Central Frank 250
You might not have somebody
take a look. It's different.
I've never seen anything like it.
I don't know. It's strange.
Bright lights moving in unusual
ways that you wouldn't expect of
either a plane or a helicopter.
Like a hockey puck. Shape of a
light out there and it just kept
going back and forth everywhere.
Oh my God, what is that?
They were going together and coming apart.
Yeah, they're well,
it's it's there's three and
there are their lengthwise.
Now I'm getting three of them.
These are huge returns.
I've never seen anything like this.
March 8th, 1994, hundreds of people
claimed to witness otherworldly
lights in the sky over West Michigan.
I was talking to my friend on the telephone.
We had corded phones back then,
and as soon as I started talking with her,
I was looking actually in my kitchen window.
And I saw these huge lights on the backyard.
And first I thought it was a huge moon,
you know, full moon.
But there was four of them.
And my friend I said Ed and I think
there's Ufo's in the backyard.
Cindy Pravda watched the unusual
lights for about 30 minutes
from her home in Grand Haven.
I never got off the phone.
I would walk from the kitchen
window to the out the walk out here.
My husband was in the basement,
but I didn't want to stop
looking at him, you know?
I knew if I ran downstairs,
there's a chance that they'd be gone.
That night, Ottawa County dispatch
received dozens of calls, all about
the strange lights in the sky.
Gary Wilkes remembers that night very well.
He was working 911 dispatch
when the first calls came in.
We started receiving a tremendous amount
of phone calls about what they considered
UFO's in the Holland, Holland area.
The Chicago Tribune reported there
were more than 300 witnesses who
saw the lights across 42 counties
as far north as the Upper Peninsula.
Dispatch eventually sent a Holland
police officer to the area where
one of the sightings took place to
check things out for themselves. This
is the Holland neighborhood
where Officer Veldhaus was first
called to to investigate reports
of strange objects in the sky.
In his police report, Bell House
says when he arrived on this street,
he met a man who had already
reported seeing two or three Ufo's.
He then looked through the man's
binoculars for himself and saw the objects.
He described them as having red,
white and green lights,
but he couldn't determine
what shape they were.
The officer asked dispatch to call
the National Weather Service in
Muskegon to have the operator check
for unidentified objects on the radar.
Jack Bushong, a now retired National
Weather Service meteorologist,
was the operator that was working
in Muskegon that night in 1994.
I was called by the Ottawa County
Sheriff's Department and and they
asked me to take a look at radar.
Oh my God, what is that?
They were going together and coming apart.
Yeah, they're well,
it's it's there's three and
there are their lengthwise.
Now I'm getting three of them.
These are huge returns.
I've never seen anything like this,
not even when I'm doing storms.
They're these aren't storms.
I went ahead and took a look down there and I
did spot one thing moving at about 100 mph,
not very fast. And it was over.
I would, I would say it was brought
right over the right over Holland City
and it was moving towards the West,
southwest out overlake Michigan.
And it it eventually reached
summer down South Haven.
That's about when it started
acting kind of crazy. It was.
It stopped and hovered for a while,
and then it would dart out
about 20 miles over Lake MI.
And then within,
just instantaneously or within a few seconds,
and I would,
I would have to find it again.
Cindy recalls the same movements that
Jack described seeing on his radar,
the lights moving erratically
and quickly darting away.
They were in a stationary in a
straight line and one would go to
the east and I would think that
they were flying over the highway.
It was going very slow.
Then it would come back to the
same order and I just washed it
for the longest time and then
the one on this side just went.
It just flew away,
like in a blinking of eye.
These same movements were also
described by Don and Michael Huey,
who witnessed the lights for themselves
from their Holland area apartment balcony.
Like a hockey puck shape
of a light out there.
And it just kept going
back and forth everywhere.
And then it just like disappeared
and went down under the trees
and everything like that.
It was that one second and says it left.
It took off and he's
gone like a few seconds.
While hundreds of people in Michigan
were watching the lights and dozens
more calling authorities to report them,
Jack was glued on his radar screen
trying to figure out what was going on.
And there was there was about 3:00 or
4:00 that that that kept following it.
And every time that that initial one
that I saw moved to the the other,
the other two or three would form a triangle.
Now there was a fourth one in there,
but it was sometimes I could see it,
sometimes I couldn't but the the main one.
And then there were two other ones
that seemed to always want to be in a
triangle with it and they were about
20 miles apart from each other and and
so I I once it got over water and the
police officers on the ground couldn't
see the the aircraft anymore they they
cut off the phone but I but I but I
was able to continue watching it for
another two hours and I watched it move
down the stem of Lake MI all the way
about just directly West of of a South
Haven and moved down towards Chicago.
And then it stopped about just
directly West of Benton Harbor.
And and it was a little bit on the
close on the side of more on the
side of Wisconsin then on Michigan
and it just stopped there and they
all hovered there for several hours
looking like just look like a swarm
of of of like flies just they were
just sitting there and hovering with
a few of them moving around amongst
each of the other in a very large
round ball of a swarm of objects.
Despite
all of the calls into the 911 dispatch
most of the witnesses weren't
afraid by the unearthly phenomenon.
Instead many seemed fascinated.
I wasn't scared.
I was more intrigued by what was going on.
Why are they in my backyard?
You know what's going on?
And I said after about 1/2
hour it was like another blink
of an eye and they were gone.
They were all gone.
I didn't know if it was like a mother ship,
if they were all connected it
at some point and why would
they were there in my backyard?
