The Lake Michigan sightings
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Having listened to a UFO podcaster's own account, John Kiriakou asked a question of his host about a case he had seen dramatised on television.

The case

He raised a Netflix episode from the previous year, one of the Unsolved Mysteries series of programmes, as he described it, that dealt in detail with sightings over Lake Michigan. Almost all of the witnesses, he noted, were employees of the National Weather Service, "and not only did they see them in the sky, but they followed them on the radar." Those objects, too, went down into the water. "What do you make of that?"

Why it persuaded him

Kiriakou gave two reasons for taking the case seriously, both evidentiary rather than interpretive. The first was duration: "it lasted for hours." The second was corroboration: "it wasn't just, you know, one guy who may have been too tired while he was on the job in the middle of the night. It was like a dozen different people, and they all watched it unfold on the radar as well."

He added the detail that interested him most. Where the lake had frozen, he said, the objects avoided that part, they went over the water that had not frozen, and then down into it.

The cost to the witness

His host, who said he had interviewed the case's principal witness on his own show a year before the Netflix episode aired, described him as having "a total science mind" and as having been completely baffled by what he saw. Asked whether the man had taken criticism for it, the host thought he had. Kiriakou supplied the outcome: "In fact, he quit his job."

The consequence to a witness is a thread running through the whole conversation, from Jimmy Carter's sighting report being released during the 1976 campaign to mock him, to an airline captain moved to a desk after reporting an object tracked from the ground.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's UFO sighting
- The Pilot Who Saw It Drink
- CIA and the UFO question
