What happens when dozens of witnesses, including police officers, a county sheriff, and college students across two cities, all see the same unexplainable thing in the sky, and the government tells them it was rotting vegetation?
You get one of the most infamous cover-ups in UFO history. And it happened 60 years ago this month in a tiny farming community in Michigan.
The Dexter-Hillsdale UFO sightings of March 1966 were not just another report of strange lights. They involved roughly 100 witnesses spread across multiple locations over several nights. Police officers photographed the objects. A county sheriff drove the government investigator to the scene himself. Eighty-seven college students watched a craft hover outside their dormitory windows for hours.
And when the Air Force’s top UFO expert told them all it was just “swamp gas,” the backlash was so fierce that a future President of the United States demanded a congressional investigation.
Now, as the 60th anniversary arrives, the case feels more relevant than ever.
A Quiet Night on the Mannor Farm
Frank Mannor was a truck driver. He lived with his wife and teenage son, Ronald, in a rented farmhouse on McGuiness Road, just northwest of Dexter, Michigan. On the evening of March 20, 1966, the family was watching television. Nothing unusual. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Then, around 8:30 p.m., their six farm dogs started barking.
When the Mannors looked outside, they saw something that would upend their lives. A reddish light, like a falling star, descended toward the tree line to the north. But instead of burning out and disappearing, it stopped. It hovered above the trees on their property. Then it changed color, shifting from red to blue and white.
Frank and Ronald did what most people would not. They went outside to investigate.
The two made their way toward the marshy area where the object seemed to have settled. They got within about 500 yards of it. What Frank described to police and reporters in the days that followed was unlike anything he had ever seen.
“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,” Mannor told interviewers. “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.”
Other accounts described the object as football-shaped with a “quilted” or “waffled” texture on its surface. It pulsated with red and green lights. Heat waves surrounded it, distorting the air the way a desert mirage would.
“You couldn’t see it too good because it was surrounded with heat waves, like you see on the desert,” Mannor said. “The white light turned to a blood red as we got close to it and Ron said, ‘Look at that horrible thing.'”
Then the object vanished. It blinked out of existence, only to reappear seconds later about 500 yards away in a different part of the swamp. The Mannors heard a sharp sound, described as something like a rifle bullet ricocheting off metal. The craft lifted into the air, paused directly above them, and disappeared into the night sky.
Frank called the police.
The Witnesses Multiply
Here is the thing that separates the Dexter sighting from so many other UFO reports: the Mannors were far from alone.
When law enforcement arrived at the farm, Deputy Sheriff Stanley McFadden and his partner David Fitzpatrick entered the swamp on foot to investigate. Dexter patrolman Robert Hunawill, who was en route to the farm in his squad car, reported that the object flew directly over his vehicle at roughly 1,000 feet. He watched it hover and then make sweeping passes over the Mannor swamp.
Dexter Chief of Police Robert Taylor and patrolman N.G. Lee were also on the scene and witnessed the lights. In total, 12 members of law enforcement reported seeing a UFO that night. Between the Mannors, their neighbors, and the police, roughly 60 people were witnesses.
But the sightings had actually started days earlier. On March 14, beginning around 3:50 a.m., Washtenaw County residents, sheriff’s deputies, and police reported lights moving at high speeds over Lima Township for nearly three hours. Calls poured in from Monroe, Livingston, Ypsilanti, Dexter, and Sylvania. Personnel at Selfridge Air Force Base confirmed the sightings but claimed their radar showed nothing.
On March 16, Deputy David Fitzpatrick and his partner spotted two lights over Milan during a shift that lasted from 3 to 7 a.m. Fitzpatrick set up a miniature camera on a tripod and snapped two photographs.
The sightings were not random. They were not isolated. Something was happening over southeastern Michigan, and a lot of credible people were seeing it.
The Next Night: 87 Witnesses at Hillsdale College
If the Dexter sighting raised eyebrows, what happened the following night, March 21, made the case undeniable.
About 50 miles southwest of Dexter, at Hillsdale College, students at the McIntyre Women’s Dormitory noticed something strange outside their back windows around 10:30 p.m. Bright, pulsating lights were hovering over the Slayton Arboretum adjacent to the dorm.
Gidget Kohn, a student who later wrote an account for the college newspaper, described the moment it appeared. “I ran to my window and there it was, radiating intense silver-white light and heading directly for the dorm,” she wrote. “A brief flash of lightning illuminated it for just a second and in that second I saw what appeared to be a squashed football or basketball.”
The students called William “Bud” Van Horn, the Hillsdale County Civil Defense Director. Van Horn initially advised them to keep watching. When reports continued, he drove to the scene himself with a patrol car.
