Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode we're talking about the Frank Manor UFO
incident. That's correct, the Frank Manor
UFO incident. This happened up in Michigan
many years ago. I found this couple articles,
actually this first one from February 17th, 1983, talking
about the death of Frank Manor gives us a little bit of
background. I'll have this posted at Kofi.
As always, thanks to the folks that contribute over there, it
really helps. Also like, follow, subscribe
doesn't cost a dime. Now.
The title of this article says Dexter man's passing recalls UFO
sighting, and it's written by William B Trimmel, News Staff
Reporter February 17th, 1983 The death this week of Frank E Manor
of Dexter Township recalled for many in Washtenaw County a
series of bizarre unidentified flying object episodes which
occurred 17 years ago, which have never been fully explained.
What was that? 196566?
Manor was 64 when he died Tuesday at the Veterans
Administration Hospital on Fuller Rd.
Funeral arrangements are scheduled for 1:00 PM Friday at
the Hosmer Funeral Home in Dexter.
Burial will be in Forest Lawn cemetery.
It was on the Manor Farm on McGinnis Road northwest of
Dexter that the most spectacular of the UFO sightings was
reported. About 8:30 PM on the night of
March 20th, 1966, several persons living in the Quingly
Brand Road near the Manor property reported seeing a
bright shining object fly overhead.
The object, which witnesses said did not have the characteristics
of an airplane, appeared to land in a swampy area on the Manor
Farm. Manor and his son Ronald, then
18, also saw the lighted object when it first appeared overhead.
When the object appeared to have landed, they dashed from their
house to investigate. When the manors reached a marshy
area on the farm, they reported seeing a lighted brown sphere
shaped object which appeared to have a quilted effect on its
surface. Two small lights at the outer
edges of the object issued a glowing bluish green collar,
which intensified and turned a brilliant red at times, they
later told Ouachita County Sheriff's Department deputies.
The entire object turned it yellow, white at times, and the
light ran horizontally between the two outer lights, they said.
The object disappeared at one point and reappeared seconds
later across the swamp about 500 yards from its original
position, Manners reported. As the deputies and Dexter
police approached the area with flashlights, the lights on the
object went out, Manners said. He and his son then heard a
sound like a whistle similar to that of a rifle bullet
ricocheting off an object, they said The UFO then went up in the
air, passed directly over them and disappeared moments later.
Robert Humwill, then a patrolman with the Dexter Police
Department, saw what he later assumed was the same object the
Manners had observed. The officer had parked his
patrol car at the Queen Lee Brand Rd. intersection while the
late Dexter Police Chief Robert Taylor and Patrolman Nolan Lee
entered the Manor property to aid in the police search.
Honeywell said the object approached over his patrol car
at a height of about 1000 feet, hovered there, then began a
series of sweeps over the Manor Swamp.
The object had red and white lights, which changed to a
bluish tinge at times, Hannibal said.
While the officer watched, the object was joined by three other
flying ships and the four flew off together, he reported later.
A short time later, in the same general area, 2 sheriff's
deputies Stanley McFadden and David Fitzpatrick saw a lighted
object in the sky at North Territorial Road near Mast Rd.
The officers turned their scout car's spotlight on the object.
It was the size of a small house, kind of pushed down flat,
Mcfarden would later report. It had red green lights on it
and movements which could not possibly have been made by any
aircraft I've ever heard of. The object disappeared moments
after the deputy saw it. And the week that followed, a
number of other sightings of UFOs reported, the most
outstanding coming from Hillsdale College, 75 miles West
of Ann Arbor. Now, as I remember, that college
was a women's college up there and they had another experience.
These things were all over the place.
The witness included more than 80 Hillsdale College women
students and the Hillsdale County Civil Defense Director
William Van Horn. The students called Van Horn
after spotting a strange flying light over a swamp near their
campus dormitory. The C.
The director said he watched the object through binoculars for
more than an hour. He said it emitted wavering
orange, red and white lights and hovered over the swamp less than
1000 yards from a college dormitory.
