Central Dispatch.
Yeah, this is, um, the National Weather Service of Muskegon.
I was calling to make sure
that the person that called me was not a hoax.
He was one of our dispatchers.
We've been chasing lights down... all over down that way.
- What do they look like? - I don't know.
We got a report of
something going through the air with lights on it horizontally.
Three to four lights...
going at a high rate of speed up and down and all over the sky.
What did I see that night?
What did I see going 72,000 miles per hour at least?
This is tough for a scientist to admit,
and so I'm just gonna have to say...
the way they acted, even though intelligent,
they didn't act human.
When I was a kid, people made fun of me.
They used to say, "It could only happen to Jack."
I was like the epitome of coincidences.
And strange ones.
I grew up in Muskegon, which is in West Michigan,
and it's a beautiful area.
You got the four seasons.
So this was my childhood home right here.
I can remember standing right out front being three and four years old,
being very curious about the world.
You know, even as far back as I can remember,
I was very interested in astronomy and science,
and then, of course, weather too.
I started learning how to read weather maps
at about five, six years old.
My parents lived on Lake Michigan.
I could see the storms rolling across Lake Michigan.
And that's how I learned that I wanted to be a meteorologist
ever since I was six years old.
On March 8th, 1994, I was 29 going on 30.
I had been at the Muskegon National Weather Service
for three years at that point.
I was the 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. shift,
and I was alone on duty for the night, which is not unusual.
Temperatures were around 20 degrees.
It was a light wind, and we had very good visibility.
Probably easily 80 miles.
I wasn't expecting that there was gonna be anything going on that night
because there was nothing going on weather-wise.
It was a very fair, clear, cold night.
That night it was very clear.
I was in the kitchen talking to my friend Edna.
And we had a corded phone at the time.
And I like to pace when I'm on the phone.
My husband was in the basement watching TV downstairs on the couch.
It was about nine o'clock at night.
And I walked to my kitchen window.
That's when I saw the lights.
And the glow of the light that was outside,
it was so bright
that I thought that it was a huge full moon.
I did a double take.
No, I saw four lights. "That can't be a full moon."
So I said, "Edna, I think there's a UFO in my backyard."
The lights were in a straight line.
They were stationary.
They were just above our tree line in our pasture.
The one to the far left
moved slowly across the tree line.
Then slowly came back into formation again.
And the other one to the far right, would be to the west,
was starting to slowly move.
Then it was gone. It was just gone in a flash.
So then I'm left with three.
I never saw a ship or ships.
The lights were so bright, I could never see beyond them.
I watched them totally for about a half hour.
I wish I had a camera back then.
We didn't have cell phones that could take a picture.
What surprised me most was there was no sound from the UFO.
My horse was out in the field,
and she was grazing and nodding off.
She didn't even know they were above her head.
Not a sound.
That's the thing that stands out the most to me.
Dead silent.
In 1994, I was married,
my daughter was ten,
and my son was 14.
My husband Daryl and I had retired to bed, and the kids were in the living room.
Joey started screaming.
Just, you know, "You gotta see this. Come in here. You gotta see this."
Our whole living room was like a spotlight.
It was so bright.
911.
Um, 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.
No, ma'am.
And we wondered if you'd heard about it.
Not a thing.
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.
You can hear my kids screaming in the background on the 911 tape.
So my husband, Daryl, said, "Let's go outside."
And this thing is roughly 300 feet.
It was right across the street,
and it wasn't doing anything
but going as slow as it possibly could.
It was not like a plane.
It was not like a blimp.
It was not like anything I've ever seen.
It was, I said, of a chrome material.
It was a cylinder shape.
And they were going around in a circle.
Saw no windows, anything like that.
And it had lights coming out of the bottom.
It's just like a circle
of a lot of different lights flickering.
I said to Daryl, "What is that?"
And
he said, "Holly, it's a UFO."
We stood out there for about,
I wanna say 15, 20 minutes before Officer Velthouse got there.
I was in my patrol vehicle
when I received a 911 call
to respond to the residence of Holly Graves and her family.
My thought on UFOs was "skeptical."
I was trying to think of any kind of explainable situation
that was going on,
whether it was somebody shining lights or maybe something was on fire.
I was met outside by Holly Graves and her husband.
I saw two lights,
and they were both moving in a southwest direction.
They were consistent with the flight maybe of an aircraft of some sort.
They were that high in the sky.
The lights went from white to green,
and they were fairly close together.
