The Strangest Thing Ever Captured on Weather Radar - 1994 Lake Michigan Incident

10 p.m. Central Time, March 8, 1994. Jack Bushong was going through his nightly routine at the National Weather Service office at the Muskegon County Airport in Norton Shores, Michigan. Bushong was in charge of surveying the weather. This included taking surface weather observations, answering phone calls from local authorities, as well as operation of the radar. His office was equipped with a WSR-74C weather radar, a very common weather radar for the early 1990s. In general, the weather was quite nice. Conditions around 10 p.m. included clear skies, great visibility, and no thunderstorms in the surrounding area. Winds were also quite calm, between 5 and 10 mph. The conditions were perfect for flying in and out of the airport. So Bushong sat back and he relaxed, expecting a relatively easy work shift. But suddenly, he received a call. This is Jack at the National Weather Service office. Check the weather radar immediately. Um, everything looks perfectly normal. The weather's perfect for flying. What are you talking about? No, no, no. Point it towards the southwest. Adjust tilt. Processor. 2682. And scan. Showing up on his radar were four unusual blips just south of the airport near the shoreline of Lake Michigan. These blips made little to no sense. There were no thunderstorms in the area, nothing unusual was going on, there weren't even clouds in the sky, but clearly something was showing up on radar. You see, Jack had actually been called by the police. They had been dealing with hundreds of phone calls from local residents because not only was there something strange showing up on radar, people were also seeing something strange in the sky. Here are a few excerpts of the actual 911 call made to the National Weather Service. People that called, that I happened to talk to, said it looked like a bunch of cylindrical objects were going together and coming apart. Now I'm getting three of them, they're very strong returns, I'm getting a real, um, they're spiking, so it's, there's something pretty... Today we're going to discuss the unusual and quite controversial 1994 Lake Michigan UAP and weather radar anomaly. On this night, hundreds of people claimed to have seen strange lights in the sky over Lake Michigan. But not only were there strange lights in the sky, there were also objects picked up Now of course, I'm not claiming that, you know, there were UFO, alien crafts over Lake Michigan, that's not what I'm saying at all, but I am an admirer of strange atmospheric phenomena. I do love some rare atmospheric optics. And something really did occur over the lake that night. Perhaps it was a nocturnal light of sorts. Maybe the lights from the city of Chicago played a role. I don't know, but we're going to look at this event in detail and we're going to try to get to the bottom of this. This is the 1994 Lake Michigan UAP incident. 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Well, it's about time we call it a night, don't you think? It was just a normal night for Matt and Amber Robinson, but that would all soon change. Good night. You see, after Matt turned off his light, he saw a strange flashing light outside his window. Perplexed, he got up to see what was going on. When Mark looked out the window, he saw three lights suspended high in the sky over the lake. These three lights seemed to be stationary at first, but they slowly shifted into a more triangular position. They also seemed quite bright, brighter than any other star in the sky. And Matt was beginning to get a bit freaked out. Honey, come take a look at this. There's like strange flickering lights up in the sky. Stop messing around. No, seriously, come here. Stop. Wait. Wait, you're serious? Seriously, come here. What do you mean? No. They had no idea what these three lights were, and they were a little freaked out. So Amber had Matt call the police. Call the cops. No, you call the cops. Yeah, is this 911? Here's the actual police phone call. Okay, so what we have here is a couple who seem to see some strange lights up in the sky. But what's interesting about it is they are very much freaked out by these strange lights. I mean, you can hear it in their voices. They say that these lights are different than any airplane and that they appear like a string of Christmas lights. The police took note of the situation, but honestly, they were mostly unfazed. They get loads of weird and random phone calls all the time. For example, people call all the time about the planet Venus. The planet Venus is a pretty bright object in the sky, and to those who are unfamiliar with the night sky, they could think that it's like some sort of alien UFO craft. In fact, my mother once texted me. She was like, yo, what? Look out your window. What's on the horizon? What is that? And I was like, it's Venus. So the police were mostly unfazed. But then they received another phone call. This time from a couple in South Haven, Michigan. They reported the same three glowing orb lights above the lake. The couple also noted that the lights were quite high in the sky and were making unusual maneuvers. And then yet another call came in, this time from Grand Haven. The call from Grand Haven actually described seeing four to five lights over the lake. Several more calls came in, and they all described the lights as brighter than the stars, but not by much. They also described the lights as being white slash yellow, but sometimes Christmassy in their appearance, featuring red and green and blue lights, and sometimes twinkling a little bit, like a little Christmas miracle. Perhaps the most unusual aspect about these lights were their movements. Sometimes they would form a little line, and then they would go into like a little triangle formation. And then sometimes if there were like four or five of them, they make like a little pentagon formation, hover a little bit. And then one of them would like dart way up into the sky, like they were just making weird maneuvers. And the calls just kept coming