‘Unsolved Mysteries’ on Netflix investigates 1994 alleged UFO sighting

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an …. unidentified flying object?

A recent episode on Netflix’s popular “Unsolved Mysteries” focused on Michigan and its rich history of UFO sightings, narrowing in on March 8, 1994 — an event that still haunts witnesses.

That day, more than 300 calls flooded into 911 dispatch from people residing along Lake Michigan to report strange lights and objects in the sky.

Cindy Pravda of Grand Haven remembers that night in vivid detail — four lights in the sky that looked like “full moons” over the line of trees behind her horse pasture, she told the Free Press in 2019.

She still lives in the same house and continues to talk about that night.

“I’m known as the UFO lady of Grand Haven.”

It was one of the largest UFO sightings in U.S. history, and it remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries.

Both police and the National Weather Service were involved.  

“And they observed several objects, or very large objects flying around on their radar,” Bill Konkolesky, Michigan director of the Mutual UFO Network, told the Free Press last year. “And their radar isn’t meant to pick up aircraft, it’s meant to pick up weather patterns. So when they’re seeing these thumbnail-sized things on their radar, they know that they’re massive.” 

A 1995 Detroit Free Press article published a conversation between the NWS and a Holland police officer.  

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“There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren’t planes,” the NWS radar operator said. “Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I’m doing severe weather.” 

That fateful day in 1994 isn’t Michigan’s only unsolved UFO mystery – the state has reported 3,485 sightings, according to the National UFO Reporting Center Online Database.

Kinross, 1953 

When a blip on the radar appeared in restricted air space near Soo Locks, an important commercial gateway, the U.S. Air Force at the Kinross base sent two experienced pilots in an F-89 Scorpion jet to investigate.  

The jet chased the object for about 30 minutes and then the two radars, the jet, and the unidentified object, seemingly intersected over Lake Superior. They lost radio contact and the Air Force pilots were never heard from again.  

Swamp gas, 1966 

Hundreds of reports of UFOs hit southeast Michigan in March 1966 after a sheriff’s office received reports of a UFO landing in a swamp in Dexter.  

Truck driver Frank Mannor had gone into the swamp with his son, Ronald, and told police at the time, “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,” Click On Detroit reported.  

The sightings across the county went on all week, with those at the University of Michigan and Hillsdale College reporting seeing strange lights.  

Dr. J. Allen Hynek from Project Blue Book, a part of the Air Force that investigated UFOs, turned up and said it was just swamp gas.  

This drew criticism and accusations of a government cover-up.

Wurtsmith Air Force Base, 1975 

In October 1975, both radar and men on the ground claimed they spotted a bright white disc hovering over Wurtsmith Air Force Base.  

They had a plane pursue it, but the UFO reportedly shot into space before they could reach it.  

“There were nuclear weapons at that base,” Konkolesky said. “It was seen on the ground by the soldiers on the ground. It was seen from the air traffic tower, it was caught on radar, so multiple ways that this was being observed. And then the other thing, too, is that within a two-week period, at least four other bases altogether in the United States that have nuclear weapons were visited by a very similar UFO.” 

Contact Emma Stein: estein@freepress.com and follow her on Twitter @_emmastein.