Two of the most famous UFO sightings in American history took place on March 20-21, 1966, in Dexter and Hillsdale.
A brilliantly lit UFO hovered over both towns on those two nights. In Dexter, a farmer named Frank Mannor and his teenage son saw it on March 20. About 50 miles away in Hillsdale, it was seen by 87 women at Hillsdale College looking out their dorm windows on March 21.
As UFO sightings go, this one had everything: lots of witnesses, a government cover-up, massive media attention, and even a future U.S. president calling for a federal investigation.
To this day, nobody has been able to conclusively explain what it was. The people in Dexter and Hillsdale obviously saw something, because that many witnesses in two different cities on two different nights couldn’t possibly have had the same hallucination.
But whether it was a classified military aircraft or aliens from another world, nobody has been able to explain.
The 1966 Michigan UFOs have been extensively covered. They were featured on a Walter Cronkite special on CBS and even have their own Wikipedia page, but here’s something that has never been reported before: For whatever reason, the Hillsdale College students who saw the UFO that night have decided they never want to talk about it again.
There were 87 women who saw the UFO that night out of their windows at the McIntyre Women’s Dormitory, and most of them are still alive, in their mid-to-late 70s now. They talked about it a lot back then, but they don’t want to talk about it now.
I know this because three years ago, my documentary filmmaking class at Hillsdale College did a film about the UFO sighting, called “Aliens in the Arb,” and my students attempted to track down some of the women who had seen it. We wanted to interview them for the documentary.
A few of the women had passed away and several more had no connection with the college anymore, but we were able to get current email addresses and phone numbers for 12 of the 87 Hillsdale students who had seen it. We split up the list and began contacting them.
What we got was… nothing. Most of the women never returned the phone calls and emails my students were sending them. Those that did answer just said, “No thanks.”
Most of the women lived out of state, but one was in Michigan. She didn’t live far from me, so I told my class that I’d be willing to knock on her door and politely ask if she’d agree to be interviewed by one of the students. She hadn’t responded to any of the phone calls or emails, so I thought maybe she wasn’t getting them.
I drove to her house and knocked on the door. She opened it but left the screen door closed. “Can I help you?” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “My name is Buddy Moorehouse, and I teach documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College. I’m really sorry to bother you. My class is doing a documentary about the UFO incident from 1966. I don’t know if you’ve gotten any their calls or emails, but we were wondering if…”
She held out her hand to stop me. “Thank you,” she said. “I did get the phone calls. I’m sorry, but I never want to talk about that again.”
And that was that. I thanked her for talking to me and told her we’d never bother her again.
Why have all these women who saw such an incredible thing decided they never want to talk about it again? They aren’t saying, of course, so all we can do is speculate.
Do they think people will make fun of them for claiming to have seen a UFO? Are they still mad about the government cover-up from 59 years ago? Is it simply that they want to be left alone? I can respect any of those possibilities.
As for what actually happened in 1966, here’s the story.
On the night of March 20 in Dexter, Frank Mannor and his son Ronald were watching TV at about 8:30 p.m. when they heard their dogs barking outside. When they went out to investigate, they saw a huge pyramid-shaped object that had red, white, and blue lights hovering over his swamp.
“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, and my son has 20-20 vision,” he told reporters the next day. “We both can’t be wrong.”
The following night, a nearly identical UFO was seen hovering over the Arboretum at Hillsdale College, which bordered the McIntyre Women’s Dormitory. It was about 10:30 p.m. and all the women were in their rooms because of curfew. But they were allowed to look out the windows, and what they saw was incredible.
“We suddenly spotted what appeared to be this strange light in the arb,” student Josephine Evans said. “It was odd the way the lights were, but it was also weird the way (the UFO) traveled.”
Gidget Kohn, a freshman who saw the UFO, wrote a first-person account in the student newspaper three days later.
“There was a glow around it and the lights appeared to be pulsating,” Kohn wrote. “The glow was gone and there were three lights which were yellow-white… then the middle light turned red and then the one on the left. We watched for about 10 minutes and then the object seemed to move up and then to the right and left very slightly.”
CBS sent a news crew to Hillsdale a few days later for Cronkite’s special report, and once again, the coeds were more than happy to talk about what they had witnessed.
“I believe I saw it, but I can’t fathom it because it was so unreal,” one student said.
At the time, the Air Force had a task force called Project Blue Book, which was tasked with studying all the UFO sightings that were taking place across the country. History has not been kind to Project Blue Book; it’s mostly seen now as an effort to explain away and pooh-pooh most of the sightings without fully investigating them.
In the case of the Dexter and Hillsdale UFOs, that’s exactly what happened. The Project Blue Book crew sent J. Allen Hynek to Michigan to “investigate.” Hynek, who died in 1986, was an astronomer and scientist who was the most famous UFO investigator in American history. When it came to the Dexter and Hillsdale UFOs, though, he came away with a whopper of an explanation that was immediately ridiculed.
It was “swamp gas,” he said.
“It appears very likely that the combination of the conditions of this particular winter—an unusually mild one in this area—and the particular weather conditions were such to have produced this unusual and puzzling display,” Hynek said. “I cannot prove in a court of law that marsh gas was the explanation, but it seems extremely likely.”
Nobody was buying it, especially the people in Dexter and Hillsdale who had seen the UFO with their own eyes. They said this all smelled like nothing more than a government cover-up.
“I think I will disprove him in a few weeks,” said William “Bud” Van Horn, the Hillsdale Civil Defense Director who had also seen the UFO. “I also didn’t care for the methods of investigation.”
Among those not buying Hynek’s explanation was a congressman from Michigan named Gerald R. Ford, who was fielding calls from constituents asking for answers. The man who would become president of the United States just eight years later decided they were right.
“I think the American people would feel better if there was a full-blown investigation of these incidents, which some persons allege have taken place,” Ford said.
Despite his calls for the Air Force to more fully investigate the claims, though, his request was denied. The Air Force refused Ford’s calls for an investigation, and he never acted on it when he became president.
To this day, the vast majority of UFO sightings in America have been explained away as clouds, government aircraft, drones, random lights, or whatever, but in the eyes of the U.S. government, the 1966 cases from Michigan are still open.
As for why the Hillsdale College students who saw it then don’t want talk about it now, we might never know. We also might never know what the heck it actually was.
As they say in the “X Files,” though, the truth is out there.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