The local reports were so widespread that the US Air
Force, which at the time had a section for the investigation of
UFOs, called in Doctor J Alan Heineck, an actual physicist
from Northwestern University. Heineck was a scientific
consultant for the Air Force and had investigated and explained
the scores of UFO sightings. Oh, yeah, he explained them all,
right. In a press conference held in
Detroit on March 26th, 1966, Heineck said the Manor sightings
and the one at Hillsdale College were probably swamp gas.
The scientists that said gases created from rotting swamp
vegetation are ignited into flames when a thaw occurs and
release the gases from ice and frozen ground.
Now I've been to Michigan many times.
I've been up there on the swamps.
I've never seen that happen. I've talked to people and I've
never I've never come across anybody who's seen such a thing.
But if you have, please leave a leave a comment.
He said the flame of chemical luminescence moves quickly and
freely about the about the error over a swampy area giving the
appearance of a solid object, then Sheriff Douglas J Harvey
was doubtful about Hynek's explanation.
That's a pretty weak theory. I'm not ready to accept it,
Harvey said. Frank Manor was equally
dissatisfied. I spent time on army maneuvers
in the swamps of Louisiana during World War Two, he said.
I've seen plenty of swamp gas. This wasn't it.
We saw what we saw, all right. That's about as good a response
as you can get. So you had this.
You had it. Sounds like multiple UFOs up
there, not just witnessed by Frank Manor, but by local law
enforcement 70 miles away. They're seeing these things.
The civil defense coordinator watched it.
What you have basically is a mass UFO sighting over the
course of several days. And what did the government do?
Well, they brought in J Allen Heineck to just Pooh Pooh.
The whole thing create a false narrative that is that it's
swamp gas and just try to deperson anybody that disagreed
with them. Now this next article comes from
aadl.org. It's in one of these library
sites that that logs these old newspaper articles.
I think sometimes it's so fun to go back and get the original
stuff. It says area UFO followed by
trouble. I think this is actually from
the time that it happened in 1966.
Yes. So this the the last one I read
you was part of the obituary for Frank Manor and this is when it
actually happened. I believe Dexter, whatever it
was Frank Manor, 47, and his family saw near their rented
farmhouse here last month, they are not too happy about the
whole thing. A month ago Wednesday, Manor
reported seeing a strange pyramid shaped object with red,
blue and white lights and swampland behind the house.
Now get that pyramid shaped this his 19 year old son Ronald and
his wife Leona also saw something.
Their report, among the first of hundreds of such reports in
Michigan, touched off an Air Force investigation.
Get that? Hundreds of reports with the
finding that what most people probably saw was the rare
phenomena of swamp gas. Now, I guess this swamp gas is
pretty rare. I've been around swamps, I've
never seen it, so I'll take their word for it.
But imagine you've got hundreds of people seeing this, different
sightings all over the place, but we're supposed to believe
it's swamp gas. Well, I think that they must
have just had more swamp gas sightings in that one week than
they had in the previous couple 100 years.
It goes on here. It says the Manners still aren't
buying that explanation. They still believe it was
something else they saw, just what they don't know.
Manor said Wednesday he hasn't spotted any more lights sent
that night. There have been sightings by
other people around here, though, he said.
They're just not reporting them. In view of what happened to us,
what happened to the Manners and is still plaguing them, is a
flood of curiosity secrets roaming the area in hopes of
seeing something too. We still have them around here a
couple of times a week, sometimes at 2:00 or 3:00 in the
morning, He said. Mostly their car loads of kids
driving around or parking near the house.
One night, Manner said some of the prowlers climbed onto the
second story roof of the house using a ladder that was
left-leaning against a wall. My daughter screamed and I
thought she was having a nightmare, but her mother went
into the bedroom and heard them crawling across the roof too, he
recalled. As a result, Manner is prepared
for trespassers. You'd better believe, he said.
I've got a shotgun in every room.
Every since the Manners and others told of seeing strange
objects, there have been reports of mysterious lights and flying
saucers elsewhere around the state and nation.
Only this week, a deputy sheriff said he chased an unidentified
flying object from Ohio into Pennsylvania.
Hundreds of people in both states reported seeing the
object, which most agreed look like 2 saucers, 1 atop the
other. On the same day, three municipal
workers and a policeman in Western Michigan saw what they
said was a hot dog shaped object.
