Something in the Sky: The 1994 Michigan UFO Event

Winter, 1994. Lake Michigan lay largely frozen. Its eastern shore runs from Grand Haven through Holland toward the Indiana line. On the evening of Tuesday, March 8, the phones started ringing.

Around 9:00 p.m., Cindy Pravda looked out her kitchen window in Grand Haven. "The more I looked at it, I'm seeing four lights, and they are like the size of the full moon." Circular. Bright white. Defined edges. She watched for half an hour, until the one on the far left moved off. That night she said it on the phone: "I think I have UFOs in my backyard."

Over Holland High School, Holland Sentinel sports writer Lee Lamberts saw "almost like Christmas lights." They seemed about 100 feet up, moving slowly, with a hum. Near Holland, Joey Graves saw "six lights out the window above the barn." Red and white. Moving. Holly Graves called 911. By about 9:30 p.m. the calls were stacking up. Holland police officer Jeff Velthouse went to the Graves home, watched red, green and white objects through binoculars, and filed a General Incident Report.

Around 10 p.m., a call reached Jack Bushong, 29, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Muskegon. He worked a WSR-74C analog radar, steering the antenna by hand. "You could pretty much use it like a spotlight." "It started as one. The object was coasting at about 100 miles per hour." Then it shot straight up, 5,000 feet, then 10,000. Two more targets came into play. "I either saw them hovering or they were jumping at a high rate of speed over to the next spot."

Coming together and coming apart. About 20 miles in each jump. Three were moving toward Chicago, toward the lake's only open water. Bushong tracked them until about 2:00 a.m. "Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail," he said in 1994. "I never saw anything like it before."

On March 11, a weather service official acknowledged radar data suggesting a "fast moving phenomenon" over the lake. By March 20, the service had dismissed the blips. Its radar was built for weather, not aircraft. Bushong was told not to talk to the media. Later that year he moved to the Atlanta office. Muskegon Chronicle reporter Michael G. Walsh obtained the 911 tapes through a records request. "It knocked my socks off." The tapes went public about a year later. The Chicago Tribune counted more than 300 witnesses in 42 counties.

MUFON's Michigan chief investigator, Daniel Snow, ruled out small planes, marsh gas, blimps, weather balloons, satellites, meteors, military aircraft and debris. "No natural phenomenon or man-made objects are a close fit." Leo Grenier, director of NWS Muskegon, saw it differently: "I don't believe for a minute that it was any kind of alien structure; I think there is a fairly strong earthly explanation." Others floated secret aircraft, a radio tower with new lights, or social contagion. On Metabunk, one forum user proposed a superior mirage. Temperature inversions over the frozen lake would bend the lights of the Wisconsin shore into view, while the same layers bent the radar beam into false returns.

No photograph or film of the lights has surfaced. What remains is sound and paper. UFO Hunters revisited the case in 2008. Unsolved Mysteries followed in 2022, as "Something in the Sky." In 2021, after a preliminary government assessment of UAP, Bushong said he felt "vindicated." Cindy Pravda now calls herself "the UFO lady of Grand Haven."