Michigan UFO Flap was way more than what it is remembered for...

March 20, 1966: Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Department

8:30 p.m.

A call comes into the Sheriff’s Department. The nature of the complaint is listed as “UFO.”

The caller reports a strange object in the swamp at the end of McGinnis Road. It is on the ground. It rises into the air to an estimated five hundred feet, then comes back down again, making a lot of noise.

8:35 p.m.

Deputies Stanley McFadden and David Fitzpatrick are dispatched in Car 34.

They arrive at the Mannor farmhouse north of Dexter, Michigan, and speak with Frank Mannor, (47) and his son Ronald (19). Mannor’s wife had made the call while her husband and son were outside. The two men tell the deputies that an object has been in the swamp behind their farmhouse for roughly half an hour. They say it repeatedly rises to an altitude of around five hundred feet and then settles back down. Lights are visible on the object, shifting from blue-green to brilliant red and yellow. At times, it appears to struggle to lift off the ground.

Earlier that evening, Mannor had noticed a faint red glow over the swampland behind the house, later likening it to the glow of cigarettes being smoked in the dark. Thinking it might be debris from a fallen meteor, he and his son set out across the low hillocks toward the swamp.

AI recreation based on photos from near where the old farmhouse stood

The deputies, accompanied by Mannor, get back into the patrol car and reposition to a vantage point overlooking the area. They secure the vehicle and proceed on foot into the woods, attempting to locate the object.

As they move through the swamp and high grass, a brilliant light appears ahead of them. When they advance, it dims. As they continue searching, the light reappears and disappears again, remaining just out of reach. Eventually, they return to the patrol car, where several people have gathered. Witnesses tell them that while the deputies and Mannor were in the woods, one of the objects had been hovering directly over the area illuminated by their flashlight beams. It then departed in a westerly direction at high speed.

At that point, Deputy Fitzpatrick records a formal statement from Frank Mannor. Mannor states that he had first seen lights coming from the swamp and awakened his son. Together, they entered the swamp to find the source. When they reached the lower edge, Ronald pointed and said, “What is that thing?” As Mannor looked in the indicated direction, the object became visible.

At the instant of observation, the small lights went out. Almost immediately, they reappeared across the swamp, roughly five hundred yards away. The object then became illuminated by a bright light running horizontally between two smaller lights. Mannor later described it as football-shaped, about the length of a car, greyish-yellow in colour, with a pitted surface “like coral rock,” appearing to hover several feet above the ground as if resting on a base of fog.

The two watched it for several minutes. Beams from flashlights were visible from a ridge above the object. As the flashlight beams appeared, the light from the object intensified and then went out. A whistling sound (described as similar to a rifle bullet ricochet) was heard. The object then passed directly over the Mannors in an instant.

The report goes on to record a detailed description of the object. It was brown in colour, with what appeared to be a quilted or rough outer surface. The bottom was flat, the top cone-shaped but low in height. Two lights were visible at the outer edges, glowing bluish-green and intensifying to brilliant red. When illuminated, a yellow-white light ran horizontally between the two outer lights, allowing part of the body to be seen.

A sketch made with the witness

The report makes clear that the sighting was not isolated. Shortly after the object left the Mannor property, Chelsea police — a town to the southwest — reported a similar object hovering over the village before departing west at high speed. Another report came from a Washtenaw County Sheriff patrol observing bluish-green lights near wooded and swampy terrain along North Territorial Road in Webster Township. When officers attempted to approach, the lights disappeared. A subsequent search of the area produced no results.

The report concludes that the area was searched with negative results and that the case status remained open.

Deputy Fitzpatrick also took several photographs during the course of the incident. Taken at night with a camera ill-suited to the task, the images show little more than blurred points of light against a dark background. Even so, the fact that he attempted to photograph the phenomenon at all suggests he believed he was observing something of significance.

The account above is drawn primarily from Deputy David Fitzpatrick’s contemporaneous police report, supplemented by later interviews with Fitzpatrick, other responding officers, and Frank Mannor himself.

What makes the case interesting, however, is not simply the details of that night, but the fact that it was only one episode within a broader UFO flap unfolding across southern Michigan. In the week leading up to the Dexter incident, citizens and police officers in at least three different counties had reported objects moving at extreme speeds, hovering, climbing, and diving.