These sightings were in hours of darkness.
Since the furor started a month ago, there had been no reported
daytime sightings. Because of recurring and
persistent reports, the Air Force has told Congress it will
name a panel of scientists to investigate them in depth.
Same thing happened in back then as today.
We're just going to, we're going to make up another panel,
another committee, another agency.
We'll, we'll investigate all this stuff.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Doctor J Allen Heineck, a Northwestern University
astrophysicist and scientific consultant for the Air Force,
urged just such a study after his probe of the sightings by
Manor and others in Michigan. Well, why have a study if all
you're going to do is say that it's swamp gas?
It says. I have recommended that that
competent scientists quietly study such cases when evidence
from responsible people appears to warrant such a study.
There may be much more of a potential value to science in
such events. Yeah, competent science seems
like so far all we've got is incompetent.
We know a very great deal more about the physical world in 1966
than we did in 1866. But by the same token, people in
the year 2066 may regard us as very incomplete in our
scientific knowledge, Honey said.
I don't like a mystery, Honey told The Associated Press this
week. A mystery is an itch that should
be scratched. Well, it seems like what they
really thought was is that it was a itch that should just be
done away with. You create a false narrative.
This shows me this idea that that he doesn't like a mystery.
In other words, he's the kind of person that's not comfortable
with with these ideas in his head that don't, that don't,
that don't correlate. He doesn't like to have things
bouncing around in his brain that he can't explain.
He's not able to say it. Well, I just don't know what it
is. Like a lot of these scientists,
they have to make, they have to make up their own idea of what
they're saying. They have to have an explanation
for everything because if they don't, then they don't feel like
they are operating in a rational world.
Well, I'm sorry, but the world is full of mystery.
And if you don't like a mystery, you're probably going to be in a
state of anxiety for a lot of your days.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and look at this other article on on
this Frank matter incident. This is from
universityofmichigan.edu. It says flying saucers and swamp
gas. A rash of UFO sightings across
Michigan in the mid 1960s launched investigations by the
highest levels of the US government.
What was happening in the skies? Collections at the Bentley
document several aspects of these widespread close
encounters. Was it spaceships or swamp gas?
The answer may depend on whose papers you pursue.
It goes on since Frank Manor was spending a quiet night at home
with his wife and teenage son, Ronald on the evening of March
20th, 1966, all was peaceful at their farmhouse just northwest
of Dexter, MI until around 8:30 PM.
That's when they saw the lights. Something unusual was in the sky
outside their farmhouse. They watched from their window
as a strange object appeared to land on their property.
Then Frank and Ronald dashed from the house to investigate.
The object hovered above a nearby marshy area, pulsating
red and green lights. Frank and Ronald described it as
a large brown and sphere shaped with a quilted pattern on its
surface. Now keep in mind that we just
read the article from 1966, and in that article he described it
as a pyramid shaped. At one point, the object's
lights went out and it disappeared, only to reappear
seconds later about 500 yards away.
Then they heard a sharp sound like a rifle bullet ricocheting
off an object. The strange craft lifted into
the air, paused directly above them and disappeared.
The Manners phoned law enforcement to explain what they
had witnessed. Instead of being laughed at,
their report was taken seriously.
Police officers on patrol that evening had seen something
similar. Washtenaw County Sheriff's
Captain David Severance even drew a picture of it based on
witnesses description. What's more, sightings had been
happening all week. The previous Monday, police on
patrol in Lima Township, southwest of Dexter had
witnessed 4 lights flying with great speed and amazing
maneuverability in the early morning hours.
One officer even attempted to take photos.
So we have law enforcement officers seeing these things.
They're happening all over that area over multiple days.
The day after the incident in the Manor Farm, lights were
reported about 60 miles southwest of Dexter at Hillsdale
College. In this case, several
undergraduate women saw lights outside their dorm windows.
