A Michigan UFO Sighting Got So Big That a Future President Demanded a Congressional Hearing

In March 1966, southern Michigan briefly became the UFO capital of America — and the story pulled in a future U.S. president, the most trusted man in television news, and one of the most mocked explanations in government history.

It started near Dexter, just outside Ann Arbor, on the night of March 20, 1966. A farmer named Frank Mannor and dozens of others — including police officers — reported a glowing, football-shaped object with flashing lights hovering over a swampy field. The next night, more than 80 students at Hillsdale College, about 50 miles away, watched strange lights dancing over a marsh near their dorms. Reports flooded in from across the region. Walter Cronkite covered it on national television.

The Air Force sent an investigator from Project Blue Book, its official UFO program — an astronomer named Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Under intense pressure to explain it fast, Hynek held a packed press conference and offered a theory: the lights were probably “swamp gas” — methane released by rotting vegetation in the marshes, glowing as it ignited. The phrase became instantly famous, and instantly ridiculed. Few people believed a glowing flying object was just bog farts, and many suspected a cover-up.

Among those unsatisfied was a Michigan congressman named Gerald R. Ford — the same Gerald Ford who would become president eight years later. Ford called the swamp-gas explanation “flippant,” and demanded that Congress hold hearings. It led to one of the first-ever congressional hearings on UFOs in April 1966. The mystery was never fully resolved, and Hynek later said he regretted the swamp-gas line for the rest of his life.