He saw it too.
The object continued to behave in ways that defied explanation. It moved unpredictably, flashed lights of varying colors and intensities, and hovered at low altitude over the arboretum. “It is not really necessary to describe all the movements,” Kohn wrote in her account. “Let it suffice to say that it moved like nothing earthly and Mr. Van Horn was seeing it too.”
Meanwhile, Hillsdale police officer Harold Hess and his partner Jerry Wise were checking lots on Carlton Road about a mile away when something caught their attention. “Then, over by the college, we saw a real brilliant light in the sky at a low altitude,” Hess recalled. “You couldn’t look at it, it was so bright.”
The girls watched the object until around 5:10 a.m., when it finally disappeared for good. In all, 87 people in the Hillsdale area reported seeing the object that night. Project Blue Book’s own files described it as “football-shaped.”
Two cities. Two consecutive nights. Over a hundred total witnesses, including law enforcement, civil defense officials, and nearly 90 college students. This was not a case that could be easily dismissed.
But someone was about to try.
Enter Dr. Hynek and the “Swamp Gas” Explanation
The sheer volume of credible witnesses caught the attention of politicians. Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey had been trying to get help from federal agencies but was repeatedly ignored. He reached out to Congressman Weston Vivian, who took the matter seriously and pulled enough strings to get the U.S. Air Force to send an investigator.
That investigator was Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
Hynek was an astrophysicist from Northwestern University who served as the scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s official program for investigating UFO reports. At the time, Hynek was still largely a skeptic. He arrived in Washtenaw County on March 23 and toured the sighting areas, including the Mannor farm.
Sheriff Harvey drove Hynek to the farm personally. They found circular marks in the vegetation at the supposed landing site. But Hynek seemed unimpressed. He described the situation as “near hysteria.”
“It’s like reports from people who witness a fire,” Hynek told the press. “You get as many different facts as you get people who saw the fire. So far, all I’ve been able to come up with is reports of a variety of lights.”
Then, on March 25, Hynek held a press conference at the Detroit Press Club. Sixty members of the press attended. Under enormous pressure to provide an explanation, Hynek delivered one that would follow him for the rest of his life.
The sightings at both Dexter and Hillsdale, he said, were caused by swamp gas. Rotting vegetation in marshy lowlands produces methane, which can be trapped by ice during winter. When the spring thaw releases it, the gas can ignite, creating brief flashes of light. He called the phenomenon “highly localized.”
“A dismal swamp is a most unlikely place for a visit from outer space,” Hynek said.
He also dismissed the police photographs as time-exposure trails of the crescent moon and Venus.
The room erupted. And outside the press club, the backlash was just beginning.
“I’m Not Ready to Accept This Weak Excuse”
The swamp gas explanation landed like a slap in the face to the witnesses.
Sheriff Harvey, who had driven Hynek to the site and watched him investigate, was blunt. “With all due respect to Dr. Hynek, I’m not ready to accept this weak excuse of gas from marshes,” he told reporters.
Frank Mannor was equally dismissive. “I spent time on army maneuvers in the swamps of Louisiana during World War II,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty of swamp gas. This wasn’t it. We saw what we saw, all right.”
At Hillsdale, Civil Defense Director Van Horn published a 15-point rebuttal of Hynek’s findings. “It was my considered opinion that Dr. Hynek had his mind made up as to what his findings would be before he ever reached the City of Hillsdale,” Van Horn wrote. “I also observed that his main line of questioning was relative only to that which would fit the Marsh Gas Theory.”
Van Horn went further. He organized independent lab tests on the soil in the Slayton Arboretum where the object had hovered. The results showed unusually high levels of boron and radiation in the soil. All microscopic life in close proximity to the spot where the lights had been seen was dead.
But perhaps the most damning revelation came decades later from Sheriff Harvey himself. In 2006, Harvey recalled a private conversation with Hynek in his office after visiting the Mannor farm.
“Dr. Hynek was sent in from the U.S. government. He came into my office. We went out to the site where supposedly this object came down on the ground,” Harvey said. “Dr. Hynek in the car said, ‘There is something. We just can’t put our finger on it. We’ve been investigating this for quite a while.'”
Back at the office, Hynek asked for privacy to make a phone call.
“He was on the phone for quite a while, which I found very enlightening,” Harvey recalled. “He came out and I said, ‘Well, Dr. Hynek. What do you think?’ He said, ‘It’s swamp gas.’ He tells me one minute he has no idea what it is. And then he makes one phone call to Washington and comes out and gives a statement that it’s swamp gas. Very strange.”
