# The Lake Michigan sightings

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "The Lake Michigan sightings," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-lake-michigan-sightings/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*The Netflix-documented Lake Michigan case John Kiriakou raised with a UFO podcaster: National Weather Service employees who watched objects for hours on radar and by eye, the objects avoiding the frozen part of the lake, and the principal witness quitting his job.*

- **Witnesses:** Employees of the National Weather Service
- **Confirmation:** Seen in the sky and tracked on radar
- **Duration:** Hours
- **Detail he stresses:** They avoided the frozen part of the lake
- **Aftermath:** The principal witness left his job

Having listened to a UFO podcaster's own account, [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/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?"*[1]

## 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."*[2]

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.[3]

## 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."*[2]

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](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)
- [Kiriakou's UFO sighting](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/kiriakou-ufo-sighting)
- [The Pilot Who Saw It Drink](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-pilot-who-saw-it-drink)
- [CIA and the UFO question](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-ufo-question)

## Sources

1. Podcast UFO Live Shows (2025-09-12), at 06:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBMOS09-qx4&t=378s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-09-12-podcast-ufo-live-shows-podcast-ufo-live-shows/
2. Podcast UFO Live Shows (2025-09-12), at 07:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBMOS09-qx4&t=469s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-09-12-podcast-ufo-live-shows-podcast-ufo-live-shows/
3. Podcast UFO Live Shows (2025-09-12), at 07:18. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBMOS09-qx4&t=438s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-09-12-podcast-ufo-live-shows-podcast-ufo-live-shows/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-lake-michigan-sightings/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt