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Meteorologist’s Account of 1994 Michigan UFO Sightings (with Audio)

September 12, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Will Haenni September 3, 2020 (wwmt.com)

• In 1994, Jack Bushong was a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Muskegon, Michigan, north of Chicago on the eastern edge of Lake Michigan. On the night of March 8, 1994, Bushong was manning the office alone. He received a telephone call from a police dispatcher in nearby Ottawa County who had been fielding reports of strange lights in the sky. The officer asked if Bushong had seen anything on radar.

• Bushong went over to the radar screen and began waving its beam back and forth across Ottawa County looking for any objects. “You could pretty much use it like a spotlight,” Bushong said describing the radar at the time. An object did appear on radar returns. “It started as one,” he said. “The object was coasting at about 100 miles per hour.” Then the object stopped and started hovering. “And then it shot up, about 5,000 feet, then 10,000 feet I was getting it, just straight up,” Bushong said. “At this point, the police officer was saying that he was seeing the same thing with that same object.” “It was almost as if, it was like it was saying to me, ‘hey, I know you can see me,” said Bushong. “[It] got up to about 30, 40 thousand feet, and finally I saw it.”

• Bushong then describes seeing a triangle of objects on radar, oriented vertically, before they finally spread out in the horizontal. “One that’s closest to the radar, so it would look bigger, and then there were two more,” he said. “One on the shore of Lake Michigan, and the other inland a little bit. They were all separated by about 20 miles.” One of the objects would zip about 20 miles away before the others followed in a geometric pattern. “I either saw them hovering or they were jumping at a high rate of speed over to the next spot. Then there were two other spots jumping to get back into the same triangle, and they kept doing this,” Bushong said. “They were just moving so fast… I really had little time to describe where they were before they had moved and jumped again.” This continued until the three, and at times four, UFOs made it over southern Lake Michigan, where he observed dozens more. For about two hours, Bushong watched the cluster of stationary objects, with some of them slowly moving in between others.

• This fascinating conversation between Bushong and the dispatcher was recorded, and has been released by the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network. (listen to the 23 minute conversation in the YouTube below)

• Bushong also spoke to an air traffic controller at the Muskegon County Airport control tower who confirmed three aircraft in formation in the distance, that didn’t have any transponder codes. The UFOs topped off close to 60,000 feet at times, so it couldn’t have been ‘ground clutter’, when radar beams bend down towards the surface of the earth, echoing back returns from objects close to the ground.

• In March 2019, the 25th anniversary of the incident, Cindy Pravda of Grand Haven shared her account of that night in 1884 with the local television news. Over one hundred people reported seeing strange lights in the sky.

• Bushong said he was initially prohibited from speaking to the media. “NWS didn’t want to become the UFO reporting center for the United States, so that’s really why they really had to duck and cover for this one,” he said. Over the years, Bushong has faced ridicule for his account, but has become more comfortable speaking about it after the U.S. Department of Defense released videos confirming what it says are “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The March 8, 1994 sightings are still labeled as “unexplained” according to the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, the world’s largest civilian UFO research organization.

• Shortly after the 1994 sightings, the National Weather Service renovated and “modernized” its offices in Muskegon. They permanently removed the radar facility.

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — “They were just moving so fast, and two more started coming into play there. I really had little time to describe where they

were before they had moved and jumped again,” said Jack Bushong, a retired meteorologist describing what he saw on radar the night of March 8, 1994.

Bushong spent his career working for the National Weather Service. On the night of March 8, 1994, he was manning the National Weather Service office by himself in Muskegon on a cold but routine night. The NWS no longer has an office or radar there after the government forecasting agency went through modernization and reorganization in the mid-90s.

The phone rang and Bushong answered to find an Ottawa County dispatcher on the other line who had been fielding reports of strange lights in the sky. They called the National Weather Service to see if anything was showing up on weather radar.

It turns out, over 100 people reported witnessing the strange lights in the sky. Cindy Pravda, who lives in Grand Haven, shared her account with News Channel 3 in March of 2019 on the 25th anniversary of one of of Michigan’s most famous UFO sightings.

That’s when Bushong took manual control of the Muskegon radar, and began waving its beam back and forth across Ottawa County looking for any objects. The conversation between Bushong and the dispatcher was recorded, which the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network has shared online.

That night, there weren’t any thunderstorms to track on radar, but rather, something else.