As I watched them,
the one light caught my attention,
and it moved from the other light in a quick manner,
and then kept going southwest.
That was noticeable to me.
Different than any normal aircraft that I've seen.
And Officer Velthouse and my husband
stood in the front yard for another ten minutes or so.
And then Officer Velthouse left.
At that point, I heard Daryl scream.
He said it just, bam, broke up into five...
before it disappeared.
As I was trying to follow the lights,
we were getting more calls
through Ottawa County Central Dispatch.
911.
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.
- Uh-huh. - It took off real fast.
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.
I contacted the Ottawa County central dispatcher
to try and locate a radar service
to determine what it was that people were reporting.
And he, in turn, contacted the Muskegon Weather Service.
Weather Service. Muskegon.
Around 10:00 p.m. that night,
I got a phone call from the Ottawa County 911 Dispatch.
Hi, Muskegon. This is Ottawa County 911 calling.
Yeah, how you doing?
Good. You guys have access to a radar there, don't ya?
- Yes, we do. - You do.
You getting anything weird down in the Southern Ottawa County area?
The reason I ask is we're getting a whole bunch of calls
of some strange lights
in the Southern Ottawa, Northern Allegan County
right near Holland City area.
- Strange lights? - Yeah.
We've had about 60 UFO calls.
Oh jeez! Okay.
I'm sitting here going, "No, come on."
"There's gotta be something more to this."
Yeah.
When he said something about UFOs are being seen across the skies,
I thought, "Oh boy."
You know, a lot of people are drinking out tonight.
But I was not going to say, just blow them off and say,
"No, I can't see something like that."
I was gonna take a look. I was actually interested myself.
As a radar operator, we had to learn...
not just learning how to look at atmospheric phenomena on the radar
but how the radar actually works,
and what can actually fool the radar.
So we're rigorously trained
because we're putting out severe weather warnings
and tornado warnings based on what we see with the radar.
I'm looking at it in the vertical 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. Wait a minute.
And I assumed it was an aircraft at about 6,000 feet,
which was not unusual.
It was moving at around 100 miles an hour,
which again was not unusual.
Now to find an aircraft in the dark like this
would be like being in the basement, and you have a flashlight,
and you're looking for that fly that's flying around,
and you only have that focused beam.
And once, you might be able to catch it,
might be able to follow it, but a lot of times, you could lose it.
Oh, it moved. Let's see.
There's something big down there. Wait a minute. That's really strange.
Yeah, right down near South Haven.
Okay, it's moving towards the west-southwest,
and it looks like a big blob.
Yeah, that's the way it was explained to us.
Hmm. This is weird.
Looks like it's steady right now.
For a brief moment of about 15 seconds,
it just stopped and hovered, which is highly unusual.
So, right away, I knew something was not right.
Either it was...
At that point, I thought,
"Okay, it could be a blimp, a balloon, or something like that."
But to be flying at night in the dead of winter
was highly unusual too.
It's gone up.
I'm getting it now at, um, at about 12,000 feet.
Huh.
You know, after that, it seemed like everything just went crazy.
Oh my God! What is this?
They were going together and coming apart.
Yeah, they're... Well, it's... There's three.
They're separated by about... Looks like about 5,000 feet in height.
Hmm.
They're very strong returns.
I mean, they're spiking, so there's something pretty solid.
It's not precipitation or anything, especially up at that height.
In all aspects,
the objects looked like an aircraft.
It just did not act like an aircraft.
We know it was solid.
It was smooth.
It seemed extremely reflective.
Very high-polished metal.
We can detect that
by the amount of energy coming back in the echo.
An officer in Holland City just sent me a message.
He says, you know, "Can you identify anything further?"
He says, "Looks like three to four of 'em."
I'm seeing three, but they look like a triangle on my scope.
This is strange, yeah, 'cause the officer says it's, uh,
"Green and red lights." It does not look like an airplane.
They come together, and then they separate.
And they just keep doing this all the time.
These are huge returns. I've never seen anything like this.
Not even when I'm doing storms. These aren't storms. They're like...
They're just poppin' up all over the place.
The northernmost one would jump 20 miles, hover.
The other two would jump 20 miles
and then make that triangular formation again
and then would hover there for a few seconds.
I can't think of anything in nature
that would play follow-the-leader like that.
It was almost as if it wanted to be seen.
I was spooked. I was creeped out.
I was nervous. I was shaking.
These are all up around between 7,000 and 12,000 feet.
