‘Unsolved Mysteries’ investigates UFOs spotted all over Michigan night sky

May 24, 2023

Both the sky and 911 dispatch center lines lit up in Michigan on that fateful evening, a night a lot of people say they witnessed the unexplainable: UFOs hovering right above them. It’s the subject of a new “Unsolved Mysteries” episode on Netflix called “Something in the Sky.”

Even a scientist can’t explain logically what he saw on March 8, 1994. “The way they acted, even though intelligent, they didn’t act human,” said Jack Bushong on the eerie show. He was a meteorologist at the time for the National Weather Service in Muskegon.

From Ludington to Allegan County and all the way down to Michigan’s southern border, people all over West Michigan described what they saw as multiple circular lights in the sky, moving in unusual ways.

“It was about 9 at night. The light outside was so bright. I did a double-take, no, I saw four lights. That can’t be a full moon,” described Cindy Pravda on “Unsolved Mysteries.” “The lights were in a straight line, stationary, just above our tree line. The one to the far left moved slowly across the tree line and slowly came back in formation again. The other one to the far right was starting to slowly move and it was just gone in a flash. Then I’m left with two.”

Pravda remembers vividly what she saw. But it’s what she heard, or didn’t hear that really stands out.

“I never saw a ship or ships. The lights were so bright, I could never see beyond them. I watched them totally for about a half hour. I wish I had a camera back then. We didn’t have phones that could take a picture. What surprised me most was that there was no sound. My horse was out in the field. She was grazing and nodding off. She didn’t even know they were above her head.”

“Not a sound. That’s the thing that stands out most to me. Dead silent,” said Holly Graves, another witness interviewed on “Unsolved Mysteries.” “Our whole living room was like a spotlight. It was so bright. You can hear my kids screaming in the background on the 911 tape.”

Then, Graves and her family decided to go outside.

“This thing is roughly 300 feet right across the street and it wasn’t doing anything except going as slow as it possibly could,” Graves added. “It was not like a plane. It was not like a blimp. It was not like anything I’ve ever seen. It was a chrome material, cylinder shape and they were going around in a circle. I saw no windows and then lights coming out at the bottom.”

The Graves family say they were outside watching the unexplained objects for a good 15 to 20 minutes when a police officer arrived.

“I was trying to think of any kind of explainable situation that was going on,” Jeffrey Velthouse, now a retired sergeant with the Holland Department of Public Safety, said on the show. “I saw two lights moving in a southwest direction and they were consistent with the flight of an aircraft. The lights went from light to green and they were fairly close together. One light caught my attention. It moved from the other light in a quick manner and kept going southwest. That was different than any normal aircraft that I’ve seen.”

Finally, the lights were gone, but not after doing one more memorable thing. The Graves family says the lights broke up into five before disappearing.

It was around then when the Ottawa County 911 dispatch connected with Meteorologist Jack Bushong. An emergency dispatcher asked him if he saw anything on the weather radar because of the dozens of calls they were getting of “some strange lights in the southern Ottawa, northern Allegan County area.”

At first, Bushong thought it was a bit ridiculous and that maybe a lot of people had been drinking. He decided to take a close look at the radar.

“I assumed it was an aircraft at about 6,000 feet, which was not unusual. It was moving at around 100 miles an hour, which was not unusual. For a brief moment, it just stopped and hovered, which is highly unusual. I knew something was not right. After that, it seemed like everything went crazy,” he said on the show.

“They were going together and coming apart,” you can hear on the 911 tape between dispatch and Bushong. “There’s three. They’re separated by about 5,000 feet in height. It’s not precipitation or anything, especially at that height.”

Bushong said in all aspects, the objects looked like aircraft. “They just did not act like aircraft. We know it was solid. It was smooth. It seemed extremely reflective, very high polished metal. We can detect that by the amount of energy coming back in the echo.”

Things continued to get even more strange as Bushong examined what he was watching on radar.

“The northern most one would jump 20 miles. Hover. The other two would jump 20 miles and then make that triangle formation again and hover there for a few seconds. I can’t think of anything in nature that would play ‘Follow the Leader’ like that.”

Bushong says once the objects got to an area over southern Lake Michigan, strange things continued for a while.

“I watched them for two, three hours and they were met up with dozens and dozens of other objects that I could see. They were doing incredible feats like going lower to 4 or 5,000 feet to going as high as 55,000 feet within a matter of seconds moving at 72,000 miles an hour.”

Bushong says he may look into that unexplained night from nearly 30 years ago for the rest of his life.

“I was spooked. I was creeped out. I was nervous. I was shaking. Driving home that night, I couldn’t believe what I had seen. My whole idea as a scientist of what’s out there, it was just a huge change of what I had to think that there’s more out there than we all know.”

You can watch volume 3 of “Unsolved Mysteries” on Netflix including this episode, “Something in the Sky.” Here are some of the 911 calls from March 8, 1994.