in. Here are a few real examples from real phone calls on that night. Okay, um, I don't know if you guys... One particular call came from Holly Graves, who lived on Country Club Road in Holland. To investigate the situation, Captain Paul Heinemann sent out Jeff Velthuis to Mrs. Graves' house to see what was going on. Now when he arrived, he too saw the strange lights up in the air. Here is a super advanced simulation of what that may have looked like. After seeing the lights himself, Police Officer Jeff Velthuis was extremely confused. He had no idea what they were. And clearly the lights were a nuisance to the public, so he needed to get to the bottom of this. At this point, he didn't know what to do, and then he realized, it must be weather related. I'll call the National Weather Service office at the Muskegon Airport. And that's where we catch up to meteorologist Jack Bushong and his radar scans. Like I said in the intro, when Jack Bushong pointed the radar towards the direction of the lights, actual objects appeared on the scope. And this is what makes this specific situation so interesting. Usually when you have like a UFO, UAP, mass sighting, it's just a bunch of people or just a collection of people that saw it once when they were camping or whatever. Very rarely is there an official government service like the National Weather Service finding evidence of such UFOs slash UAPs. So this was kind of a big deal. In some ways, it was kind of like proof that there was actually something there. At this point, there was only one thing they can do, keep an eye on the anomalies. Bushong continued to conduct additional radar scans, and the scans did show the lights were moving. Now here's the sad news. Unfortunately, we don't have any copies of these weather radar scans. We only have sketches made from meteorologist Jack Bushong himself. It's very annoying. It's also super annoying that if I want to look up archival radar scans, I can go all the way back to 1995, but not 1994. I was not happy about this. I also looked at various weather channel uploads on YouTube from 1994, and there was one from March 9th, but not March 8th. So these are kind of in a way lost media. So we don't have the actual radar imagery, but we do have sketches made by Bushong himself. Here are the sketches. Now, as you can see, at first it starts off and there's just a little blip right here circled. But then three blips appear, and then over time, they shift into a triangle shape, and then a fourth blip appears, and then they move to the west, slowly over Lake Michigan towards Chicago. Now these blips were supposedly between 7,000 and 14,000 feet in altitude, and they were also making very fast maneuvers. An exact quote from him about the incident was this, there were three and sometimes four blips and they weren't planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope. These were the size of half a thumbnail. Wait, half a thumbnail? So that's like, that's how big they were on radar. They were from 5,000 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. They're moving towards Chicago. Finally, around 1030, they faded from view off of radar. The anomalies had either gone out of range, or they had changed altitude enough that they can no longer be picked up by the radar's beam. At this point, there were also no more ground observations, and the ordeal was finally over. The next day, many were talking about the strange UAP event that had occurred over Lake Michigan during the prior night. All in all, it's estimated that it was viewed by over 300 people in 42 different Michigan counties. The rumors eventually spread to the local paper, the Muskegee Chronicle, who on two days later after the event, March 10th, 1994, published an article titled, Mystery Lights Captured on Radar. A National Weather Service official revealed a fast-moving phenomenon over Lake Michigan off South Haven. Mysterious lights were reported frolicking over Lake Michigan this week, jumping from South Haven 10 miles off the shore in 10 seconds. Military planes on maneuver, the northern lights, space creatures poaching Lake Salmon, no one could say what they were seeing. But the late Monday visual sightings were confirmed by radar trackings. Leo Greiner was the man in charge of the specific National Weather Service radar office at the Muskegon Airport. He was essentially Jack's boss. When questioned by reporters about the radar imagery, Greiner stated this, Witnesses were talking about red and green sets of lights to the south, oscillating. They appeared to be moving to the southwest. The lights did some rather erratic movements at times. He continued and said, What seems significant to me is we did pick up radar echoes of something that was doing the same thing described by those seeing it visually, Greiner said. Beyond that, I don't know what it could be. In the weeks and months after the event, people assumed they would get answers, but the mystery persisted. A full year after the event, people still didn't know what was going on. The Chicago Tribune published an article titled, Lights, Radar Blips Still Have Michigan Folks Wondering. Even to this day, the event remains a large part of Michigan lore. So, what actually happened? We're going to go over some theories real quick, and I'm going to tell you what I actually think happened, and I'm like 95% sure that this happened. But first, big picture, I'm pretty confident that something actually did occur in the sky over southwest Michigan on that night. Like I've said over and over and over again, you can hear it in the voices of the police calls. To have 300 people call to be like, yo, something weird is going on over the lake, I mean, obviously, that is unusual. And not only that, but we have skeptics from the National Weather Service who also claim to have seen something weird. Now, just real quick, talking about the National Weather Service, the people that work for the National Weather Service are like serious scientists. These are, this is like a top level job for a meteorologist. They do tend