The Military Cover-Up of the Dexter, Michigan UFO Incident
Article by Doug Marrin March 12, 2021 (thesuntimesnews.com)
• On March 14, 1966, law enforcement officials in Washtenaw County and Selfridge Air Force Base, Michigan; Sylvania, Ohio; Livingston and Monroe counties in Colorado reported seeing “four strange flying objects” in the sky, moving at high rates of speed”. The same day, the US Air Force and Civil Defense begin an investigation into the incidents.
• On March 20, 1966, the colored lights of a UFO in a wooded swamp on the farm in Dexter Township, Michigan caught the attention of Frank Mannor and his son, Ronald. The men reported the strange object it to the police. Doug Harvey, Washtenaw County Sheriff at the time, got the call. “We got a call that the Mannors out in Dexter seen a UFO. So I went out there, and the grass was down flat in a round circle… [T]hey said they definitely seen an object come down and lift off.”
• According to Frank Mannor: “We got to about 500 yards of the thing. It was sort of shaped like a pyramid, with a blue-green light on the right-hand side and on the left, a white light. I didn’t see no antenna or porthole. The body was like a yellowish coral rock and looked like it had holes in it—sort of like if you took a piece of cardboard box and split it open. You couldn’t see it too good because it was surrounded with heatwaves like you see on the desert. The white light turned to a blood-red as we got close to it, and Ron (his son) said, ‘Look at that horrible thing.’”
• The Dexter Township police report states: “Frank Mannor and his son, Ronald [plus 40-60 others including 12 policemen?] saw hovering over a swamp about 1,500 ft away a brown luminous car sized object, with a ‘scaly’ or ‘waffled’ surface, cone-shaped on top, flat on bottom, or football shaped, and 2 bluish-green lights on right and left edges that turned bright red and helped illuminate the object in between. Lights blinked out and the object reappeared instantly across the swamp 1,500 ft away. The whole object lit up with a yellowish glow at one point and also rose up 500 ft then descended again. After 2-3 minutes of viewing, when two flashlights appeared in the distance, the object seemed to respond by flying away at high speed directly over the witnesses with a whistling sound like a rifle bullet ricocheting. Object remained in the swamp area for 1/2 hr.”
• Robert Hunawill, a patrolman with the Dexter Police Department, saw the same object perform a series of passes over the Mannor swamp. Hunawill described the thing as having red and white lights, which changed to a bluish tinge at times. While he watched, the object was joined by three other aerial craft, and all four flew off together.
• Sheriff’s deputies Stanley McFadden and David Fitzpatrick also witnessed the craft in the sky over North Territorial and Mast Roads. The officers turned their spotlight on it. “It was the size of a small house, kind of pushed down flat,” McFadden reported. “It had red-green lights on it and movements which could not possibly have been made by any aircraft I’d ever heard of.”
• Soon, UFOs were being spotted everywhere. Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey’s office was bombarded with reports of UFOs faster than officers could respond. Accounts of “unidentified aerial phenomena” quickly spread throughout the Midwestern states coming in as far away as Kansas. The UFO reports were first dismissed as a hoax gaining momentum, then as a mass delusion of some kind. But the sightings continued pouring in from more credible witnesses. Something strange was happening that couldn’t be denied.
• The U.S. Air Force sent in astrophysicist Dr. J Allen Hynek of Northwestern University to investigate the matter at ground zero. Dr. Hynek arrived in Dexter and found what he later described as “near hysteria.” Considered the nation’s leading Ufologist, Dr. Hynek worked with the USAF’s ‘Project Blue Book’ program, which ran from 1952-1969. Hynek’s gols under Project Blue Book were to: 1) determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and 2) scientifically analyze UFO-related data.
• “A professor Hynek came to our jail and introduced himself,” recalled Sheriff Harvey. “He said, ‘I’m from Washington, and I’ve come down to inspect that site about the UFO.’ So I drove him out there, and he looked at it and talked to the Mannors. He got back in the car, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘You know, I really don’t know. I really don’t know. Something was there.’”
• “As soon as we got back to the jail, he had a call from Washington,” continues Sheriff Harvey. “He went in my office. Twenty minutes later, he comes out of my office, and he says (to the press there), ‘We have definitely discovered that it was swamp gas.’” Hynek had suddenly gone from “I really don’t know what it is” to “it was swamp gas” in a matter of minutes said Harvey.