Six days earlier, in the early hours of March 14, Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies were already dealing with something similar.

Just before 4 a.m., Deputies Buford Bushroe and John Foster were driving near the intersection of Waters Road and Lima Center Road in Lima Township when they noticed a red green object in the sky to the northwest. At first it looked distant, almost star like, but it was moving at what Bushroe would later describe as fantastic speed, fast enough for him to call it the weirdest thing he had ever seen.

The object did not behave like an aircraft. It shot straight upward, stopped, hovered briefly, then dropped straight down again. As the deputies watched, it repeated the pattern. They radioed the county jail to report what they were seeing and almost immediately other calls began coming in. Police agencies in Livingston County, Monroe County, and the city of Ypsilanti were now reporting sightings of the same object. Officers in Sylvania, Ohio saw it as well. So did police in the village of Dexter.

About forty minutes later, a second object appeared. Within the hour, there were four. They moved together in tight formation, still displaying what the deputies described as great speed and amazing maneuverability. By around 5.30 a.m., the objects arced across the sky, turned toward the northwest, and disappeared.

Air Force observers at Selfridge Air Force Base could see the objects visually but were unable to pick them up on radar. An Air Force spokesman later said that no government aircraft were operating in the area at the time. Colonel Gerald Miller, the county’s civil defense director, opened an investigation involving sheriff’s deputies and Air Force officials in an effort to determine what the objects had been.

Crucially, this establishes the UFO sightings with similar characteristics over a sustained period of time, and involves a similar caliber of witness reliability. But, the next infamous case within the “Michigan Flap” occurred the night after the Mannor farmhouse object was encountered. About sixty miles southwest of Dexter, at Hillsdale College, students began reporting a strange glowing object hovering near one of the dormitories. What started as a handful of sightings quickly drew a crowd. More than eighty people would ultimately report seeing it, most of them students, but also college staff and local officials.

According to later magazine accounts, the reaction inside the dormitory was unusually measured. As the sightings drew more attention, the assistant dean of women, a former newspaper reporter with several years of professional experience, joined the group of students watching from the windows. Rather than dismissing what they were seeing, she suggested they take notes. Over the next four hours, students recorded their observations and made sketches as the object continued to hover nearby.

Witnesses described it as glowing and football shaped, unsteady in the air, wobbling and wavering rather than moving smoothly. At one point, it appeared to fly directly toward a dormitory window before stopping suddenly. The object emitted shifting orange, red, and white lights and seemed to hover just above swampy ground roughly a thousand yards from the dorm rooms.

Among those watching was a forty one year old county civil defense director, who observed the object through binoculars for several hours. Even with magnification, he could not determine its exact shape, describing it as either round or oblong. He suggested that its apparent rotation may have accounted for the changing colours.

As at Dexter, local authorities were alerted and observed the phenomenon themselves. The object remained visible for hours before eventually disappearing. No immediate explanation was offered.

Almost one hundred people viewing this object, over hours, was not the end of the story. The following weekend, Washtenaw County departures and city police were processing UFO reports almost continuously, at all hours of the night and early morning. Objects being reported hover low over houses and roads, hanging motionless in the air, changing colour, and then dramatically departing the scene.

There were not confined to a single pocket of the Michigan countryside. Sightings were reported near Milan, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor town and along roads that were not far from the Mannor farmhouse near Dexter. Local police departments confirmed several of the reports. In a few cases, officers watched alongside civilians. In others, they arrived just after the objects had gone.

The sightings did not slow down. Over the following weekend, Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies and city police processed at least eleven new UFO reports, arriving late Saturday night, through Sunday morning, and into the early hours of Monday. By now, the objects were appearing so regularly that the reports read less like isolated incidents than a rolling log of interruptions.

The weekend began around 8.30 p.m. on Saturday, when Judith Alpha, who lived on Willow Road in Augusta Township, contacted authorities to say she could see five objects in the sky over the Milan area. She said they hovered unusually low, and later reported that one of the objects had positioned itself roughly five hundred feet above her house. Milan police confirmed the sighting, noting that the objects were visible over the north edge of the village.

