On March 20th, 1966, next Dexter, Michigan, farmer Frank Mannor and his son watched a car-sized, football-shaped object with a central porthole and pulsating lights at each end of its brown quilted surface rise from a swampy area on his farm, hover several minutes at a thousand feet, then depart.

The following day eighty-seven women students at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, their dean, and a civil defence director all claimed to have watched for four hours a glowing football-shaped object hovering above a swampy area several hundred yards from the women’s dormitory. At one point the object flew directly toward the dormitory, then retreated. On another occasion the object appeared to „dodge an airport beacon light”. Its glow would diminish when police cars approached, and it „brightened when the cars left”.

The Michigan sightings made nearly every newspaper. Even „The New York Times” – which normally declined to run a „flying saucer” story – gave it several inches. Major Quintanilla sent Dr. Hynek to Michigan to investigate.

„By the time I arrived,” Hynek later wrote, „the situation was so charged with emotion that it was impossible to do any serious investigating. I had to fight my way through reporters to interview witnesses. Police were madly chasing stars they thought to be flying saucers. People believed space ships were all over the area”

Hynek spent a week interviewing witnesses; he even pulled on a pair of hip boots to wade through farmer Frank Mannor’s swamp. Pressure mounted for an explanation, and on March 27, Hynek held the largest press conference in the Detroit Press Club’s history. Hynek later described the gathering of television reporters, newspapermen, photographers, and others, all „clamouring for a single, spectacular explanation of the sightings,” as „a circus.”

Hynek said he provided „what I thought at the time to be the only explanation possible…..I made the statement it was ‘swamp gas’,” the phenomenon caused by decaying vegetation that has spontaneously ignited, creating a faint glow. „And even though I went on to emphasise I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, that there was a full explanation….”Well,” Hynek later said, „the press picked up the words ‘swamp gas’ even before I had finished the conference and that was all you heard or read about in the media for weeks.”

Hynek’s ‘swamp gas’ explanation was met with ridicule, hostility, and increased suspicion that the government was engaged in a cover-up.