Wow, this is strange.
Okay, they look like they're all moving toward the south, towards Chicago.
They're about over the center of Lake Michigan.
Three of them in a triangle just off the coast of Berrien County.
Once it got to that one area in Southern Lake Michigan, it stopped,
it hovered, it stayed there for a while.
I watched them for two, three hours,
and they were met up by dozens and dozens of other objects that I could see.
They were doing incredible feats,
like going from lower, say at four-or-five thousand feet,
to going as high as 55,000 feet
within a matter of seconds,
which none of our military aircraft can do at all.
At one point,
I saw it move 20 miles out over Lake Michigan
in less than a second.
So it's moving at 72,000 miles an hour.
At that speed, you could fly from New York to LA in about two minutes.
And there's just no technology I know of that can go that fast.
I know it wasn't swamp gas
because the weather radar, uh,
would actually not be able to see swamp gas.
I knew that they were not a super-refraction of the radar beam
or a bounce-back of the radar back down to the earth
because of their movements and their speeds.
But also because
by raising the radar antenna to the many degrees that I did up,
that eliminates all super-refraction possibilities.
Later on, I found out that that was the only clear area of no ice.
It was absolutely the northernmost point that you could get
without going into solid sheets of ice.
So they were out over open water.
It was a rendezvous point
for other objects from... coming in from other directions.
All right, well, if we get any more, we'll let you know also.
Please do. Thanks a lot, then.
- Okay. Thank you. Bye. - Uh-huh. Bye-bye.
Once I got off the phone with the 911 dispatcher,
I called my wife and told her all about what I had seen.
And I said, "Can you go out and take a look to the southern sky
and see if you see anything?"
It was late at night. It was the dead of winter.
She actually was too afraid to go out. She was creeped out.
Said, "I'm not going out there by myself."
I did stay over and watch it a little bit more.
And one by one, they would disappear until they all just kind of faded away.
The next shift that came in after me,
he didn't really get excited like I was.
Really didn't know what to think of it because he hadn't seen the whole thing.
Driving home that night, everything was going through my mind.
And I couldn't believe what I had seen.
My whole idea, as a scientist,
of what's out there,
it was, like, just a huge change in the way I had to think.
That there's more out there than we all know.
Probably around 8:00 in the morning,
we started getting direct calls, which were coming in to me.
And these were citizens who saw something strange
and wanted to report it.
So I got the idea
of calling the dispatch operator in Ottawa County, 911,
and saying, "How long would it take to get a copy of these calls?"
And he said, "I'll have it for you in an hour."
So I picked it up.
And this is back in 1994.
Popped it in the cassette device,
and it knocks your socks off.
911.
This is a non-emergency,
so feel free to cut me off if something comes in.
And I feel kind of silly calling, but is there any Air Force airplanes
or helicopters flying around in Allegan or Ottawa County tonight?
I don't know if you guys do anything on UFOs at all.
It's not a real emergency. We're calling about them UFOs we saw.
- Mmm-hmm. - They're out there.
They ain't airplanes.
These people saw something that either frightened or amazed them.
You can hear, uh, the sincerity in their voices.
You can hear the amazement.
I think that's very compelling.
But also, there was the 911 dispatch recording
with the National Weather Service radar operator.
He alone and the dispatcher set this apart
from so much other UFO stuff that I've seen.
I listened to five or ten minutes of it, and I called the news desk and said,
"We got a major story."
I got back to the newsroom, batted out a story,
and got it on the wire.
When the event happened on March 8th,
I had no idea it was recorded.
The tape was immediately given to my boss
and to my boss's boss.
And that's when just everything broke loose.
Residents in places like Grand Haven, Holland, and other lakeshore towns
reported seeing the strange phenomenon in the night sky.
This was definitely brighter than anything I've ever seen before.
Flashing green lights, and once in a while,
you'd see, like, a red.
About ten seconds. It just went...
Were they watching us?
Were they taking samples of the atmosphere, you know?
What were they doing?
The March 8th, 1994 sighting
of UFOs in Southwestern Michigan
is really one of the big cases historically.
Not just for Michigan, but for UFOs, period.
Meet the Mutual UFO Network or MUFON,
international investigators of strange sights in the skies.
They're trying to find just what's haunting the Great Lakes state.
MUFON is the world's largest civilian UFO research organization.
We've been around for over 50 years.
And we have over 4,000 members in over 40 countries.
We take UFO reports that people, uh, send in to us.