As the night wore on, more reports followed. William Morgan, who lived on Armstrong Drive in Ypsilanti, told sheriff’s deputies he saw three objects hovering about two thousand feet up at around two in the morning. He described white and red lights, holding position in the sky. A few hours later, at around 5.45 a.m., Don Hoff, a printer for the Ann Arbor News, was called by a neighbour and asked to come outside. He watched an object with a blue white light moving in the southeast and followed it through binoculars. He said it did not look like a star or an aircraft.

Other residents were seeing things at the same time. Fred Steinheiser, on Church Street, reported a high flying object moving rapidly in the northwest at about 2.15 a.m. Fred Parks, on Pomona, said he saw an object over his area the same night. Additional sightings were logged over US-23 in Ann Arbor Township, along Fosdick Road in Pittsfield Township, and near Huron River Drive close to North Territorial Road, not far from the Mannor farm where an object had reportedly landed briefly a week earlier.

Some reports came in late. Two women on Norwood Street, Mrs Joseph Gittelman and Mrs Kathy Brest, contacted authorities to say that on the previous Thursday night and early Friday morning, they and several neighbours had watched an elliptically shaped object with five bluish green lights hovering over their neighbourhood.

By now, the reports were no longer confined to southeastern Michigan. In Newton, North Carolina, police officers from six towns across three counties reported seeing a glowing blue object streak across the sky at around 2 a.m. before “exploding” silently, lighting up the sky over the town of Valdese. In Warren, Michigan, Arthur Fiedler told state police he had photographed an object with red and white lights that had no wings and made no sound. Three police officers in the Bad Axe area reported seeing an unidentified object moving over the city early the same morning. Two officers in Shelby Township, Macomb County, described strange white lights that fell swiftly into a swampy area and disappeared.

Military and aviation authorities, meanwhile, reported nothing. Air Force officials at Selfridge denied scrambling fighter jets in response to the Milan sightings. Radar operators at Willow Run Airport and at the military installation at Fort Custer said they detected nothing on their screens.

One of the weekend’s sightings, ironically enough, occurred near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the headquarters of Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s official UFO investigation program. An Ohio highway patrolman, R. D. Landversicht, reported seeing a strange light approaching the base and photographed it. He turned the film over to Air Force officials for processing.

Taken together, the effect is difficult to ignore. From March 14 through the end of the month, unexplained aerial objects were being reported night after night, by civilians and police, in towns, along highways, near swamps, and over ordinary neighbourhoods.

By the point the sightings had become so prominent that they became a problem that required some kind of explanation from authorities. This wasn’t unlike the inexplicable drone incursions at the end of 2024, which briefly forced their way into mainstream media and public attention before quietly receding. The explanation that was eventually offered in 1966 would prove just as unsatisfying, and in time would become part of UFO lore itself, a shorthand invoked far more often than the events it was meant to resolve.

Despite the widespread reporting that had pre-dated both the Dexter / Mannor Farmhouse and Hillsdale sightings (and indeed what would come after) the government response would focus predominantly on those two in particular. In stepped Dr Hynek.

After getting boots on the ground (and swamp), travelling around with a few police officers, interviewing a few people and, Hynek was instructed to give a press release about the Dexter and Hillsdale cases, held in Detroit. Later, Hynek would reflect that he was not ready to make any definitive suggestions about what had caused the sightings, but he had his instructions from his Blue Book superiors and he carried them out.

At the press conference, Hynek did not arrive with a verdict. What he offered instead was a description of a known natural phenomenon that might account for some of what had been reported. Citing information relayed to him by a University of Michigan academic, he explained that decaying organic matter in wetlands can release combustible gases. Under the right conditions, those gases may ignite, producing floating lights that flicker, shift position, and sometimes seem to jump abruptly from one place to another. Such lights, he noted, generate little heat, leave no physical traces, carry no distinctive smell, and can persist for surprisingly long periods. Occasional popping or crackling sounds are not uncommon.