I don't know, just to be a witness,
you know, just to say tell my story and say,
yeah, I believe that there was
unidentified flying objects in my backyard,
but what exactly were those
unidentified flying objects?
Each of the witnesses have their
own thoughts on the matter,
but they all seem to lean in One Direction.
I have no doubt in my mind that
they're extraterrestrials.
They've got all these
different names for them now.
And are they from outer space?
Are they from planet Earth?
Are there from the water?
Who knows? Who knows
if there's an alien,
I hope they just get this
over with and come down,
talk to us or something.
I don't know. Something
unexplainable. You know?
I don't know. I don't know.
We don't know.
It's a big universe out there.
We don't know what's out there.
We have no idea.
Gary Wilkes was working at the
Ottawa County Dispatch the evening
the lights were spotted, and even he
doesn't doubt what the witnesses saw
when I really don't know what
they were seeing. However,
I'm convinced they did see something
with the enormous amount of phone
calls we received that evening.
The sightings over West Michigan in 1994
garnered national attention and even to
this day is still a topic of discussion.
In 2022, Netflix's Unsolved mystery
series ran an episode dedicated
to these lights in the Sky.
There are things out there
that we don't understand.
We're always looking for answers.
That episode of Unsolved Mysteries
even prompted a former pilot
to contact Jack and relay his
account of that night in 1994.
There was a 747 pilot that wrote me after
the Unsolved Mysteries documentary,
and he did right Meaning said that the
FAA did see something at his 12:00,
asked him to identify it.
He did. It was that March 8th,
1994 night and he wrote me
and he told me it was this.
He's a retired pilot of a of a cargo 747
who was landing in Chicago and he saw it.
So there you go, you got a newspaper,
got a newspaper reporter that saw,
you got police officers that
reported on the ground,
You got a pilot that a 747 pilot that saw it.
You got the FAA that saw it on
the radar and then you got and
then you have a meteorologist,
a radar meteorologist that saw it.
So you got all them and then plus 300
people in West Michigan that saw it too.
The alien craze is now more
widespread than ever after a recent
Congressional hearing discussing UFO
sightings by military personnel.
Although the government now refers
to these sightings as unidentified
aerial phenomenon or Uap's,
UAP are in our airspace,
but they are grossly underreported.
These sightings are not rare or isolated.
They are routine military
aircrew and commercial pilots.
Trained observers whose lives depend
on accurate identification are
frequently witnessing these phenomenon.
Three former U.S.
military personnel testified in
the public hearing before Congress.
Former U.S. Navy Lieutenant
Ryan Graves, retired U.S.
Navy Commander David Fraver
and retired US Air Force
Major David Grush who had the
most sensational of claims.
I was informed
in the course of my official duties
of a multi decade UAP Crash retrieval
and Reverse Engineering program.
Biologics came with some
of these recoveries. Yeah.
Were they I guess human or non
human? Biologics? Non human?
And that was the assessment of
people with direct knowledge
on the program I talked to.
The allegations made by the witnesses are
already being disputed by the Pentagon.
But with the idea of Ufo's or Uap's back
at the forefront of discussion in America,
our eyes turned back to the skies over
West Michigan and hopes to understand what
was seen on that cold March night in 1994.
Could the lights in the sky and the radar
signatures viewed at the National Weather
Service have been an atmospheric anomaly.
I I went through a number of things
on radar that that I wanted to check
out and make sure that it and and
I discussed with a lot of other
people that knew radar meteorology
and no was not an almost propagation
which is super refraction where
the beam is coming back down.
This definitely had the signature of
what an airliner would look like look
like it's it's just that it's movements
were were very fast and and strange
and if not an anomaly could it have
been a military aircraft Jack doesn't
seem to think it's a possibility either
we would not test vehicles like that in
Chicago airspace it's just no way that
would be so illegal and so dangerous.
I I mean they should be court
martialed for any military guy to be
flying the way they were in Chicago.
Air spares like airspace,
like the way I saw them fly and they
were flying at all sorts of altitudes,
directions and and and extreme high speeds.
And the fact these lights mysteriously
vanished as quickly as they were
first seen also leads to more
questions about the sighting.
I said after about 1/2 hour it was like
another blink of an eye and they were gone.
They were all gone.
I didn't know if it was like a mothership,
if they were all connected it at some point.
And why would they were there in my backyard?
I don't know, just to be a witness, you know,
just to say tell my story and say, yeah,
I believe that there was unidentified
flying objects in my backyard. Cindy
looks back, pretty certain that what
she saw was from another world.
But Jack, who never actually
saw the lights for himself,
just the radar signatures,
is still insured to this day.
What he actually witnessed that night,
I just. I just don't know.
I I've tried to figure it out.
I've never seen anything myself in the sky.
I've looked, being a meteorologist.
I've looked to the skies all the time.
I'm a big airplane buff.
I've been on airplanes all the time.
I've been on aircraft.
I've always had my nose
out the out the window,
and I've never seen anything I
couldn't explain in the skies myself.
But as far as that night goes,
it was a weird night and I I can't.
I don't know anything else. The
lights in the sky over
West Michigan on March 8th,
1994 might always remain a mystery,
but witness Cindy Pravda hopes that
telling stories like this will get
more people to come forward and lead
to a real explanation in the future.
I hope people are more apt to
come out and and speak about it.
There's a lot of people I know
that they're still to this day,
I still get phone calls from people,
you know, Cindy,
can I talk to you about this?
And, you know, I think I saw the same thing,
but I never told anybody and my
wife or my husband thinks I'm crazy.
And you know, yeah,
I just hope people open up.