They phoned William Van Horn, the Hillsdale County Civil
Defense director, who arrived with a patrol car and also saw
the lights first hand. The incidents were so widespread
and witnesses were so credible that senators, governors and law
enforcement and researchers would become involved, trying to
understand what was happening. Today, numerous collections at
the Bentley document much of this activity, from archive
newspapers to governor's papers to faculty, correspondents and
more. What happened in the spring of
1966 in Michigan It may be impossible to know, but a dive
into the archive materials certainly reveals what happened
next. Then it goes on and says
Washington County Sheriff Douglas J Harvey knew the
manners and had visited them on the night of March 20th.
He found their testimony to be credible and took their account
seriously. These people have seen
something, Harvey said, refuting rumors that the family was
seeking publicity or was somehow deranged.
Harvey's officers were among those who had also witnessed the
unexplained lights. I know my men, I trust their
reports, Harvey told the Ann Arbor News on March 22nd.
I don't know what it is, but I'm sure they have seen something
aloft. Harvey also asked for help
investigating the incidents from several federal agencies, but
was reportedly ignored. Desperate, he reached out to
Western Weston Vivian, his congressional representative.
Vivian took Harvey's request seriously.
This may have been motivated in part by his constituents.
Concerns about the UFOSA file in his collection contains letters
from citizens predating the 1966 incident, asking for information
and relaying worries about UF OS.
More public letters conveying UF OS concerns and predating the
1966 incident can be found in the collections of other
politicians, including Michigan Senator Phil Hart and
Representative William D Ford from Michigan's 15th District.
Vivian pulled enough strings to get the US Air Force to send out
an investigator, Jay Allen Heine, PhD, and astrophysicist
from Northwestern University. But soon Heine's president
presence would create more problems than it would solve.
Well, clearly these things have been going on for months if not
years, these sightings and people have been trying to get
someone to investigate it. The federal government was just
blowing them off. The sheriff goes, gets a hold of
this connected congressman and they send out Heineck, which
just sounds to me like it's just an immediate cover up.
Heineck was a respected academic who had worked at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory during World War 2,
then as a full professor in physics and astronomy at Ohio
State University. He eventually left Ohio State to
conduct research at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory, where he worked on AUS satellite program in the
late 1950s. When the program him ended, he
returned to teaching at Northwestern University, where
he chaired the astronomy department.
He did all this while consulting on the side for the United
States Air Force about UFOs. So you see the connection there.
You've got your intelligence. The big universities connected
right in with the government. Beginning in the late 1940s,
Hynix was asked to advise the military on Project Sign, an
investigation into a rash of reports about strange objects in
the sky. Project Sign eventually morphed
into Project Blue Book in 1952. Heinek initially approached the
UFO reports with a great deal of skepticism.
After all, they were reports Heineck was largely behind a
desk, reading accounts from people he hadn't met and from
places he'd never seen. Things begin to change when
Heineck went into the field visiting with people, making the
claims and hearing them first hand.
The witnesses I interviewed could have been lying, could
have been insane, or could have been hallucinating collectively,
but I do not think so, he wrote in the Heineck UFO Report, the
authority of account of the Project Blue Book cover up in
1977. Heineck would go on to write
exhaustively about UFOs, even creating a classification system
for alien encounters, most encounters of the first kind,
second and third kind. But when he arrived in
Washington County on March 23rd, 1966, he couldn't see much
evidence that anything was awry. In fact, he devised a tidy
explanation for all of it. On March 25th, 1966, Heineck
gave a press conference where he said that the incidents at the
Manor Farm at Hillsdale College were the result of riding
vegetation in lowland areas. The vegetation created gases
that were trapped in the winter. During the spring thaw, the
gases were released. This so-called swamp gas
phenomena could cause lights and even sound.
Heineck called it highly localized.
A Dismal swamp is most likely. Swamp is a most unlikely place
for a visit from outer space, Heineck said at the press
conference. You personing these people?
Furthermore, Heiney asserted that the strange photos taken by
the police officers were nothing more than trails made as a
result of a camera time exposure of the rising Crescent moon and
the planet Venus. The public wasn't buying it.
Among the skeptics was Sheriff Harvey, who continued to support
his patrol officers in the manners.
With all due respect to Doctor Heiney, I'm not ready to accept
this weak excuse of gas from marshes, he told reporters.