Hynek was explicit about the limits of what he was saying. This was not a universal explanation for UFO sightings, nor even a conclusive account of the Michigan cases. He emphasized more than once that he could not demonstrate, “in a court of law,” that swamp gas explained what witnesses at Dexter or Hillsdale had seen. It was a provisional suggestion, offered in the absence of anything better and under the expectation that something be said.

That nuance did not survive contact with the room. In later years, Hynek would recall the press conference as unruly and unmanageable. Reporters, he said, were uninterested in conditional language or scientific caution. They were looking for closure, for a clean resolution to an increasingly public problem. “They wanted little green men,” he later remarked. When he circulated a written statement that framed swamp gas as a possible explanation, he watched one reporter skim the page, underline the words “swamp gas,” and run for the phone.

By the next morning, the distinction had vanished. Newspaper stories across the country reported that the mystery had been solved.

Hynek, meanwhile, withdrew. He left Michigan shortly thereafter, later saying only that he departed “as quickly and as quietly as I could.”

Hynek of course deserves much of our respect, but it is interesting that his reasoning about “marsh gas” was drawn upon again in a different, less “chaotic” environment. A CBS special in 1966 with Walter Cronkite. It came out in no small measure due to the huge public and governmental attention paid to the Michigan UFO flap. He does not hedge his words when given the chance, as he states, again, the explanation for the sightings (although perhaps other answers were edited out)…

Firstly, a few things about “swamp gas”.

There are a litany of reasons why this was a bad explanation, but if we were to give the argument its due… Yes, marsh gas, will o’ the wisp, fox fire, these are real and rare occurring natural phenomena that, as Hynek said, occur when gases formed by decaying organic matter ignite under certain conditions and create flickering lights near the surface of wetlands. Yes, they may drift, dim and reappear. But these are low lying, fragile occurrences, and they certainly don’t act in the same way that the varied reports that were made across March suggest these reported objects were moving. Even in the Dexter / Mannor Farmhouse case that Hynek was largely referencing.

We saw in the police report that the same object appeared for at least an hour, that it ascended and descended up to five hundred or more feet. That it was a solid object, with different lights associated with it, that did move away from the swamp area at a high rate of speed. The deputies present saw this with their own eyes, were bothered enough to try and take photos of it, and did not use words that described a glow or flame. It was an object which produced extremely bright luminosity.

Mannor described the object carefully, noting that it was brown or greyish yellow, with a kind of ‘quilted’ surface. It was flat on the bottom, with lights at its outer edges and a yellow light running horizontally between them. This was not just a passing belch of gas.

Frank Mannor himself was blunt about the explanation that followed. Having spent time on military manoeuvres in the swamps of Louisiana during the Second World War, he was familiar with swamp gas. “I’ve seen plenty of it,” he said later. “This wasn’t it.”

Likewise, one of the Hillsdale witnesses, Barbara Kohn, accused Hynek of “not doing his research thoroughly before rendering his opinion.” She was certainly not wrong. She brought receipts as well, not only had she viewed the objects through binoculars and noted their outline as “very precise”, she also refuted the basis of Hynek’s explanation: “These objects were not viewed over a swamp but over the college arboretum and the college baseball field… the arboretum is a carefully tended woodsy park with a few small ponds but has no rotting vegetable matter from which gas might have been produced.”

More damning was her suggestion that Hynek had only spoke with two of the witnesses at Hillsdale, neither one of which had reported seeing the objects when they were first seen, and that he had made no visits to the dormitory rooms from which the objects were seen from.

While Dr Hynek’s later turn on the reality and explanation of UFOs was a brave and welcome one – it is unfortunate that he did use the language that he did, or if we were to completely absolve him, that he did his ‘job’ at the time so well. Not only did his hand wave of the entirety of the Michigan UFO flap (based on just these two cases) end up resting on just two words, but he also dismissed Fitzpatrick’s photographs as long exposures of the Moon and Venus. Quite a rebuke to the deputy’s abilities… But also quite a strange statement given that on the 22nd of March (according to a variety of time and date apps and calander searches) there was a new moon phase! Meaning that there was no moon illumination at all.