Harvey never wavered in his belief that something was covered up. “I’ll believe this to the day I die,” he said. “Somebody has kept something quiet.”
A Future President Steps In
The swamp gas explanation did more than anger witnesses. It became a political issue.
Michigan Congressman Gerald R. Ford, the House Minority Leader at the time, was flooded with letters and telegrams from constituents who felt insulted by the Air Force’s dismissal. Ford did not shy away from the spotlight. He called Hynek’s explanation “flippant” and demanded that Congress conduct a formal investigation.
Ford proposed that either the House Armed Services Committee or the Science and Astronautics Committee schedule hearings and “invite testimony from both the executive branch of the government and some of the persons who claim to have seen UFOs.”
It was the first time a congressional leader had ever called for such an investigation into UFOs. Ford’s push lent credibility to the witnesses and sent a clear message: the government owed people a better answer than swamp gas.
The Air Force caved under pressure. On April 6, 1966, they announced a panel of “scientific observers” to study the sightings. This led to the University of Colorado’s Condon Committee, a two-year, $500,000 project led by physicist Edward Condon.
The Condon Committee’s final report, released in 1969, ran over 1,000 pages. Its conclusion was devastating for UFO researchers. The committee found nothing of scientific value in any documented UFO phenomena. The Mannors were dismissed as having been too far away to know what they saw. The Hillsdale students had likely seen “young men who played pranks with flares.”
Project Blue Book was shut down that same year. The official position of the United States government was that there was nothing to see here.
But not everyone accepted that verdict. Least of all the man who had started it all.
Hynek’s Transformation
Here is the great irony of the Dexter case: the man who coined the phrase “swamp gas” would eventually become one of the most prominent advocates for serious UFO research in American history.
J. Allen Hynek later admitted that the Michigan incident was a turning point. “I was a thorough skeptic, and I’m afraid I helped to engender the idea that it must be nonsense, therefore it is nonsense,” he told Omni magazine in 1985.
A professor at Hillsdale College who later took a class with Hynek at Northwestern reported that Hynek once shared his private thoughts about the swamp gas explanation during a lecture. According to the professor, Hynek said he had no real explanation at all, but the Air Force kept pressuring him to come up with one. So he gave them what he considered the most ridiculous explanation he could think of, one they would clearly reject. Instead, they ran with it.
After leaving the Air Force’s orbit, Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in 1973 to bring scientific rigor to the field. He developed the famous “Close Encounter” classification system, which directly inspired Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hynek even had a cameo in the movie.
At the First International UFO Congress in 1977, Hynek put it plainly: “I do believe that the UFO phenomenon as a whole is real.”
The swamp gas case had transformed the debunker into a believer.
The Human Cost
For Frank Mannor, there was no such redemption. The ridicule he endured after coming forward destroyed his peace.
In a nationally broadcast interview with Walter Cronkite, Mannor expressed deep regret. People had thrown beer bottles at his car. Strangers showed up outside his home to call him a “nut.” His life had been turned upside down simply because he reported what he saw.
“If an alien landed in my yard and spoke to me,” Mannor told Cronkite, “I would never tell anyone.”
Frank Mannor died in 1983 at age 65. His obituary renewed interest in the sighting, but by then the damage was done. The man who had the courage to speak up spent the rest of his life wishing he hadn’t.
Many of the Hillsdale witnesses have shown similar reluctance. When a documentary filmmaking class at Hillsdale College attempted to track down the women who saw the UFO from their dorm in 1966, they contacted 12 of the original 87 witnesses. Most never returned phone calls or emails. Nearly 60 years later, they still did not want to talk about it.
Why This Case Still Matters
The Dexter-Hillsdale sightings of 1966 are not just a historical curiosity. They represent a pattern that echoes through every era of UFO research: credible witnesses see something unexplainable, they report it, and the official response is designed to make the story go away rather than find the truth.
Historian Will Matthews of Kalamazoo has called the Dexter and Hillsdale sightings “amongst the top two or three most publicized UFO events of all time.” They prompted the first congressional call for UFO transparency. They led to the creation of the Condon Committee and the eventual closure of Project Blue Book. They turned the Air Force’s own scientific consultant into one of ufology’s founding voices.
And 60 years later, we are still asking the same questions. The Pentagon released UFO videos in 2020. Congress has held hearings on what the government now calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. The push for government disclosure continues.
The swamp gas is long gone. But whatever Frank Mannor and all those witnesses saw hovering over Dexter Township on that March night in 1966 has never been explained.
“There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, and my son has 20-20 vision,” Mannor told reporters the day after his sighting. “We both can’t be wrong.”
Sixty years on, the question remains: were they?
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