Beauty spot becomes UFO hotbed as couple spot aliens during firework display

Panoramic views, lapping turquoise water and towering sand dunes make Lake Michigan one of the most breathtaking natural landscapes in the USA.

But its reputation for unrivalled beauty is facing stiff competition from its growing renown as an - home to frequent unexplained phenomena and UFOs.

British historian Tony McMahon explains: “Within this Lake Michigan Triangle, for centuries ships have gone missing. In more recent times, aircraft as well.

“And it’s reached such a scale that there have been , to these planes and the poor souls never seen again.

“The .

“Now, it could have been that the ship crashed into another vessel, but we have no record of that other vessel, which really begs the question, did something very unusual happen here within the Lake Michigan Triangle? Could these people and this vessel have encountered something from out of this ?”

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A new Blaze documentary series, Alien Corridors, has brought together a team of multi-disciplined experts from around the globe to investigate extraterrestrial hotspots including Lake Michigan.

On 4 July 2002 in Tinley Park near Chicago, Illinois, a retired police officer and his wife were celebrating Independence Day - their eyes fixed on the sky, where fireworks lit up the dark night.

Among the exploding colours, something strange caught their attention. Three bright orbs glowed red.

Unlike the surrounding fireworks, they maintained a V formation as they glided across the night sky.

The couple waited for the familiar boom of a firework and a shower of sparks. But instead, the flying V moved towards them in silence. As it passed overhead, lights disappeared to reveal what witnesses described as a triangle with rounded edges, unlike any aircraft they had ever seen.

A little over a month later, at approximately 10pm in the same vicinity, a neighbour yelled for Bill Dooley to look up to the sky.

He saw three bright lights cruising towards him that appeared to be stacked on top of each other. Suddenly, they manoeuvred into the shape of a triangle and hovered in place for roughly 30 minutes, before disappearing into the night.

Around the same time, Tinley Park resident T.J. Japcon was at a party with his family a few blocks away, when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks.

Three lights moving northwest in a triangle formation stopped and hovered right above him.

Tony McMahon says: “T.J. Japcon has a camcorder, so he hurtles back indoors, grabs the camcorder and starts to film. And what he films is unbelievable. What he sees in the sky are these three very disturbing orb-like shapes. And they’re not moving across the sky. These objects are just still, almost as if they’re observing. What could these orbs have been? Was it a plane? Was it a helicopter, or was it something else?”

Beyond Tinley Park, right across the region, police stations were flooded with reports from people all claiming to have seen the same thing.

Unexplained expert Dr Matthew Hayes says: “The typical sighting is just a light in the sky and it lasts for a few seconds, usually very, very quick, very unidentifiable, to say the least. And when you get that kind of sighting, that’s really interesting, but you just can’t really do very much with it.

“But these Tinley Park sightings lasted for around 30 minutes in the sky, which is a very, very long time for a UFO sighting. There’s immediately something more there.”

In the days and weeks that followed, the region was abuzz with talk about the mysterious lights. No one claimed responsibility and no one can say for certain what caused the aerial anomaly.

That same day, Chicago hosted its annual air and water show. With so many planes en route to different airports, could locals have mistaken the glowing lights for a specialist plane?

“Probably the most typical way that people try to debunk UFO sightings is to just say it was a plane,” says Dr Hayes. “I am very sympathetic to that. And I think many UFO sightings actually are, in fact, just planes. But again, a plane has a particular characteristic to it. It moves, first of all. You can generally see it moving across the sky. And this isn’t really what happened with the Tinley Park sighting. These orbs were stationary for the most part. That, I think, would generally throw the plane theory out the window.”

But is there any link between Lake Michigan, its ship-wrecks and plane crashes and the mysterious UFO sightings?

