushong gave his recollection of the events that night to WWMT News Channel 3. Bushong explains he was able to manually control the radar with two cranks that allowed him to move it up and down and side to side. This was often done when looking for hail. According to him, he swept the radar over the area in question and got a return that showed an object moving at 100 mph. As he watched, it stopped and hovered, and then “shot up.” He then saw a triangle formed by three objects twenty miles apart. One object would jump to a spot twenty miles away and the other two would follow to reform the triangle. He says they did this repeatedly. Bushong called the FAA control tower at Muskegon County Airport and asked if they were getting similar returns. A controller there reported seeing “three aircraft in formation” with no transponder codes.

Bushong was told by the NWS not to speak to the public about what he’d seen. According to him, their main concern was to avoid becoming a U.F.O. reporting center. Bushong says he’s faced ridicule but feels more comfortable speaking about his experience since the U.S. Department of Defense released videos they confirmed were of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

The case was looked into by Mutual UFO Network Michigan Chief Investigator Daniel Snow and is listed as Case 62470. Snow reported there were over 300 witnesses, provided an overview of the occurrences that night and included a recording from the 911 dispatch with the attached conversation between a dispatcher and Bushong. A dispatcher is heard saying they’d received 60 calls reporting U.F.O.s. Bushong is heard describing 3-4 returns the size of half a thumbnail and he tells the dispatcher that planes show up as pinpoint sized blips.

The tape was obtained by Mike Walsh when he was an investigative journalist for the Muskegon Chronicle. Walsh, who is now an attorney, was interviewed by Marie Cisneros, herself a Michigan MUFON investigator, for the Muskegon Channel series, Paranormal Muskegon, in January of this year. He describes his habit of getting to the office early, which “was my mistake that day.” His boss told him they’d been getting a lot of phone calls about “unusual activity near Holland” and asked him to look into it. Walsh began by calling the police department and they dismissed the reports with comments like, “Yeah, there were lights in the sky; they’re called planes.”

Walsh then got the idea to send a Freedom of Information Act request to the 911 dispatch service via fax. The fax was received at 9:00 a.m. and by 9:15 a.m., Walsh was contacted and told to come over and pick up the tape. He was given a cassette tape and he listened to it in his car. He tells Cisneros “it blew my socks off.”

The first caller is a woman who describes seeing an “unusual orb” across the street with the voices of her excited children in the background. A police officer was called to confirm her sighting and he did so. Walsh then describes the interchange between the dispatcher and Bushong and how “it would make your hair stand on edge.” One instance is when Bushong exclaims, “Oh my God, what is this?” when he spots a particular return.

The story made international news and the Muskegon Chronicle was besieged by calls from news organizations all over the world. Walsh received two calls from pilots, one from American Airlines and the other from United Airlines. They said they saw “a flash of light that went in front of them” and one pilot said, “It looked like it was out of Star Wars.”

Walsh tells Cisneros people were concerned about their jobs. Bushong was concerned enough to approach him at his house the Sunday after the story broke and beg him to stop reporting on it.

Walsh sent a federal F.O.I.A. request to the NWS for radar tapes and was told, “the machine does not record.” He describes the NWS response as being “so fast and so sophisticated- that was their posture.”

Walsh interviewed the woman who is heard at the beginning of the tape. He describes that she saw a “circular worm-like object” with blinking lights that “was able to navigate.” It moved off slowly to the southwest and discharged “what appeared to be… two other craft,” went across Lake Michigan and disappeared “at a high rate of speed.”

While Walsh found the case mystifying, he wasn’t convinced that people were seeing something extra-terrestrial. He does however, talk about his belief in the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. He has talked about the case on Larry King Live, UFO Hunters, on other television shows and radio.

Being able to listen to Walsh himself and hear the dispatch tape really brings this case to life. As to the question of whether or not something unusual was happening in the sky over Michigan that night, hearing is believing.