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The flap brepravettror Rateave' 2004/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010002-9 the Air Force, who sent its scientific consultant, Astrono- mer J. Allen Hynek, Director of Northwestern Universi- ty’s Dearborn observatory to investigate, and from the University of Michigan who dispatched its own scien- tists. But it also brought a spate of unsolicited curious, believers and non-believers, who tramped over Mannor’s grounds with utter disregard for his property and his pri- vacy. The night after the sightings, the roads leading to Man- nor’s home were choked with cars and the grounds were overrun with a carnival crowd made up largely of scoffers. One man brought a violin and fiddled for over an hour with the explanation that his music might lure back the creatures from outer space. Another man blinked his car lights off and on in “pi-code”, believed by him to be the language planets spoke. Unfortunate as it may be, this can be the expected re- sponse to any phenomenon of such eerie proportions, but it neither swayed nor unsettled the sturdy Mr. Mannor. He was no science fiction buff and, as a hunter, outdoors- man and resident of Michigan’s swamp country, he was fully conversant with the trickeries of foxfire and the will- o-the-wisp manifestations of nature. “I seen what I seen and nobody’s going to tell me different,” he was quoted in a Life magazine article on the sighting, April 1, 1966. He backed up his statement by volunteering to take a lie detector test. And his convictions were further shored up by 52 other witnesses, 12 of them police officials. Astronomer Hynek, who had set up headquarters at Selfridge Air Force Base in Mt. Clemens, Mich., to sift reports and make his own investigation into the sightings, acknowledged the sincerity and honesty of the witnesses: “But I am not willing to guess what they saw.” He juggled continued on next page FLAP IN MICHIGAN continued Dr. H, Allen Hynek (L) confers with Dexter Police Chief Robert Taylor on the numerous sightings. Some of the 87 coeds at Hillsdale College who sighted mysterious object outside dormitory window, kept a four hour vigil, taking notes and drawing sketches of the glowing phenomenon that was later to be dismissed as “marsh gas’’, by Investigator Hynek.