Dr Hayes says: “The Great Lakes is, in general, a magnet for some high strangeness. It’s known for lots of UFO sightings. It’s known for some crypto-zoology even. And there’s been a lot of talk of strange, otherworldly vortexes in the Great Lakes that bring down ships. Lots of strange incidents out on the water that can’t necessarily be accounted for by conventional means. There’s a lot of mystery.”

While some see the vanishing vessels and crew as casualties of the unpredictable nature of wide open waters, stranger cases of missing people and missing planes make the idea of some sort of portal to another dimension all the more intriguing.

Dr Hayes tells one story that he says “particularly highlights the strangeness of Lake Michigan and the triangle.”

He adds: “It’s quite a spooky story from 1937 of the ship O.M. McFarland that was on its mission.

“Captain Donner goes below decks to his quarters and the crew later finds that he has completely disappeared wholesale.

“There’s no explanation for this. It’s extremely odd. No trace of Captain Donner ever

shows up again, and nobody really understands what has happened.”

Tony McMahon adds: “Was there a mutiny on board? Was he forced to walk the plank? Were the crew just covering what they’d done? Had he slipped off deck? I mean, entirely feasible. These things happen.

“Well, the crew were adamant that was not the case, that he’d been seen going into his cabin. And then, when they went in, almost like a magic trick, he’d gone.

“Now, this poses the question, had somebody or something taken the captain away?”

Another similarly mysterious disappearance occurred 13 years later in 1950. Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 was on its way from New York to Minneapolis when the plane entered a section of extreme and unexpected turbulence, caused by an electrical storm.

Just before 10pm, Captain Robert Lind made his second request to descend to the cruising altitude of 25-hundred feet. But he was denied.

Lind decided to steer south to dodge the worst of the storm.

What he and the crew didn’t realise is that they were heading straight for the Lake

Michigan Triangle.

Shortly after 11:3pm, the time of their last communication, the plane disappeared.

“The plane disappears altogether and is never really found,” says Dr Hayes. “There are little bits and pieces of the plane that are found by rescue teams, but nothing substantial. Nothing that you would expect from what people assume is the fact that the plane crashed, that it went down.

“There’s no engine found. There’s no large pieces of the plane found. It’s just the smallest little bits here and there, which is unusual.”

Two hours after the plane’s last communication, two police officers reported seeing a strange red light hovering over Lake Michigan.

Despite ongoing efforts, the plight of flight 2501 remains a mystery.

For many of these disappearances, no concrete answers are ever found, although some scientific explanations have been proposed to make sense of why so many crashes have occurred here.

Dr Hayes explains: “One interesting theory that has been proposed to explain some of the weirdnesses around the world - like triangles, like vortexes - is the theory of ley lines.

“This was developed in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins, an Englishman, who was fiddling around with a map one day and realised that if you draw certain lines straight across the map, that they will intersect most, if not all, of the ancient sites that he was interested in. And these are ancient sites that typically people in this community have associated with supernatural activity or just unnatural phenomena of one kind or another.”

Ufologists theorise that these ley lines could act as a guide to possible landing sites for UFOs.

One of these lines runs almost directly down the middle of Lake Michigan. One theory, connected with the ley lines, suggests that strange events and numerous sightings around Lake Michigan point to some kind of alien base hidden there.

In 2007, a team of divers set out to examine old boat wrecks in Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan.

They discovered an underwater structure of prehistoric stones that has been called ‘the Lake Michigan Stonehenge,’ because of its similarity.

Tony McMahon says: “It’s believed that these stones have been in place for something like 10,000 years.”

It is just another discovery that adds to the mystery of the Lake Michigan Triangle.

But, despite years of eyewitness accounts both from locals and credible professionals, the answers to many of Illinois’s greatest mysteries continue to elude us.

MUST KEEP: The 8-part series, Alien Corridors, premieres on Thursday 14th November at 21:00

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• The Falkirk Triangle features as part of an exclusive 8-part documentary series, Alien Corridors, Thursday nights at 9pm on BLAZE, premiering on 14 November