GRAND HAVEN, Mich. — When Cindy Pravda saw four brilliant lights hovering above her Grand Haven home, casting silent shadows in the dark of night, she was on the phone with a friend. She wasn't scared.
"They looked like moons," said the Grand Haven resident who watched the otherwordly scene from inside her house for thirty minutes, awestruck.
Thirty years ago on March 8, 1994, reports of UFO activity took West Michigan by storm, with sightings stretching up and down the Lake Michigan shoreline.
“Outer space or the other side of Antarctica, I don't know," said Pravda, a "firm believer" alien life. "Are they government? I don't know. I don't know."
What Pravda saw that night— a series of bright objects that seemed to dart southwest across the state and out over the lake— others witnessed, too.
The 911 dispatch center in Ottawa County fielded calls for hours, with one resident calling the phenomenon a "string of Christmas lights" in the late winter sky.
"Boy, you ought to have somebody take a look," they said. "It's different. I've never seen anything like it."
"They ain’t airplanes," said another caller.
When the dispatch center couldn't explain the seemingly extraterrestrial, they phoned the National Weather Service. Working the night shift at the time, Jack Bushong, a young meteorologist, answered.
"We're sitting here going, 'Now, come on. There's got to be something more to this,'" the dispatcher told Bushong, stationed at the Muskegon County Airport.
Manipulating his radar settings, the meteorologist spotted a metallic object approximately 5,500 feet above South Haven. For a moment, it hovered at the high altitude. Then— all of a sudden— it split up.
"Oh my God, what is this?" Bushong said.
"Creeped out" by the activity, Bushong watched the dots on his radar move tens of miles at a time, often returning to a triangular formation before settling over open water in Lake Michigan, which was mostly frozen at the time due to an unseasonably cold winter.
"They were probably there for water if they were something otherworldly," Bushong said in a Friday interview with FOX 17. "It was moving in weird ways, what in the world could it [have been]?"
The sightings stole headlines in newspapers and the National Weather Service told Bushong not to talk, even as his account matched with eyewitnesses.
"They didn't want to turn into the UFO Reporting Service," he said. "I was really worried about my job."
Thirty years later, he's still unsatisfied with easy explanations. Whatever he saw, he saw something.
"I think I saw advanced technology that somebody has," Bushong said. "I don't know who has it."
“I have come to the conclusion that they wanted to be seen," Pravda said. "They wanted the story to be told.”