We can identify usually between 80% to 95% of what comes in to us every year.
And the ones that we can't identify
are the interesting ones that keep us going.
Michigan is one of those states where we just happen to have
more UFO sightings reported to us than many of the other states.
We're always in the top ten.
But this UFO event in March of '94,
we're talking over 300 witnesses to UFOs
in a single night.
This was not just on the west side of the state.
Michigan's got 82 counties,
and 42 counties had UFO sightings that night of March 8th.
MUFON officials say
this is the hottest UFO case in the country right now.
Not only because of the mass sightings
but the fact that these objects have actually been tracked on radar.
You can't say nothing happened that night.
It's scientific.
Here is an instrument recording something that is undeniable.
I learned about the sighting
when a friend from Flint, Michigan called me.
I called the headquarters of MUFON,
and I was put in charge of investigating this case.
I got in the car as quickly as I could, driving to Holland.
I interviewed 20 or 30 people
who were direct witnesses.
They put us all in separate rooms
and had us all draw pictures
and write our story.
How'd you know it was something unusual?
I saw the bottom.
It was metal. It had lights on it.
I've had nationwide stories before, but nothing like this.
This went worldwide.
The reaction was immediate.
For two weeks now, the big question in much of Western Michigan has been,
"Oh my God, what is this?"
After the event,
I was contacted by dozens of people from throughout the state.
I had calls I remember from two pilots.
Both from major airlines
who were coming in over to O'Hare over Lake Michigan.
And both of them separately verified
this very bright, cylindrical object
going in front of them across Lake Michigan.
And then just disappearing at a phenomenal rate of speed.
Both of them did not want their names used,
did not want their carriers used,
because there was so much prejudice, perhaps.
I think there had been a stigma
attached to people who claim to have seen UFOs
because it may suggest that they're mentally ill.
You're silly, you're drunk, you're crazy.
Soon after the event occurred,
I walked into the weather office,
and the guys had taken paper plates,
stacked and stapled like flying saucers.
And they put about 50 of them hanging from the ceiling on strings.
Just put my hands on my face and thought, "Oh no."
When it came to this event,
I knew people might not believe me,
and what I had seen might sound crazy.
I did not want to be thought of
as somebody, especially as a scientist, as somebody with a mental illness.
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.
Meteorologists with the National Weather Service
said 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.
Something called "ground clutter."
Well, at this point, I was told not to talk or give interviews to anybody.
I was very anxious 'cause I worked my entire life for that job.
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 of my career, yeah.
My supervisor Leo had to toe the line.
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 gotta get out of Michigan."
I knew I had to hurry up and get a job to wherever I could
based solely because of this UFO event.
But I was depressed to have to leave such good friends, childhood friends,
and my family.
That was the impact on my career, yes.
I almost put it behind me
because I didn't think we were gonna ever be able to learn anymore.
But I did want vindication for this because there were jokes.
What I saw, this was a life-altering event.
It's something you just don't forget.
How much brain space this occupied in 30 years, uh,
it was enough to where I gave myself headaches thinking about it.
Literally headaches trying to just really focus
and try to figure it out 'cause it's such a mystery.
Whoa! Got it! Whoo-hoo!
Today a highly-anticipated report
from the US Intelligence Community
zeroes in on unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAPs,
commonly known as UFOs.
This report had lots of input from the military.
It was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
They did find more than 140 reports
dating back to 2004,
where investigators could not find an explanation.
Pilots said they saw objects that moved at exceptional speed and agility.
My gosh!
They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west.
We have people like Navy pilots, former CIA directors coming forward and saying,
"Yeah, there are things that we don't really understand."
One 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.
This is a technology that we don't completely understand.
And it seems to be defying our understanding of physics.
The larger question is, "Is this alien life?" remains unanswered.
After all these years,
it seems like the US government and the military
is finally taking UFO sightings more seriously.
And that's made me re-examine my own UFO experience.
I've been dreaming about this for 27 years.
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 other people on the ground, 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.
And so why not for UFOs?
- Virginia? - Oh, Jack!
- Jack Bushong. Nice to meet you. - For real. It's so nice to meet you.
I have so many questions that I know I...
I knew of Virginia Tilly.
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.
I know you've been investigating this the whole time.
Believe it or not, I tried to reach you.
- Oh, you did? - I did.
- I tried actually several different times. - Really?
And I was always told you weren't available,
or you weren't allowed to speak to me.
- No men in black came? - No men in black. Oh jeez.
