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| Newspaper front page from the day after the sighting (via the Hillsdale Collegian). |
Surprisingly, given my interest in paranormal phenomena, I did not know about the Hillsdale UFO before I chose to attend Hillsdale. If I remember correctly, my first knowledge of it came from an excerpted archive of a past article of Hillsdale College's newspaper, The Hillsdale Collegian. From that fateful moment on, I wanted to know everything that I could about this sighting (and to prove the jokers wrong).
My desire for knowledge finally bore fruit almost exactly one year ago today in the second semester of my senior year at Hillsdale, when I researched, wrote, and published what I then considered the definitive account of the Hillsdale UFO. I drew on material from our newspaper's archive, other research, and, most fascinating to me, interviews with firsthand witnesses who were actually there and saw the UFO. I encourage you to read the whole thing here, but I'll publish some choice excerpts below (I hope the Collegian doesn't get mad at me):
...At about 10:30 p.m. [on March 21, 1966], according to an eyewitness account written by [Hillsdale alumna] Gidget Kohn three days later, dozens of girls and other witnesses — 87 total — began to watch an “intense silver-white light.” The event was later described in Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s decades-long investigation of UFO sightings nationwide as “football-shaped.”
The room of Josephine Evans ’69 had one of the best views of the object; many girls crowded into it to watch.
“We suddenly spotted what appeared to be this strange light in the [college's] arb[oretum],” Evans said. “It was odd the way the lights were, but it was also weird the way [the UFO] traveled.”
“There was a glow around it and the lights appeared to be pulsating,” Kohn’s account added. “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.”
...As the girls, trapped in the dorm by curfew, along with dorm moms and Van Horn, kept watching the object, it continued to behave bizarrely, moving unpredictably and flashing lights of varying colors, intensities, and sequences.
“It is not really necessary to describe all the movements,” Kohn wrote. “Let it suffice to say that it moved like nothing earthly and [Hillsdale Civil Defense Director] Mr. [Buck] Van Horn was seeing it too.”
Meanwhile, around the same time, Harold Hess, then a Hillsdale police officer, was on a midnight to 8 p.m. shift with his partner, Jerry Wise, checking lots on Carlton Road, near where today the CVS [correction: Walgreen's] pharmacy stands. But something quickly caught their eyes, even though Hess said it was about a mile away.
“Then, over by the college, we saw a real brilliant light in the sky at a low altitude,” Hess said. “You couldn’t look at it, it was so bright.”
Hess and Wise drove over to the arboretum, where they discovered the mysterious unidentifiable object that was the source of the blinding light.
“It wasn’t a chopper. There was no humming. I took my weapon out. Jerry told me to put it back,” Hess said. “‘Whatever it is, I don’t think it’ll bother it one bit what you’ve got at your side,’ Jerry told me.”
Then, Hess said, the light split, and went in two different directions. The action had physical effects on the object’s surroundings.
“We got into our patrol car and we couldn’t transmit. We just got static,” Hess said.
“It’s one of those things that runs your hair up on the back of your head just thinking about it.”
...“It was the most unusual thing that happened to me in college. And it was very interesting,” Evans, who hadn’t even considered the possibility of UFOs being real before seeing one herself, said. “I didn’t realize how unusual it was or interesting until much later. You grow up and look back and say, ‘holy moly, did that really happen?
The incident has also stuck with Hess, despite the intervening years.
“It’s just one of those things you never forget even as your memory fails,” he said.
The case received such national prominence that Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a Northwestern University professor, technical consultant on Steven Spielberg's 1977 UFO film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a leading UFO investigator/debunker for the U.S. Air Force, came in to to investigate. Through his investigation, Hynek came up with the explanation that the UFO was actually "swamp gas," the first time that anyone used what remains probably the second-most common explanation for UFO sightings (after weather balloons). But many were, and remain, skeptical of this:
“It was my considerate opinion that Dr. Hynek had his mind made up as to what his findings would be before he ever reached the City of Hillsdale,” [former Hillsdale Civil Defense Director Buck] Van Horn said in a May 26, 1966 Collegian article. “I also observed that his main line of questioning was relative only to that which would fit the Marsh Gas Theory.”My story received a lot of attention, both on and off campus. In fact, it got me in touch with a biographer of Hynek, who told me that Hynek himself did not actually believe in or possibly even originate his explanation. The following account I received from Hillsdale College religion and humanities professor Dr. Thomas Burke, a student of Hynek's at Northwestern, lent some credence to this biographer's version of events:
[Hillsdale alumna Gidget] Kohn also said that subsequent testing of the arb revealed high levels of radiation, boron, and destruction of microscopic plant and animal life.
[Hillsdale alumna Josephine] Evans also remains skeptical of both the swamp gas explanation.
“Dr. Hynek came to Hillsdale and I think he just wanted to get rid of us,” she said. “Hynek was pressured to play it down. Makes you wonder if there’s some kind of cover-up.”
She also doubts it was a prank.
“Some people said it could have been frat guys pulling a prank,” Evans said. “But they were way too busy drinking to do something like that.
“It was a UFO. I’m convinced to this day that’s what it was.”
Hess also denies the official explanation.
“I don’t believe it had anything to do with swamp gas. This was just slow, huge. Swamp gas would never be bright. It was like looking into 20 spotlights,” Hess said. “They’ll never convince me it was swamp gas. I just truly felt it was a UFO. I have no knowledge as to what it was, no speculation as to what it could have been.”
...In class, Hynek told us about his experience. He said the Air Force kept bugging him for an answer so he gave out the most ridiculous answer he could think of hoping just to get them off his back so he could continue to work on it. So he blurted out ‘swamp gas’ as a sort of joke. Immediately they ran with it and closed the investigation down, but he told us one thing he knew: It was not swamp gas.
...Hynek also showed us a graph where he plotted clarity and strength of evidence for being a genuine UFO on one axis and reliability of the witnesses on the other. (He had investigated a great many cases.) Most of the cases fell into a low evidential area of the graph either because the evidence was not strong (poor viewing conditions or capable of natural explanation) or because the witnesses were not very reliable, or both. There were a few cases however where the witnesses and the viewing conditions were very good and the sightings inexplicable enough that he felt they provided good evidence for being a genuine UFO.
As with many of these events, we may never be sure what actually happened, although today the Michigan Mututal UFO Network is holding a 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1966 string of Michigan UFO sightings of which the Hillsdale UFO was by far the most significant; maybe they'll figure it out there. Whatever the truth of that day was, though, I consider it somewhat preordained that I chose to attend the college at which one of the most famous UFO sightings of all time occurred without even knowing about it before I came there.
It's almost like somebody planned it that way...
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| By the way, I once had a phone interview with this guy. But that's a story for another day... |
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