• At a March 25, 1966 press conference in Detroit, Dr. Hynek explained that marsh or swamp gas is produced by rotting vegetation. “This gas can be trapped by ice and winter conditions and may be released in some quantity when a spring thaw occurs. No heat is felt, and the lights do not burn or char the ground. They can appear for hours at a time and sometimes for a whole night. Generally, there is no smell and usually no sound, except the popping of little explosions. Sometimes the lights are on the ground and sometimes floating above it.”
• Then, around midnight of March 28th, police officer Robert Hunawill and his wife saw these same strange lights in the sky for five or ten minutes, and took a photo of it. Hunawill said the lights were moving all the time. Reporters noted that this sighting and others occurred nowhere near swampy areas. But Dr. Hynek did not attempt to explain these incidents.
• “With all due respect to Dr. Hynek, I’m not ready to accept this weak excuse of gas from marshes,” said Sheriff Harvey. Hynek’s statement outraged many people, most notably the witness at the center of it all. “I spent time on army maneuvers in the swamps of Louisiana during World War II,” said Frank Mannor. “I’ve seen plenty of swamp gas. This wasn’t it. We saw what we saw, all right.” Of all the responses to Hynek’s disclosure, Mrs. Frank Mannor cut to the heart of the matter, stating simply, “I think there’s something going on the people don’t know about.”
• In a letter to the editor in the March 29, 1966, edition of the Ann Arbor News, Lawrence Espey, Ph.D., wrote of witnessing a bright crimson light near Ann Arbor’s VA Hospital that made maneuvers uncharacteristic of aircraft. It was also observed by an independent witness. In his letter, Dr. Espey took exception to the idea that such phenomena was simply swamp gas. He noted that swamp gas, or methane, burns with a colorless flame, while these objects appeared to ‘glow’. Also, swamp gas tends to expand, while these objects remained as a dense, uniform sphere at altitudes over a thousand feet. “What propels the gas during the rapid unpredictable ‘maneuvers’ commonly described by viewers?” queried Dr. Espey. “Why do the spheres of ignited gas sometimes terminate in a high velocity dive to the ground? It seems like a burning gas would rise.”
• In 1977, ten years after the Dexter, Michigan UFO sightings, Hynek wrote in his book, The Hynek UFO Report, about the Air Force’s policy to cover up unexplained aerial phenomena. He explained that by 1948, sharp intra-agency disagreements brought the Air Force to the hardened stance that, given our own advanced scientific knowledge, these sightings’ very nature and purported behavior had to be complete nonsense. “Once the decision was made that UFOs had to be figments of the imagination, the Air Force policy on UFOs never changed direction. ‘It can’t be, therefore it isn’t’ became the guiding principle,” writes Hynek. “[A]nd anyone associated with Blue Book, from Director down, learned to follow suit or else…”
• In his book, Hynek continues: “Even though the shifting winds of public opinion about UFOs often reached gale proportions (especially at such times of great concern as the great UFO scare over Washington, D.C. in 1952 and the Michigan ‘swamp gas’ episode in 1966), the Air Force held firm, like a rusted weather vane that stubbornly points in one direction only.”
• The Dexter Leader newspaper reported on March 31, 1966: “The United States Congress has been reluctant to investigate the UFOs. If an investigation is launched, Congress will appear to give credence to the idea that there is more to the UFO sightings than a mistaken sighting of natural or human-made objects. To refuse to investigate opens Congress to the charge that the government knows what the UFOs are but is covering up.”
• What the Dexter, Michigan UFO incident did accomplish was to serve as a turning point in UFO investigation and government transparency. As a result of the 1966 Dexter reports, Congressmen Gerald Ford and Weston Vivian, both from Michigan, called for a Congressional hearing into the matter. “We’ve had several incidents in Michigan in the last week, incidents that many reliable good citizens felt were sufficient to justify some action by our government, and not the kind of flippant answer that was given by the Air Force, where they passed it off as swamp gas,” said Congressman Ford.
• The congressional hearing became an impetus for greater governmental transparency and public accountability. From there, an initiative began that would diminish the Air Force’s sole control of UFO investigations by focusing on a collaborative scientific analysis of selected sightings. The Air Force didn’t even try to create a plausible alternative explanation for the Dexter incident. In fact, it became a metaphor for the government gaslighting a canny public who knew better – ‘nothing to worry about here folks, just some swamp gas’.
