<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Are there unexplained things in the Universe? \u00a0The short answer to this question would no doubt be, \u201cUmmm, yeah!\u201d and judging by the number of \u201cUnexplained this\u201d and \u201cParanormal that\u201d programs that dot the airwaves, the unknown is doing a healthy business. \u00a0Toss in books, magazines, movies, and a zillion web pages devoted to the genre and one can see that people are zealously curious about the unexplained. Though I am not slavishly attracted to the topic, I will admit to watching (and reading) about mysterious happenings on a fairly regular basis. \u00a0When Harold S. Riter began recounting local ghost stories in the <\/span>Ontonagon Herald <\/span><\/i>early in 2019, it was fun to catch up on the local lore. \u00a0Having hung around the Ontonagon County Historical Society as a board member for more than thirty years (not to mention numerous field trips to the OCHS museum), I have previously heard many of these stories, but it is still fun to hear them again.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of the newer entries into this entertainment canon is the History Channel\u2019s series <\/span>Project Bluebook<\/span><\/i>. \u00a0The catch here is the tagline that proclaims the stories are, \u201cbased on the work of Alan J. Hynek\u201d who did indeed look into and report on many of the unexplained incidents that the US Armed Forces were charged with investigating. \u00a0A good deal of these UFO sightings were easily explained by eyewitnesses misinterpreting what they observed, but there were some that defied rational explanation. The problem I have with the <\/span>Project Bluebook<\/span><\/i> series is the \u201cbased on\u201d part. \u00a0It seems the facts of these reports weren\u2019t interesting enough on their own, so the series creators took artistic license to jazz them up a bit. \u00a0I stopped trying to watch the series when they put Wernher von Braun (the acknowledged father of the United States manned space program) in a scenario where he was apparently (and secretively) working on some interdimensional teleportation device. \u00a0I also couldn\u2019t fathom why they kept bumping off witnesses in the first couple of episodes, but nevertheless, this version of <\/span>Project Bluebook<\/span><\/i> did not amount to \u2018must watch TV\u2019 for me. \u00a0When the <\/span>X-Files<\/span><\/i> were first aired, they included many snippets of truth about documented encounters, but never tried to pass of their dramatic Sci Fi series as \u2018factual\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At times, these kinds of shows present evidence that does make one think, \u201cOkay, I wonder what just happened here?\u201d but there are too many times when they reach a little too far to try and create a mystery. \u00a0One of the programs I caught part of (and don\u2019t ask me what it was called because it wasn\u2019t worth remembering this series\u2019s title) investigated strange noises that people have been hearing \u2018all over the world\u2019. \u00a0Most of the \u2018evidence\u2019 presented was in the form of people filming themselves with their cell phones while capturing strange \u2018whooshing\u2019 or \u2018roaring\u2019 sounds that seemed to emanate from the sky. The one mystified man reporting this phenomenon hit it the nail squarely on the head when he said it sounded like \u201cjets ripping open the sky, but there weren\u2019t any to be seen.\u201d \u00a0As a lifelong member of the KISS club (as in \u2018Keep It Simple, Stupid\u2019, not the band KISS in this case), I do believe that he missed the most obvious (and therefore, the simplest) explanation.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Growing up in Marquette when the KI Sawyer Air Force Base was operating, we heard this exact sound time and time again. \u00a0As kids, we got pretty proficient at finding the aircraft making all the noise, even to the point of being able to identify them by their profile. \u00a0What we learned very early on is the sound of a jet lags far behind the actual aircraft. If you heard a loud whooshing sound, you had to look well ahead of it to see the object making the noise. \u00a0The sound travels much farther than one would think, but also slow enough that it seems to come from well behind the aircraft. Most people usually look far enough behind the actual source of the sound and they miss seeing the streaking jet. \u00a0If they were flying at the right altitude, a jet\u2019s exhaust makes a condensation trail (\u2018contrail\u2019 for short) that makes it easier to locate the source of the noise. When the man said, \u201cIt sounded like jets ripping apart the sky,\u201d he had the \u2018jet\u2019 part right, but not the \u2018ripping\u2019 part. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A few days after I had seen this program, my wife and I were snowshoeing the old railroad grade at the base of the Mass City bluff when we heard what sounded like \u2018jets ripping apart the sky\u2019 several times. \u00a0We could see old contrails to our south but we never did see the actual jets that were making the noise. At no time did we feel compelled to grab out a phone to record the noise to post as an unexplained mystery. \u00a0There was no mystery. The Air National Guard detachment in Duluth routinely fly over our area on training runs and on this beautiful, sunny day, I wager they had a great view of the area even though we never saw them. \u00a0It would have been hard for anyone to miss the daily flyovers that were taking place in the Ontonagon area in the later part of April and early May of 2019. There were \u2018confirmed sightings\u2019 of the noise makers in this case and some claim they thought the jets were actually coming in for a landing on the Greenland Road.