Hillsdale’s founding role in the UFO craze

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Hillsdale’s founding role in the UFO craze
A sketch of a UFO from the Collegian archive

Most people remember Gerald Ford as the president who pardoned Nixon — few know he was once a UFO investigator.

Ford was a United States congressman representing Michigan’s fifth district when people all over Michigan started reporting unidentified flying objects in March 1966. Sightings occurred first in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Dexter, Michigan, on March 20, 1966, and caught the attention of the local press, but it was not until 19 Hillsdale College students living in the McIntyre Hall along with the house director and her husband, Civil Defense Director Bud Van Horn, saw flashing lights over Slayton Arboretum on March 21, 1966, that Ford took interest in the phenomenon.

In an eyewitness account written for the Collegian several days after the sightings, Gidget Kohn ’69 said what she and her classmates saw resembled the popular conception of a UFO.

“I ran to my window and there it was, radiating intense silver-white light and heading directly for the dorm,” she said. “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 women of McIntyre were not the only ones who saw the object that night. Harold Hess, a Hillsdale police officer on duty that night, told the Collegian in 2015 he recalls seeing bright lights over the arboretum and driving over to investigate. When he arrived, Hess found the object was the source of the flashing lights. He tried to radio it in to headquarters, but he only got static.

“It’s one of those things that runs your hair up on the back of your head just thinking about it,” he said.

Since so many people in different places had seen the same inexplicable phenomenon in the same place, Hillsdale became the center of a national news storm. Rep. Weston Vivian, D-Mich., called for an investigation of the sightings in Hillsdale and Dexter, since these were the locales where the most people had reported UFOs. The Air Force sent in Josef Hynek, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University.

But even as Hynek arrived in Michigan, other Michigan towns like Clinton and Saugatuck were reporting UFO sightings in the night.

Kalamazoo UFO historian Will Matthews said the Hillsdale UFO sightings kicked off a national UFO craze.

“Once a couple of reports get a lot of publicity, then the dam breaks,” he said. “After Hillsdale in 1966, reports came in from all over the country.”

By the time Hynek investigated the swamp in Dexter where the first UFOs had been sighted, he was greeted by people who believed the UFOs had extraterrestrial origins. The Grand Rapids Press reported that as Hynek conducted interviews, a man began playing his fiddle “hoping the phantom pilots would come to the earth,” while another man used the headlights of his car to blink pi in morse code at the swamp, saying that this was a number understood across the universe.

Hynek met similar belief in the veracity of the UFOs in Hillsdale. He interviewed the students and came to the conclusion that the Hillsdale UFO was “swamp gas” — a term he coined which has since become a popular explanation for UFO reports.

Ford, however, said Hynek’s report was unconvincing. In a public radio broadcast, he demanded that the Air Force conduct a more thorough investigation of the Hillsdale UFO sightings, so the public would not have to fear the government might be hiding something.

“These are incidents which 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,’” he said.

Some Hillsdale residents were not satisfied with Hynek’s assessment either. Van Horn wrote a 15-point rebuttal in the form of an open letter to Hynek and said he would lead his own research team, recruiting students from the college to do a soil test on the area where the UFO was sighted. These tests revealed unusually high levels of boron and radiation present in the arboretum’s soil and showed that all microscopic life in close proximity to the spot where the UFO had been seen was dead.

Meanwhile, UFO reports came in from all around the midwest — Green Bay, Wisconsin; Des Moines, Iowa; St. Louis, Missouri; Sandusky, Ohio — and Ford petitioned Congress to investigate the Air Force on the grounds that they should be transparent with the American people.

The press mocked Ford and his UFO-plagued state — one writer called Michigan “the three-martini-before-dinner state” — but the congressman insisted Congress investigate the UFOs, if only to assure the American people of their safety.

“I have never said that I believe any of the reported UFO sightings indicate visits to earth from another planet. Apart from pranks and natural phenomena, some of these objects may well be products of experimentation by our own military,” Ford said in a 1966 press release. “If this is so, why doesn’t the Air Force concede it and in this way reassure the American people? There would be no need to go into the nature of the experiments.”

Vivian, on the other hand, said a research university, not Congress, should investigate the UFOs so as not to turn the incidents into a circus. In the end, Vivian’s reasoning beat Ford’s, and Congress passed on the project to the University of Colorado, which in turn investigated UFO sightings in the United States. The university came up with negative results and the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book, its official UFO investigation chapter.

Ford never got a public investigation and the source of the Hillsdale UFOs remains a mystery.

Although Vivian said his memory is failing him, he may have an answer to why the UFO sightings began in the first  place. A former radar researcher at the University of Michigan, Vivian said the University would operate government-funded test aircraft out of Willow Run Airport nearby in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

“I vaguely remember the University of Michigan launching synthetic aircraft to test our radar systems. That could have been the cause for at least the first few sightings,” he said.

Vivian also said that despite his differences with the future president, he remembers Ford positively.

“I only talked to him sporadically after I was in Congress in 1966, but he was a good man,” he said.