Sighting record / 1967
Ottawa County, Michigan. A dark, clear night in late February 1967. At 8:19 p.m. a call reached the sheriff's dispatcher. A minute later, Sheriff Bernard Grysen heard it too. He went outside and watched a reddish-orange object hover low over Lake Michigan, a short distance from his cottage. It moved quickly from side to side. Then it was gone. His deputy, Dave Heerspink, saw it at three different times, at three different spots in the county. A cluster of lights. Intensely bright at the centre, reddish at the edges. It was "definitely not a plane," he said. More than a dozen people saw something that night. Project Blue Book's verdict was split down the middle. Partially Venus. Partially unidentified.
Early 1967. Michigan still remembered the wave of March 1966 around Dexter and Hillsdale, the episode tied to Hynek's "swamp gas" explanation. In Ottawa County, on the Lake Michigan shore, Sheriff Bernard "Bud" Grysen had led the department since 1959. He knew how that kind of publicity played out.