Full script: the history of Dexter, Michigan
On the night of March twentieth, 1966, Frank Mannor's six farm dogs started barking at his farmhouse outside Dexter, Michigan.
Mannor looked out and saw what he described as a red falling star to the north. But it did not fall. It hovered over the marsh near his farm, glowing.
He phoned the police. Mannor and his teenage son Ronald went into the swamp on foot. They said they got within five hundred yards of an object shaped like a football, with a quilted steel surface, blinking lights and antennae.
They said it vanished, reappeared in another part of the swamp, and then took off with a sound like a rifle bullet ricocheting. A Dexter patrolman reported that it flew right over his squad car.
Twelve members of law enforcement reported seeing a UFO, and some sixty people in all. The next night, about fifty miles away, eighty-seven students at Hillsdale College watched flashing lights hover over the campus arboretum for hours.
The Air Force sent its civilian UFO investigator, J. Allen Hynek. At a press conference in Detroit, he said the likely cause was marsh gas. The explanation was met with near-universal hostility. Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, the future president, called for a congressional investigation.
Hynek later wrote that swamp gas became a household word and a standard joke for UFOs. He went on to argue that UFOs deserved serious study, and even had a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
No one ever proved what was in the marsh that night. But in Dexter, Michigan, swamp gas has never sounded quite the same.
