Hillsdale College, my alma mater, is getting recognized more and more nowadays. A private, liberal-arts college tucked away in a small town in southeastern Michigan, Hillsdale rejects all government funding, and takes its commitment to Great Books and to the Western and American heritages quite seriously. Its alumni go on to great things; many of them populate the ranks of movement conservatism in various capacities.
But what too few people know is that Hillsdale College was also the site of a famous UFO sighting. On March 21, 1966, dozens of witnesses on campus watched for hours as a mysterious, multicolored, football-shaped object appeared in the campus arboretum. As a longtime UFO enthusiast, I became fascinated by the story when I learned about it as a student. My fascination bore fruit in the from of a story I wrote for the Hillsdale Collegian, the campus newspaper, my senior year; you can read it here. An excerpt:
The night of Monday, March 21, 1966 was pretty typical for the McIntyre Hall residents — until the UFO appeared.
At about 10:30 p.m., according to an eyewitness account written by Gidget Kohn three days later, dozens of girls and other witnesses — 87 total — began to watch an “intense silver-white light.” The event was later described in Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s decades-long investigation of UFO sightings nationwide as “football-shaped.”
The room of Josephine Evans ’69 had one of the best views of the object; many girls crowded into it to watch.
“We suddenly spotted what appeared to be this strange light in the arb,” Evans said. “It was odd the way the lights were, but it was also weird the way [the UFO] traveled.”
“There was a glow around it and the lights appeared to be pulsating,” Kohn’s account added. “The glow was gone and there were three lights which were yellow-white…then the middle light turned red and then the one on the left. [We] watched for about 10 minutes and then the object seemed to move up and then to the right and left very slightly.”
Anyway, some current Hillsdale students made a documentary about the incident; I make an appearance. You can watch the whole thing here, or below:
The documentary adds some details to my own account of the UFO sighting, going into how the famous “swamp gas” explanation offered by J. Allen Hynek of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book may not have been entirely genuine, relaying archive of contemporary reactions to the incident, and more. Give it a watch. The Hillsdale UFO deserves to be recognized more and more as well.