“You could pretty much use it like a spotlight,” Bushong said when describing the operation of the radar at the time. “I had two cranks to bring it up or down, or side to side. You pretty much sent it out searching for weather: any type of rain, sleet snow; or hail is what we were usually looking for when we took it off of automatic mode.”

23:12 minute audio of 911 calls on UFO sightings in Holland, MI, 1994 (‘Mutual UFO Network’ YouTube)

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Lake Michigan UFO Sightings Still Unsolved 25 Years Later

March 25, 2019
ExoNews Editor

by Dejanay Booth March 7, 2019 (freep.com)

• On March 8, 1994, about 9:30 pm, Daryl and Holly Graves and their son, Joey witnessed lights in the sky over Holland, Michigan that filled the sky along nearly 200 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline to the Indiana border. “I saw six lights out the window above the barn across the street,” Joey Graves said in 1994. “They were red and white and moving.”

• Cindy Pravda, 63, of Grand Haven, Michigan remembers four lights in the sky that looked like “full moons” over the line of trees behind her horse pasture. Pravda still believes the lights were UFOs. “I watched them for half an hour. The one on the far left moved off to the highway and then came back in the same position,” Pravda said. “The one to the right was gone in blink of an eye and then, eventually, everything disappeared.”

• Holland Police officer Jeff Velthouse who described witnesses seeing five to six objects, some cylindrical with blue, red, white and green lights as he spoke to Leo Grenier, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service office in Muskegon County, who was following the lights’ movements on radar. “The movement of the objects was rather erratic. The echoes were there about 15 minutes, drifting slowly south-southwest, kind of headed toward the Chicago side of the south end of Lake Michigan,” said Grenier. “There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren’t planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I’m doing severe weather.”

• Hundreds of calls flooded 911 and MUFON to report the strange sightings in the night sky. (listen to actual 911 calls in video below) The reported UFO sightings was the largest since March 1966, said Bill Konkolesky, Michigan state director of MUFON. MUFON interviewed dozens of witnesses H, Konkolesky said, many of whom remain in contact with the organization. “There was a lot of enthusiasm into the UFO field (then) because of the amount of press coverage. It was outstanding,” he said. “They were paying attention to the phenomenon.”

• The mystery of one of the largest UFO sightings in Michigan history remains unsolved, but it continues to fascinate extraterrestrial researchers, psychologists and history buffs alike.

The eerie lights filled the sky along nearly 200 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, from Ludington south to the Indiana border.

On March 8, 1994, calls flooded 911 to report strange sightings in the night sky. The reports came in from all walks of life — from police and a meteorologist to residents of Michigan’s many beach resorts. Hundreds of people witnessed what many insisted were UFOs — unidentified flying objects.

Cindy Pravda, 63, of Grand Haven, remembers that night in vivid detail — four lights in the sky that looked like “full moons” over the line of trees behind her horse pasture.

“I got UFOs in the back yard,” she told a friend on the phone.

Today, the mystery of one of the largest UFO sightings in Michigan history remains unsolved, but it continues to fascinate extraterrestrial researchers, psychologists and history buffs alike.

Pravda still believes the lights were UFOs.

“I watched them for half an hour. Where I’m facing them, the one on the far left moved off. It moved to the highway and then came back in the same position,” Pravda told the Free Press Thursday. “The one to the right was gone in blink of an eye and then, eventually, everything disappeared quickly.”

She still lives in the same house and continues to talk about that night.

“I’m known as the UFO lady of Grand Haven,” Pravda laugh.

Where it started

Daryl and Holly Graves and their son, Joey, told reporters in 1994 they witnessed lights in the sky over Holland at about 9:30 p.m. on March 8.

“I saw six lights out the window above the barn across the street,” Joey Graves told the Free Press in 1994. “I got up and went to the sofa and looked up at the sky. They were red and white and moving.”

Others gave similar accounts, including Holland Police officer Jeff Velthouse and a meteorologist from the National Weather Service office in Muskegon County. What’s more, the meteorologist recorded unknown echoes on his radar the same time Velthouse reported the lights.

“My guy looked at the radar and observed three echoes as the officer was describing the movement,” Leo Grenier of the NWS office in Muskegon said in 1994. “The movement of the objects was rather erratic. The echoes were there about 15 minutes, drifting slowly south-southwest, kind of headed toward the Chicago side of the south end of Lake Michigan.”

actual 911 calls from witnesses to the 1994 Holland Michigan UFO Incident

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