• The UFO hype around the Dexter, Michigan UFO incident also delineated between those people who accept the unknown and those who attack it. While we never got a glimpse into other worlds, we got a pretty good look at our own. As Hynek quotes Air Force Captain E.J. Ruppelt, “The powers-that-be are anti-flying saucer, and to stay in favor it behooves one to follow suit.”
• [Editor’s Note] By 1965, Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford had helped to whitewash the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald as a member of the Warren Commission. In 1966, Ford needed to boost his public persona, so he jumped at the opportunity to come out on the ‘side of the people’ with regard to the Dexter UFO incident. Of course, nothing ever came of the Congressional hearings besides getting so-called ‘reputable scientists’ involved in future UFO investigations. This only paved the way for the US Air Force to end Project Blue Book in 1969 after the further ‘gas-lighting’ of the UFO phenomenon by the University of Colorado’s Condon Committee Report, and for scientists such as Carl Sagan to step in and continue the government’s anti-UFO whitewash propaganda at that level. In 1974, the Deep State infested government rewarded Ford for his loyal and nefarious service as the successor to the equally-corrupt Richard Nixon, as President of the United States.
“A cover-up is an attempt, whether successful or not, to conceal evidence of
wrongdoing, error, incompetence, or other embarrassing information. In a passive cover-up, information is simply not provided; in an active cover-up, deception is used.” – Wikipedia
“The powers-that-be are anti-flying saucer and to stay in favor, it behooves one to follow suit.” – Air Force officer quoted by Capt. E.J. Ruppelt, (Hynek, J. Allen. The Hynek UFO Report)
March 14, 1966, Lima Township
Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Deputies spot “four strange flying objects” in the sky, moving at high rates of speed. Law enforcement in Livingston Co, Monroe Co, Sylvania, OH, and
Selfridge Air Force Base near Mt. Clemens also report “red-green objects … moving at fantastic speeds.”
The same day, the U.S. Air Force and Civil Defense begin an investigation into the incidents.
March 20, 1966, Dexter Township
Colored lights catch the attention of Frank Mannor and his son, Ronald, in a wooded swamp on the farm where they live. The two men run to the strange object and report it to the police.
“We got a call that the Mannors out in Dexter seen a UFO,” recalls Doug Harvey, Washtenaw County Sheriff at the time, in an interview with the Ann Arbor District Library. “So I went out there, and the grass
was down flat in a round circle…and they said they definitely seen an object come down and lift off.”
Frank Mannor later tells reporters, “We got to about 500 yards of the thing. It was
sort of shaped like a pyramid, with a blue-green light on the right-hand side and on the left, a white light. I didn’t see no antenna or porthole. The body was like a yellowish coral rock and looked like it had holes in it—sort of like if you took a piece of cardboard box and split it open. You couldn’t see it too good because it was surrounded with heatwaves like you see on the desert. The white light turned to a blood-red as we got close to it, and Ron (his son) said, ‘Look at that horrible thing.’”
The police report states: “Frank Mannor and his son, Ronald [plus 40-60 others including 12 policemen?] saw hovering over a swamp about 1,500 ft away a brown luminous car sized object, with a ‘scaly’ or ‘waffled’ surface, cone-shaped on top, flat on bottom, or football shaped, and 2 bluish-green lights on right and left edges that turned bright red and helped illuminate the object in between. Lights blinked out and the object reappeared instantly across the swamp 1,500 ft away. The whole object lit up with a yellowish glow at one point and also rose up 500 ft then descended again. After 2-3 minutes of viewing, when 2 flashlights appeared in the distance the object seemed
to respond by flying away at high speed directly over the witnesses with a whistling sound like a rifle bullet ricocheting. Object remained in the swamp area for 1/2 hr.”
Robert Hunawill, a patrolman with the Dexter Police Department, saw the same object perform a series of passes over the Mannor swamp. Hunawill described the thing as having red and white lights, which changed to a bluish tinge at times. While he watched, the object was joined by three other aerial craft, and all four flew off together.
Sheriff’s deputies Stanley McFadden and David Fitzpatrick also witnessed the craft in the sky over North Territorial and Mast Roads. The officers turned their spotlight on it. “It was the size of a small house, kind of pushed down flat,” McFadden reported. “It had red-green lights on it and movements which could not possibly have been made by any aircraft I’d ever heard of.”
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“We got a call that the Mannors out in Dexter seen a UFO,” says Doug Harvey who was the Washtenaw County Sheriff at the time. “So I went out there and the grass was down flat in a round circle…and they said they definitely seen an object come down and lift off.”