I've got that link to the pictures he's talking about
there. I do believe that somebody went
back and checked and found that it was not possible that that
could have been the moon in Venus as they weren't up that
night in that direction. Heine explanations were so
unsatisfying to the public that pressure mounted for a deeper
investigation. Congressman Vivian continued to
put pressure on the Air Force for more investigative
resources, and he wasn't alone. Representative Gerald Ford from
Michigan also became involved, requesting a full congressional
inquiry about the UFO reports. The Air Force caved under
pressure. On April 6th, 1966, they
announced that they would convene a group of scientific
observers to further delve into recent sightings.
By the fall of 1966, the US Air Force had commissioned the
University of Colorado and physicist Edward Condon to head
up a two year project to study UFOs and determine the if the
government should continue. Funding UFO Investigations Known
as the Condom Committee, this group of 11 scientists, give or
take some part time consultants, released a report in 1969 that
was more than 1000 pages long and concluded that there was
nothing of scientific value in the documentation of UFO
phenomena. The report dismissed hundreds of
eyewitnesses across the country, including those from Washtenaw
County, who saw something strange in the sky in March of
1966. The report supported all of
Heineck's findings. The manners were dismissed as
having been too far away to know what they saw.
The Hillsdale College students likely saw young men who played
pranks. Both flares, the photos of the
police officer were just what Heineck said they were streaks
of light from Venus and the moon.
In its conclusion, the report fails to validate any of the
hundreds of eyewitnesses featured in its thousands plus
pages. In our experience, those who
reported UFOs are often very articulate but not necessarily
reliable, the report says. And we pay for this garbage.
We pay for this garbage in 1966, and we pay for this garbage
today. The Condon report was
scrutinized by members from the National Academy of Sciences to
ensure its accuracy. Appeal to authority.
Among the reviewers was H Richard Crane, a distinguished
professor of physics from the University of Michigan.
Crane and his colleagues concluded that the Condon report
got it right, that UFOs weren't worth scientific investigation.
And most of what people were saying was highly explainable.
But tucked into Crane's archive papers at the Bentley are
letters from Condon on which Crane is copied, which speak to
one of the more controversial aspects of the report, a memo by
Condon committee member Robert J Lowe and assistant Dean at the
University of Colorado. Lowe's memo, dated in 1966,
assured the University of Colorado administrators that
they could expect the study to find that UF observations have
no basis in reality. The memo raised doubts about the
project's objectivity, and the copies of the memo were leaked
to the press. Look magazine ran a highly
publicized article about it. Controversy or no, the Air Force
acquiesced the report's findings, and Project Blue Book
was shut down in 1969. Talk about a cover up.
Then it goes on and says UFO sightings continue to this day.
And in June 2021, an unclassified report was released
to Congress about the unidentified aerial phenomena.
Then it goes on and talks a little bit about some of the
nonsense has been happening lately.
But what I find so fascinating about this case is you had all
these people, Frank Manor kind of start to take the whole thing
off. This family man, this salt of
the earth guy, this their family sees this UFO within 500 feet.
He gives a detailed description of it and then he calls law
enforcement out. They see it.
People in surrounding community see it.
You have a whole college full of girls to see something similar.
So we have multiple UFO showing up all over in that area of
Michigan over over maybe a year or so because they said in these
letters Mclure back in at least back to 1965.
So we have all of these eyewitness accounts and the
local law enforcement tries to get some help with the federal
investigation and the feds have no interest in it.
But finally, when they're forced to look at it, they send in Jay
Allen Hayek to create a parallel narrative.
It's just swamp gas. They just create the flimsiest
of excuses. They direct a lot of ridicule of
Frank Manor. In fact, the college girls
didn't seem to get that much of it because it was a whole lot of
them in one place. But Frank Manor, he got a lot of
ridicule over this. We've done podcast on him
before. And for what?
Why was it so important for them to cover this up?
Are they afraid of mass hysteria?
Are they afraid that if they admit these things are real that
at some point people will look into the subject and find out
that our own government is in collusion with these things?
Who knows, but we know one thing for sure, a lot of people saw
these things in 1965 and 66 there in Michigan and they
reported it and nothing was done about it.
Until next time. This is UFO warning over now.