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. Read more