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I can confess to only seeing one true UFO in my days and that was during one of my summers working at the Huron Mountain Club north of Big Bay. \u00a0There were plenty of reports of strange lights in the sky from some of my fellow workers who hailed from more urban areas. If one comes from an area with a lot of light pollution, the Club\u2019s dark sky environment enables one to see things \u00a0out there that are just not as visible where there is a lot of background light. I was able to identify most of these mysterious things as satellites, Jupiter rising, northern lights, and even a full Moon poking through the trees. My only mystery encounter was much less dramatic. \u00a0One clear evening, I was standing on the front porch of the main clubhouse after work taking in the stars over Lake Superior. To the northwest I could see lights twinkling on the Keweenaw Peninsula when I noticed something unusual to the north. There was a bright light that was moving toward the Keweenaw but it would stop, go backward for a while, then change direction again, resuming its motion toward the west. \u00a0It is impossible to tell how far over the lake this object was and there was no sound to be heard. It truly was a UFO because I had no idea what it was, and in this case, I didn\u2019t have enough information to identify what I was observing. Rationally, it could have been a helicopter or airplane flying in circles, but again, that is just speculation on my part. If cell phone had been invented, perhaps a posting of this could have been corroborated with other sightings, but it remains a mystery to this day. \u00a0Isn\u2019t that the true definition of a UFO?<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My favorite UFO story happened the second summer I spent at Northern Michigan University\u2019s Field Study station at Cusino Lake. \u00a0My project took me to a four by seven mile plain that used to be covered by a virgin stand of White Pine back in the 1880s. Repeated forest fires had depleted the soil in this area during and after these stands were logged, leaving a dry, sandy glacial outwash plain covered in scrub brush and some more recent pine plantations. \u00a0I was there to measure the old White Pine stumps to try and determine how much wood had been harvested from this site. There was a Biology grad student named John Snow doing a project in the same area concerning turtle reproduction. The easiest way for him to find the turtle nest sites was to go out at night and find the turtles laying eggs, mark the spot and then return in the daylight to dig up, measure, and replace the eggs.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0John asked if I wanted to go with him one night and having not seen the Kingston Plains at night, I agreed. \u00a0It was a dark, moonless night and the stars were brighter than I had ever seen given the inky black sky and no other lights in sight. \u00a0As we followed a turtle trail, John tapped me on the back and said something that sounded a little like, \u201cGaa gaa wha da?\u201d Not understanding a word of what he said, I turned around to see what he was trying to tell me only to see three extremely bright lights heading toward us at what seemed to be treetop level. \u00a0The middle light was the brightest and on either side, there were two smaller lights that were bobbing up and down in unison. Yes, for a brief minute, John and I thought we were about to be abducted, that is until the lights passed over us and we heard the roaring of the jet engines. When I began to laugh, John actually got a little miffed, thinking that I was making fun of him. \u00a0\u201cNo, no, I am not laughing at you,\u201d I said, \u201cI am laughing because I have seen the B-52 bombers from KI Sawyer practicing low level runs over the plains for the last two weeks. We couldn\u2019t hear the engines with the sound trailing behind the big jet. The speed of the lights and the utter silence was unnerving in the dark so it didn\u2019t dawn on me that is what we were seeing.\u201d During their night practice missions, they would turn the landing gear lights on so they had a way to see the tree tops. \u00a0They were flying higher than it seemed in the dark, but in the daylight, they were low enough that I could see the rivets on the underside of the planes as they roared past. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During one of the summers that I had worked at the Huron Mountain Club, we decided to climb one of the peaks inside the club boundary near Ives Lake. \u00a0This rather broad rock outcrop had a bare summit so we thought it would be neat to see the lay of the land on a night when the Moon was full. The first thing we noticed on the moonlit mountain top were the wolves howling and answering each other from every direction of the compass. \u00a0The second thing we observed was a set of aircraft lights streaking from east to west over the valley that lay between our mountain top and the next. We knew instantly that these were also planes from KI Sawyer practicing night runs to try and stay below the radar station at Mount Horace Greely on the Keweenaw Peninsula. \u00a0We had observed them many times flying lower than our location on one peak or another in the Huron Mountains during the daylight, so we were not at all spooked by this sighting. It would have been nice to have remembered this a couple of years later when John Snow and I were spooked out on the Kingston Plains.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In each case, my encounters with low flying jet aircraft were accompanied by \u2018a roaring sound like jets ripping the sky apart\u2019. \u00a0When I used to go to KI Sawyer for band jobs, the road from the old main gate passed through the rows of guidelights located at the end of the main runway. \u00a0Many times a bomber or tanker on landing approach would pass no more than a hundred feet over the road making my truck shake, rattle, and roll. Loud, roaring jet engines become much less mysterious if one hears them enough, especially when they pass over at low altitude.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Are there other UFO mysteries out there? \u00a0How about the jet that was scrambled from Kincheloe Air Force base near Rudyard, Michigan in 1953 to follow a bogie spotted on radar streaking across Lake Superior in a westerly direction? \u00a0The plane and pilot disappeared without a trace. There have been some pieces of wreckage that washed up on the north shore of the Keweenaw Peninsula near Redridge in recent years that may be from that jet. \u00a0If I recall this event correctly, it was recounted in the real Air Force <\/span>Project Blue Book<\/span><\/i> and the investigation was eventually filed under \u2018inconclusive\u2019. \u00a0No doubt the newer <\/span>Project Bluebook<\/span><\/i> series would find something more sinister afoot here, but I would rather leave it a true mystery until more facts are found. \u00a0There are enough real mysteries in life that are worth investigating without fabricating some strange plot twist to make them \u2018better\u2019 stories.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Cub Koda and Brownsville Station rocking\u00a0The Martian Boogie<\/em>