to be very intelligent, and they are very, you know, matter of fact. They're not going to be like, oh, UFOs, and they're not going to wear aluminum hats. You can even bring up stuff like ball lightning, or like Will of the Wisps to these people, and they actually get kind of annoyed when you talk about those things because they don't believe in any of those things, usually. Jack actually hardly talked about the anomalies after the event. It wasn't until he retired that he started coming out of his shell a little bit for interviews, and that's because he didn't want to lose his credibility since he was a meteorologist working for the National Weather Service. And then, of course, there's his boss, Leo Greiner, the director of the National Weather Service office in Muskegon. He was also a big skeptic on the event, and a year later, he told the Chicago Tribune it was likely some sort of military operation. I don't believe, for a minute, it was any kind of alien structure. I think there was a fairly strong, earthly explanation for what occurred. Greiner continued on to say that he thinks the FFA knows exactly what happened, and the fact that they weren't saying anything about it was suspicious in itself. If any aircraft are within a given area, then the FAA has to know what's going on in that area, but most of the time, they won't acknowledge anything, not even to us. I think I know what it was, but I'm not going to tell you. Once I retire from the National Weather Service, I might tell somebody. Unfortunately, Greiner passed away at a rather young age of 68 in 2005, so unfortunately, we're never really going to know what he thinks could have happened that night. Okay, so the first theory is that it was some sort of military exercise operation, and perhaps it was. Theory number two is that it could have been some sort of natural phenomenon, specifically the Northern Lights. Now, not many people talk about this, but Jack Bushong actually recalled the police to make sure he wasn't being pranked the first time. When he recalled the police dispatcher, they confirmed that it really was the police that had called him, but he had mentioned that some people were reporting seeing the Northern Lights. So perhaps the Northern Lights were dancing in some unique way over the lake. It could have also been a form of atmospheric optics. This is another type of natural phenomenon. This includes things like sun dogs, and this is actually exactly what I think happened that night. Okay, now real quick, let's just take a look at the surrounding environment where the sightings took place. Okay, we got a large body of water right here, Lake Michigan, interesting. Oh, a major city over here called Chicago, interesting. Now let's look at the meteorological conditions from the time of the event. Well, we all know it was a nice night under clear skies, you know, a few, maybe a couple cirrus clouds, but it's very likely that there could have been a temperature inversion at the time of the event. Such events are very common over Lake Michigan in the month of March. We talked about temperature inversions recently during the death fog video, but said temperature inversions create stable air layers. The lake's temp was around 36 degrees. Winter had just ended. It was almost spring. So the water was super cold. But since it was almost spring, you had some warm air going over the lake. This then created temperature inversion where the surface, the atmosphere over the lake is really cold. And then above that is this warm body of air. And then this can kind of create a lens effect. Often temperature inversions can actually create mirages. These stable air layers can bend light in a way to make things look like they're floating over the water. Now remember, hello, Chicago is right here. It was dark out. So you had the lights from the city. Okay. Now think about this. You get some weird lensing over the lake. Those lights from the city look like they're up in the sky in a weird way. Perhaps that's what they saw. Or perhaps there was even a couple of jets doing some maneuvers closer to the lake, or maybe even some boats on the ground. There was also a home Chicago Bulls game that night that started at seven, which should have gotten done around 10 PM. And then maybe they had some firework display or some spotlights that then were inverted in a weird way through temperature inversion over the lake, creating some weird lights in the sky. I don't know. Temperature inversions can also bend radar beams. This is known as radar ducting. So yes, a radar can pick up something unusual on the ground, like a ship or a boat. In fact, it's happened before. On July 3rd, 2013, a modern WSR-88D radar, the ones that we're all familiar with today, near another great lake, Lake Superior, actually picked up ships over the water. Look at these. This was all due to a temperature inversion. Do you see these little blips? These aren't even little blips. These are big blips. These are ships. I mean, seriously, look how big they are. Incredible. And that's exactly what I believe happened on the night of March 8th, 1994. It's probably just a ridiculous atmosphere set up that was very rare. And somehow it created a perfect mirage or a perfect little, little, little, little refracting layer of atmosphere. And then you had like some boats on the, near Chicago doing some sort of formation. Maybe there's like three or four of them. And the people on the other side of the lake saw these lights from these boats, and then the radar picked up the boats. Now I will say, I don't know for sure that's what happened. I mean, maybe they said that it was in the atmosphere, 10, 15,000 feet. I don't know much about the radar technology of the time and how they're able to figure out these calculations. I don't know. But I want to know your thoughts. Was it some sort of atmospheric optics? Was it weather related at all? Military related? Nothing at all, just mass hysteria? Or was it aliens? Let me know in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching. That's him. I'm laughing.