But interestingly, “marsh gas” as an explanation has become so passe as to be laughable, although it is true that it was more or less accepted by the majority of people who were not going to entertain anything but a prosaic explanation, it has also taken on a new life as a kind of reverse punchline. While now these excuses now range from the banal balloons, drones and lanterns, to the fancy ball lightning or other exotic forms of plasma… they are all equally low hanging and apparently iron clad responses to the vast majority of skeptics and otherwise non-interested people who encounter accounts of unexplained things in the sky or ocean; but “marsh gas” is not getting any playtime anymore.

Oddly enough (and in a slightly similar way to ball lightning), that there are apparently this many UFOs that could be explained away with this phenomena would mean that vast parts of the world are lousy with swamp gas. Much like the reach to claim that the “foo fighters” of WWII were ball lightning seems to suggest that this scientific mystery is about as rare as a hotdog at a baseball game. A Google for videos or pictures of swamp gas yields surprisingly little, lots of people lighting methane on fire but nothing like a sustained UFO sighting as described by the… around 100 witnesses in March 1966.

It is no wonder that this explanation has long since lost its usefulness.

In the years that followed, the Dexter case remained of interest for UFO investigators attempting to reconstruct what had happened beyond the headlines. Among them was journalist and researcher Harry Willnus, who sought out figures involved in the original investigation to ask how they remembered the events with the benefit of time and distance.

Willnus later tracked down Doug Harvey, the former Washtenaw County sheriff, and met him years after the incident. By then, Harvey was retired from law enforcement and running several driver education testing businesses. According to Willnus, he was open, energetic, and direct about what he recalled.

“My men saw something that night,” Harvey told him. “And I’m positive what they saw wasn’t swamp gas.”

Harvey also expressed doubt that Hynek had ever closely reviewed the sheriff’s report, despite how central it later became to public discussion. He recalled personally taking Hynek out to the Mannor property so he could walk the terrain and see the swamp for himself. Afterward, the two returned to the sheriff’s office, where they spoke at length.

According to Harvey, Hynek admitted during that conversation that he did not know what the witnesses at the Mannor farm had seen.

Then, Harvey said, a phone call came in.

The dispatcher informed Hynek that Washington was on the line. Hynek stepped out of the office to take the call. When he returned moments later, Harvey remembered him as looking unsettled, a little pale.

“That’s when he said it,” Harvey told Willnus. “‘It’s swamp gas. It’s swamp gas they saw.’”

As we mentioned earlier, the ‘official’ story is that Hynek’s swamp gas explanation originated with a University of Michigan academic who contacted him while he was in the area, he himself said this. If Harvey’s recollection is accurate, it complicates that narrative. It suggests that the framing of the Michigan sightings may not have emerged organically from (little) fieldwork or consultation, but rather crystallized abruptly under external pressure.

There is no way to independently verify the details of that phone call decades later. But it is interesting to wonder just how much the Michigan Flap required an elimination, a sloppy one perhaps due to just how quick the fire was spreading. The boots came down haphazardly and “swamp gas” became the explanation. Playing up the uncertainty wasn’t on the cards this time.

And now, few remember the Michigan UFO flap for what it actually was: one of the most widely reported, well documented, and carefully witnessed series of UFO sightings of the twentieth century.

We remember “swamp gas.”

In one sense, that explanation backfired. Its absurdity was so obvious, and so poorly matched to the testimony of police officers, students, and civilians, that it exposed the weakness of the government’s UFO investigations rather than settling the matter. The reaction was immediate. Michigan congressman Gerald Ford publicly demanded a fuller inquiry, arguing that the public deserved something better than ridicule disguised as explanation. The ‘government’ handling of this was no longer trusted, it was a moment for many people that broke their ability to believe what they were being told to believe.

But in another sense, swamp gas achieved its purpose. It not only shut the lid on the wild events that had occurred through March of 1966 in Michigan, but the controversy it generated helped bring Project Blue Book to an end. Public hearings were held, civilian oversight was proposed, and Hynek himself suggested before Congress that the subject required independent scientific review. The result was not renewed investigation, but whitewashing. The Condon Report followed, and with it an official declaration that the UFO problem no longer merited serious attention.

If anything, the infamous phrase now stands as a reminder of how much needed to be buried to make the problem go away, and now more than 50 years later, these excuses aren’t working anymore.