None of those.
There are very few, if any,
that have the kind of documentation that goes with this case.
This one, I feel, is much bigger than any of the others that I've--
No kidding! The absolute top one?
- Really? - I would think so.
There's a lot of gaps I'd like to see filled up.
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.
This was one of the most unusual things I've ever heard.
- March 8th of '94. - Okay.
Young couple that were camping out that night.
An ice-cold night, right on the lake.
After midnight, the wife woke up.
There was a tall tower of water.
They said it looked like a huge waterfall.
Went up almost as high as what looked like the heights of the sky.
- At least 20 feet wide. - Okay.
It was lit behind and from above.
And they're looking off towards the Chicago area,
towards the southwest.
They both were so frightened,
they grabbed a couple of quick things that were laying with them,
and they ran up the stairs as fast as they could go.
So what you're telling me completely correlates with what I saw on radar
from eleven o'clock through well after midnight.
I was watching them till two in the morning on radar.
In the same place,
I have them at 6,000 feet at that point.
- It must've been a pretty tall waterfall. - Okay. You're right.
That's incredible.
A lot of these UFO events occur around great big bodies of water.
- The Great Lakes seems to be a hot spot. - A very...
- Freshwater here. - I've heard that so many times.
The Great Lakes is the largest fresh water area on the entire planet.
It's almost as if they were looking for open water,
and they found it right here.
And, uh, so there has to be a connection.
I always wanted to meet him.
You know, being "the radar guy."
He said, "I saw what I saw."
So they see that we're not crazy.
You know, what we saw was real.
The 1994 sighting has affected me in a popularity kind of way.
And a lot of the inquiries, too, are sincere.
But if the recording from the radar operator did not exist,
it would affect me differently, I believe.
It would be more adverse, probably, or more unbelievable to people.
We saw it out in the east sky.
We could see, you know, the... I guess you would call it metallic...
- We could see that, yes. - You could see that?
I saw something that I'd never seen before.
The interesting thing to me about the two lights was
one of them broke away from the other at a noticeably high speed.
When I was seeing the objects between South Haven and Benton Harbor
and yet the witnesses, the police officer was in Holland,
they couldn't tell how far away or how high up.
I could though.
I could see exactly how far away they were
and how high up they were.
And it matched perfectly with what they were seeing.
Now I'm 100% sure we were seeing the same thing.
There's no doubt about it.
The strangest thing I saw that night
was when I was using the beam of my radar to track the one object,
and then it split into several objects.
And they began to make triangles, and different rotating patterns,
and also even rotating
in the way that they were going from horizontal to vertical.
But the one thing that was very odd
was each triangle was lined up perfectly
down the beam of the radar.
If it was in any other position,
I wouldn't have been able to see it all in one beam.
There was no way something could do that
unless it knew where the radar was.
To get that, you have to be pretty intelligent.
It almost made me wonder,
are they communicating, you know, this way?
I just keep having to say, "What did I see that night?"
"What did I see going 72,000 miles per hour, at least,
you know, in a second?"
What was it?
What do you think you saw that night?
It was a UFO.
I know that.
What do you think you saw that night?
I... It's a tough question to answer
because, um, you don't wanna look like a kook, you know.
But I've checked off everything I could think of.
But it looked like an extreme technology
that seems like it's hundreds of years, uh, advanced.
More advanced than what we have.
Nobody can conclusively say these are
any kind of extraterrestrial craft.
Now, on the other hand,
I look up at the universe,
and I see the night sky.
And I have a feeling we're not alone in the vastness of this universe.
It's been almost 30 years,
and it's so gratifying to me that I was a piece of that evening.
When I look through here, it takes me back almost 30 years.
My children were small.
It's a UFO.
I'm glad my babies got to see it.
The two best things that ever happened in my life
were my children.
And this night ranks right under that, you know?
It's even making me emotional here, and I don't want to be emotional.
I hope everybody in the world can see what we saw that night.
When we get UFO reports in,
it's understood that we're only getting a small portion
of the group of people who may have seen something.
We've only received a very small amount
of the stories that have happened that night.
There are a lot more.
And I would encourage people to tell their story.
This is a good time to do it. Why not?
It's time we talk about it.
I'm hoping that there's gonna be some witnesses that will try to contact me
and give me their story about that March 8, 1994, event.
Unless we finally figure out what this is and there's hard proof about it,
I am not going to give up this obsession of mine
to try to figure it out.
I can see doing this the rest of my life.