THE PHENOMENON started March 14 during a routine
patrol by Car 19, Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Department. Here’s how it appears
on the official reports:
‘3:50 a.m. Received call from Deputies (Robert)
Bushroe and (John) Foster. Stating that they saw some suspicious objects in the
sky. Disc, star like colors red and green, moving very fast, making sharp
turns, having left to right movements, going in a northwest direction.
‘5:04 a.m. [most likely at 4:04 a.m.] Livingston County called and stated that they also
saw the objects. . . .
‘4:05 a.m.—Ypsilanti Police stated that the object was
seen at the location of US-12 and I-94.
‘4:10 a.m. Monroe
County called and they
also saw the objects.
‘4:20 a.m. (Bushroe and Foster) saw four more in the
same location moving at a high rate of speed. . . .
‘4:54 a.m. Two more were spotted coming from the
southeast, over Monroe
County.
‘5:30 Dep. Patterson & I (Cpl. Broderick) looked
out of the office and saw a bright light that appeared to be over the Ypsilanti area. It looked
like a star, but was moving from north to east.’
Bushroe added this note when he returned from patrol.
‘This is the strangest thing that Deputy Foster and
myself have ever witnessed. We would not have beleaved [sic] this story if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes. These
objects could move at fantastic speeds, and make very sharp turns dive and
climb, and hover with great maneuverability. We have no idea of what these
objects were, or where they could have come from. At 4:20 a.m. there were 4 of
these objects flying in a line formation, in a northwesterly direction, at 5:30
these objects went out of view and were not seen again.’
That same morning, Dexter Patrolman Robert Hunawill
was on patrol with Patrolman Richard Alexa and two county deputies. He said:
‘We first saw them in the early morning, maybe about 4 a.m. . . . We saw red and
white lights off in the distance, about four of them.’
HUNAWILL later reported eight other sightings and took
photographs several times.
‘Again in the 20th,’ he said, ‘my wife and I saw four
objects hovering over the Mannor farm while the deputies were searching the
swamp. Later that night, we’d just come home and were pulling into the driveway
when one of the objects came over the house at no more than 3,000 feet. Took a
couple of minutes to pass over. A couple of deputies followed it out of town
and saw it hover over Island Lake
Road in the direction of the Mannor farm.
‘It’s not marsh gas. My reaction to Dr. Hynek is the
same as the rest of the people around here. He made us look like fools. I don’t
think he’ll get any co-operation out of these people any more.’
THURSDAY morning, March 17: Washtenaw Deputies David
Fitzpatrick and Nuel Schneider had been called out on a minor accident.
Fitzpatrick’s account:
‘We seen three different objects in the sky to the
south of us. Two of these objects were close together and the other farther to
the east. On one of these object we could see on one side white light and on
the other a green light.
‘We headed south towards Milan on Marion Road. At this time we stopped the
patrol car and looked back to the west and at the same time looked toward the
east and seen a real bright object hovering over what looked like US-23.
‘We then drove to Arkona and Carpenter Roads and
Deputy Hennes let us use his field glasses. At the time we seen this strange
object and some colors. The top of it was yellowish blue-green, and the bottom
bright red with what looked like black marks across it.
‘The object itself looked like a toy top. When at the
above location, we were about five to 10 miles from this object.
‘This seems very unbelievable and something right out
of these science fiction movies on TV!’
NEXT: The Mannor sighting.
‘We all run out on the porch and we seen this thing
like a ball of fire, maybe more like a shooting star, come out of the west,
then drop below a clump of trees maybe half a mile behind the house.
‘Me and Ronnie (Mannor’s 19-year-old son) decided to
come down for a look. My wife, Lena, kicked up
an awful fuss, Said we might get radioactive.
‘I told her if they was anything radioactive we’d get
it just as bad in the house as down in the swamp. I asked my two sons-in-law to
come, but their wives wouldn’t let ’em.
‘We come over that knoll just this side of the swamp
and there it was, about eye-level with us, no more than 500 yards away. It had a
blue light in front, and in the back a light that kept changing from red to
white, like it was rotating, like the light on a police car.
‘It was almost flat on the bottom, and kinda high and
peaked on top. We couldn’t see much except the outline and the lights at the
end, because the whole thing was wrapped in a light like a halo, and it kept
shimmering.’
The next night, Mrs. Mary Leonard and her three
children returned from buying groceries to their home just southwest of Ann Arbor.
‘There was just one light,’ said Mrs. Leonard. ‘It
glowed off and on, and it zig-zagged a little. It was greenish and reddish, and
it looked like it had a little light on it. We saw it in the southwest about
8:30 p.m., more than half way up from the horizon.’ ”
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