THE UFO SIGHTINGS WHICH BEGAN IN DEXTER MICHIGAN MARCH 1966

In March of 1966 there was a sighting of UFO's that were spotted by Sheriff's Deputies. They are known to be pretty reliable witnesses. But as I was just 10 years old and living in Ft Leonard Wood MO instead of my home town of Ypsilanti, I missed this story back then.

My friend Joe told me all about it and another of my good friends is retired from the Sheriff's Department. Joe believes it and Mike remembers it making the Sheriff's Department, State Police and local community the "laughing stock" of the midwest.

Here is what happened according to the media from back then...

This March 14, 1966 article from the Ann Arbor news described the area's initial UFO sighting.

Stateside's conversation with UFO enthusiast Harry Willnus.

It began in March, 1966 , with a sighting over a farm in Dexter.

Lights were seen hovering and then zipping across the sky. Reports came in from all over the area. One Washtenaw County sheriff deputy was quoted as calling the objects, whatever they were, “the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.”

The official explanation — flares caused by the burning of gases bubbling up from the area’s swamps — was unsatisfactory to many of those involved. Then-congressman Gerald Ford called for a congressional investigation. It never happened.

It wasn’t long before UFO mania had swept the nation. UFO reports were pouring in from all over the country. This was the era that sparked Hollywood’s love-affair with aliens, leading to blockbusters like E.T. the Extra Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Walter Cronkite anchored a 1966 CBS report titled, “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” which featured the Dexter incident.

But after the UFO fever subsided, after the Hollywood productions made their millions, after NASA's moon program closed for good—in short, after America moved on — the question remained: what really happened in Dexter that March?

Harry Willnus was a teacher in the area at the time. He has been searching for an answer to that question for the last 51 years.

During the course of that half-century, Willnus has spoken with many of the most important humans involved in the incident.

Nothing he's heard or seen has convinced him that the official version of events is the correct one.

“I’ve been studying this,” Willnus said, “I’m convinced that planet Earth is being observed.”

Read More on The Swamp Gas Mystery

Willnus described a particularly strange series of events involving Allen Hynek, the scientist brought in by the Air Force to investigate the incident.

One afternoon not long after the sightings, Hynek spent several hours looking for evidence in the Dexter swamp. He was accompanied by Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey, who led the local response to the sightings.

Afterwards, on the drive back from the swamp, Hynek told the sheriff he still did not have an explanation for the sightings. But later, back at the sheriff's office, Hynek received a phone call from Washington, D.C.

When Gerald Ford demanded answers for UFO sightings in Michigan

"Hynek stepped out of the office, took the call, came back in a few minutes later. Harvey described him as looking a bit shaken," Willnus said. "He had his head down and he was mumbling ‘Swamp gas, swamp gas, it was swamp gas.' I don’t think Hynek knew what swamp gas was.”

Listen to our full interview with Harry Willnus above, in which he recounts a UFO sighting of his own.

US AIR FORCE REPORT ON ROSWELL JUNE 24 1997

On this day in 1997, U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.

Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects  or UFOs, began to flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the dawn of the atomic age caused many Americans to turn their attention to the skies.

The town of Roswell, located near the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material scattered over some of his land.

He turned the material over to the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disk.” A local newspaper put the story on its front page, launching Roswell into the spotlight of the public’s UFO fascination.

The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from die-hard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, when claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather balloon story as a cover-up.

Believers in this theory argued that officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area 51 installation in Nevada.

Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that the crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests.