Pyramid-Shaped UFO Witnessed by More than 60 Witnesses Covered Up

On Mar. 20, 1966, in Dexter, Mich., a farmer and his son were mesmerized by the sudden appearance of “colored lights” in a wooded swamp on their farm. They both ran to where the lights shone, as Frank Mannon later explained to reporters from the local newspaper:

“We got to about 500 yards of the thing,” Mannon said. “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.’”

To their amazement, the strange object suddenly lifted off, lingered for several hours, and finally shot away at a high speed and disappeared into the horizon, but not without leaving trace evidence.

Frank and his son immediately ran back home and called the local Washtenaw County Sheriff Doug Harvey to report the strange event.

“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,” Harvey said in an interview with the Ann Arbor District Library

Ann Arbor District Library

The police report continued: “Frank Mannor and his son, Ronald [plus 40–60 others including 12 policemen?] saw hovering over a swamp about 1,500 feet 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.

Ann Arbor District Library

Lights blinked out and the object reappeared instantly across the swamp 1,500 ft. away.

Ann Arbor District Library

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.”

Ann Arbor District Library

Other Credible Witnesses

According to local reports, another patrolman, Robert Hunawill, from the Dexter Police Department also witnessed the UFO fly over the Mannor swamp.

Hunawill said that the UFO displayed red and white lights that changed to a bluish tinge from time to time. He also said he saw the object join three other similar UFOs, and all four eventually fly off in formation.

Two sheriff deputies Stanley McFadden and David Fitzpatrick said they too witnessed the UFO flying over North Territorial and Mast Roads. This prompted them to aim their patrol car 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.”

McFadden

Air Force Sends in Dr. J. Allen Hynek to Investigate

Within a couple of hours, UFOs were being sighted throughout the Midwestern states and even Kansas as telephone calls came pouring into the Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey’s office.

Air Force Sends in Dr. J. Allen Hynek to Investigate

Within a couple of hours, UFOs were being sighted throughout the Midwestern states and even Kansas as telephone calls came pouring into the Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey’s office.

During the days following the event, it seemed as though a standard disinformation campaign was put in place, with many dismissing the UFO sightings and landing as a hoax and mass hysteria.

But when local residents and officials demanded their stories be heard, the U.S. Air Force finally relented and decided to send in astrophysicist Dr. J Allen Hynek of Northwestern University to investigate the close encounter. He was a top Air Force advisor on several UFO studies it conducted, including Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952–1969. Dr. Hynek then came to Dexter and said he found an atmosphere of what he described as “near hysteria.”

Disappointing But Not Unexpected Results

What happened next was predictable but disappointing all the same:

“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 (the press was 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. “And that’s where it died,” says Harvey.

Waited More than a Decade for Vindication

To say the town folk, witnesses, and officials involved in this case were disappointed would be a gross understatement — betrayed would be a closer description.

But, they would have to wait more than a decade for vindication when Hynek in 1977 wrote his book, The Hynek UFO Report, in which he described the Air Force’s disinformation strategy to cover up unexplained aerial phenomena at all costs.

It was in this book Hynek mentioned the Dexter case by name:“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.” (Hynek, J. Allen. The Hynek UFO Report, p. 28. Kindle Edition.)

The residents of Dexter were likely glad their testimony about what they saw was finally vindicated, but I’m sure for many of them still living, it was far too little, too late.

Fantastic Short “Walter Cronkite” News Video about the Incident: