Written by John Lasker

Strange lights are appearing again over the lake with the creepy name…but can chump hoaxters ruin 150 years of paranormal history?

On a brisk, fall night, the crescent moon over Lake Erie is a blood-red orange. In the background, dark waves lap rhythmically onto the beach. It is picturesque in many ways. But the serenity is about to be shattered. Out some unknown distance over the lake, several pulsating lights chillingly materialize from nowhere.

The scene  was captured on video, put on Youtube, and downloaded hundreds-of-thousands of times. The lake front is not far from the hardscrabble city of Cleveland, Ohio, and the lights are described as “orbs”. Out of thin air they appear over the lake, and sometimes witnessed near a local nuclear power plant.

Apparently, the “Lake Erie Lights” have returned once again, and they have locals talking. Some loudly, some in hushed tones. But some are wondering whether these recent waves of UFO sightings over the lake with the creepy name is the real thing or a hoax.

If the new lights and their videos are indeed a hoax, it would be a shame for UFOlogy because Lake Erie has a long history of mind-boggling paranormal activity.

To start, the lake is named after a Native American tribe called the “Erielhonan”, meaning the people with “long tails”. They were also called the “Cat” or “Raccoon” people. What’s more, the region was a hot-bead of abolitionism leading up to the Civil War, a time when the locals on the highlands south of the city told outsiders beware of the lake’s “Wizard Lights”. Some thought they were distressed ships on fire, but daybreak revealed no wreckage, dead bodies or survivors.

One hundred and fifty years later, on a cold winter night in 1988, a UFO described as large as “the Goodyear Blimp” appeared on the lake. Stunned witnesses said at first the craft seemed to be struggling to get off a sheet of ice that was not far from the lake’s shore. As a crowd of witnesses grows, the craft sets loose a squadron of smaller, triangular-shaped craft that buzz the witnesses.

A local Coast Guard team sees the entire episode unfold right in front of their eyes, but within hours the team is apparently strong-armed into silence by military officers from Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. What’s more, the civilians who do see the oblong craft will soon have their homes buzzed by an alleged unmarked black helicopter.

It’s one of the best-documented UFO cases in the history of the US. Twenty years later, in an interview for this book, one of the Coast Guard personnel there that night is still not sure what he saw – or is he?

Since 2004, CUP, the Cleveland  Ufology  Project, has documented 40 sightings from northeast Ohio and from the miles of Lake Erie beaches. CUP was founded in 1952 and, fittingly, is one of the oldest UFO-spotting groups in the country, if not the planet. The latest wave of Lake Erie Lights took place at the beginning of 2010.

A witness saw a triangular-shaped craft with amber lights vanish over the lake. Then for ten nights in a row, witnesses said a mysterious light began appearing over Lake Erie near Cleveland – showing up at around 7:30 pm and zipping around in the darkness for about two hours before disappearing. MSNBC covered the fresh wave, even going live to Cleveland for witness interviews.

A similar light was captured in May, and all videos were posted on YouTube, which has become the clearing house for fresh UFO footage, whether legitimate or bullshit.

“It’s a hot spot,” declares local Ufologist Aaron Clark about the beaches of Lake Erie near Cleveland. “Some believe there’s a UFO base on the bottom of the lake.” One thing is certain, the Lake Erie UFO hype is real: Literally millions have viewed Internet videos of Lake Erie UFOs. The Cleveland Office of Homeland Security has, to an unknown degree, investigated the sightings and perhaps and probably continues to do so. In 2007, an “orb” was videotaped over the Key Bank Tower during a peace rally, and the incident made it on the CBS nightly news.

In 2010, the Cleveland office of Homeland Security refused to comment to UFOcasebook.com on whether they were investigating the recent sightings, even though it has investigated lights over the lake before.

“If you take all of the people in Ohio who are interested in this subject, I bet half of them are from that part of the state,” says Ohio-based William E. Jones, state director for Ohio MUFON, or Mutual UFO Network. “A lot of folks up there have seen things over the years. More people are interested up there. I don’t know why.”

Historically, the total number of eyewitness accounts is unknown because there are so many of them. Stories of “strange ships” on the lake have been circulating since at least the 1800s. Ask anyone who lives near the lake, and either they’ve seen something odd, or know of someone who has. For some, what they saw will remain the mystery of a lifetime.

For a few others, it will take over their life. As it did to Michael Lee Hill, a musician who lives just feet away from the beaches of Lake Erie in the Cleveland suburb of Eastlake, which is where the “Goodyear Blimp” UFO was sighted.

Roughly five years ago, Hill was walking down the beach and something caught his attention out the corner of his eye. Hill told this journalist that a top hat-shaped craft hovering and pulsating over the shoreline. The following is a written account of what he saw, posted on a web site devoted to the paranormal:

“It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen, I did not get that one on tape but it sparked my interest in trying to film them, but before I get into that, let me tell you what this craft looked like,” he wrote.

“It looked like a flat platform made of glowing plasma red, you could make out the edges very well, they were not blurry. On top of this platform sat what looked like a glowing sun, kind of like a ball of plasma that was around the size of a small plane, The ball was about 1/3 the length of the bottom part. Just picture a line with a ball on top and that is what it looked like, the line part about ten feet thick I would say.”

After that first encounter six years ago, the visitations began in earnest, he said. Soon after, he started taking a video camera to the lake front. Since then he’s captured dozens of “orbs” and bright lights that appear to be silently hovering over Lake Erie. He’s downloaded  many of his videos to YouTube. Videos that caught the attention of David Sereda, a world-renown UFOlogist.

Sereda directed Dan Akroyd: Unplugged on UFOs, and in his latest documentary, From Here To Andromeda, he poses the question, “Where should humanity go if Earth were to perish?” Co-producing the documentary is Hill, who created the film’s music.

Hill has also appeared on the History Channel’s UFO Hunters, hosted by Bill Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine. On the episode, the UFO Hunters decide to test Hill’s blood and the blood of another apparent contactee. Both had elevated levels of Creatine Kinase, which is a very rare occurrence in just one person, let alone two.

“There’s a huge story unfolding here,” said Hill from his home near the shores of Lake Erie. “I’ve had contact my whole life. I remember asking my mother, ‘Why do Santa’s elves keep visiting me?’”

Hill believes these UFOs aren’t just dropping in to catch the sites of the blue-dot that is two planets away from a middle- aged sun. “I really do consider myself a spiritual messenger. I know it sounds freaky,” says Hill, who claims he mysteriously had his jaw broken a couple years ago just days before he was to be interviewed by a local broadcast news station. “I think they’re absolutely sending us a message. I believe they are here to help us become a galactic society.”

Hill isn’t the only Eastlake resident who recently saw something strange over the lake. Gary Strauss is not a UFO enthusiast. “Not at all,” he says. “I’m not one of those UFO people.” He’s a chemist and a supervisor at a local laboratory. He’s also lived on the lake in his own home since 1984. He lives in the same neighborhood as Hill, but both claim to have never met.

Early on the morning of June 21st, 2007, Strauss and his son saw four bright lights high above the water. All shaped like the tip of a Sharpie marker. He says the lights were parallel with the shoreline, positioned at 11-o’clock and 30 degrees above the horizon. At first the lights were flat, he said. Then one vanished. Then another. Soon, all four were gone.

Suddenly, they reappeared in the shape of a diamond, says Strauss. Then they went flat again. This went on for more than an hour. He called Eastlake police and they dispatched an officer. Strauss says the officer also saw the lights. He remembers the officer saying, “‘What is that?’”

The following day, his son checked the Internet for lights over Lake Erie. He viewed one of Hill’s videos. And shouted: “‘That’s it!’” said Strauss. “‘That’s what we saw. That’s what it looks like!’”

But unlike other Lake Erie witnesses, Strauss doesn’t believe the lights are extraterrestrial. Strauss has contemplated other explanations. Planes. Boats. Canadians out to fool gullible Americans. But none of those seem plausible to him.

“I personally think it’s the government,” he said. “They’re experimenting with some type of technology. Maybe it’s the aerospace industry.”

Strauss believes the lights may be some type of exotic radar innovation. “They’re bouncing radar off some type of object. Some form of radar reflection technology. I’m just making an educated guess.”

An example of radar reflection technology has been applied to Laser Geodynamic Satellites or LAGEOS spacecrafts. Publicly, the US government says two are in orbit, and both are roughly the size of a basketball. They are made of brass, and partially covered with a retro-reflection material.

A material that returns light in the direction it comes from, similar to a road sign. It is believed that lasers have been used to illuminate them from space. Could US space interests have developed a satellite that can re-enter the atmosphere? Is the US government secretly testing these satellites over Lake Erie?

Nevertheless, the Lake Erie lights have struck a chord of intrigue within his mind. “I look outside a lot more. I want to see it again,” says Strauss, “and this time, I’m going to have my camera.” Asked if he’s becoming obsessive, like Richard Dreyfuss’ character Roy Neary of “Close Encounters,” he’s says no way. “No. I’m not obsessive. Absolutely not.”

The Eastlake police actually had two witnesses see those lights that night. A detective, who wished his name not be used for publication, says he too saw the lights, but from a different vantage point. The Eastlake police asked the Cleveland office of Homeland Security to look into the sighting.

The unnamed detective said the Homeland Security office discovered that on the night of the sighting the Canadian Coast Guard was near the opposite side of the lake searching for a man who had been reported missing. Using a helicopter, the Canadian Coast Guard was dropping flares, connected to miniature parachutes, over the water.

Later it was discovered the man had drowned. Strauss believes it couldn’t have been flares because the lights were in a straight line, then vanished, and reappeared in a diamond formation. When trying to explain the Phoenix Lights the military used the same explanation.

Nonetheless, are the aerospace industry or the military, or Cleveland’s NASA John Glenn Research Center, conducting secret tests over Lake Erie? Due to the amount of classified military research conducted during the Bush administration and now ongoing, it’s hard to dismiss the military explanation as to “What else?” the “Lake Erie lights” might be. During the last decade, the Bush administration funneled billions to the aerospace industry so to develop space-based weapons and super-powered radar sensors all in the name of missile defense.

Super-secret military space planes and space bomber programs are also believed to have been revived. Killer satellites loaded with lasers and missiles are on the drawing board. The Pentagon’s US Space Command is still desperate to build the ultimate space radar so to protect US space assets and tell the difference between a balloon decoy in space from a mushroom-cloud inducing ICBM. And while the Obama administration promised to gut the missile defense budget and never weaponize space, the current White House has so far cut just a sliver off of missile defense spending.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon or NASA will never say publicly if secret research is ongoing over Lake Erie. One reason why is, it would be a lot easier to retrieve plummeting and secret technology from the shallowest of Great Lakes instead of some residential area. The evidence for using the lake’s airspace as a testing ground leads to NASA’s Plum Brook site in Sandusky, OH, a small town on Lake Erie, 50 or so miles west of Cleveland.

The site is home to the world’s largest space environment simulation chamber, called the Space Power Facility. The chamber is 100 feet wide and 122 feet long. “It was designed to test space hardware… in a simulated low-earth orbit environment,” states NASA’s web site.

The tests performed there in the past are impressive: Mars Landers, Solar Sails, International Space Station hardware, for example. The chamber is scheduled to test NASA’s new spacecraft, Orion, which is planned to take the US back to the moon by 2020. Recent upgrades to the Plum Brook site will also allow it to test “next generation lunar landers, robotic systems, and military and commercial aircraft.”

Moreover, just a three-hour drive away from here is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, considered by many to be a top-secret research facility for the Air Force.

Since UFOs became an American and global obsession in the middle of last century, the US military has been a chief suspect as to what they are. And if the US military were testing over Lake Erie, then they’ve tricked many an Ohioan. But when it comes to playing UFO tricks over Lake Erie, or with a video camera to be more specific, skeptics say the trickster is Michael Lee Hill of Eastlake. Skeptics question whether Hill (along with his videos) has pulled an elaborate hoax, just like the notorious “Haitian UFO” video of 2008 on YouTube, which was viewed more than five million times, but then debunked by the Los Angeles Times.

After Hill posted one of his Lake Erie UFO videos to AboveTopSecret.com a popular paranormal discussion board, the thread took an unconvinced slant. Hill claimed he is pointing his camera directly North, over the lake and towards Canada. But with the help of a flight tracking map, one skeptic shows that Hill’s camera is more likely pointing to the West and is probably filming the incoming flight path of two distant planes in an “S”- shaped landing pattern.

Two airports are in the vicinity of where Hill says he is shooting. Abovetopsecret.com has labeled Hill’s videos a hoax. In 2010, a similar story line would play out with the newest wave of sightings. One of the main witnesses this time was 20-year-old Eugene Erlikh. It was his camera that was capturing the new lights, the ones that re-appeared ten nights in a row in March of 2010. Besides MSNBC, MUFON also began taking notice.

They sent investigators. The lights, however, would sputter upon MUFON’s arrival, and not much else was witnessed. Indeed, the investigator put an apparent end to the newest Lake Erie UFO cluster after two MUFON teams in separate areas concluded the recent lights were airplanes making incoming landing-patterns to a local airport.

Ben Radford, a paranormal investigator and managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, said YouTube and the ubiquitous Internet is fueling a UFO frenzy. “The problem is anyone can post anything and call it a UFO, a ghost, but there’s no filter,” he says. “You don’t know if that person has a history of hoaxes or mental illness. What happens is a real case is drowned out by a sea of hoaxes, mistakes, or misidentifications.”

Could Hill’s videos marginalize over 150-years of Lake Erie sightings?

In the 1860s, and for sometime before that, those who lived on the highlands south of Cleveland were perplexed by a mystery on the lake – they called the phenomenon “The Wizard Lights”. One such account of these lights occurred on the night of Oct. 29th, 1867, when something strange – and bright – appeared out on the lake. Many thought it looked as if a steamer was in distress and on fire.

“The object appeared to be some 200 or more feet in length upon the water, and about as high above the water as an upper cabin steamer,” stated one witness. “The sky and water were beautifully irradiated by the light during its great brilliancy.”

The witness continued, “The resemblance which this light bore to that of the burning steamer was so strong that I confidently expected the arrival of the boats from the wreck during the night.” But none came, nor did any wreckage wash ashore. There was some speculation that heavy winds had opened crevices in the lake, sending underground gas, ignited by lightning, spewing into the air.

One hundred and twenty years later, however, many credible witnesses would swear the “mysterious lights” on the lake was a ship. But not from this planet.

On a cold, clear winter’s night in early March of 1988, Sheila and Henry Baker were driving their three children to their lake-front home, which is not far from where Hill has shot many of his videos. But as they neared the waterfront, Sheila’s attention was drawn to something odd over the lake.

It appeared to be… hovering? She went down to the beach. And there before her, was something much “larger than the Good-year Blimp”. It was a gun-metal colored, “football-shaped” object.

Bright ,white light poured out of each end. It was dead silent. Then it began to “teeter-totter.”

The ice underneath it began to rumble and implode with thunderous cracks, she said. It appeared to be struggling. Perhaps trying to escape to the stars above. Far from this strange planet and into infinity. Maybe those aboard knew their presence, their destruction right there in these icy waters, could lead to some unfathomable consequences for the billions who lived on this small blue dot.

Several years later during an interview with Cleveland’s largest daily newspaper the Plain Dealer, Sheila Baker leaned over to a reporter and insisted: “I saw it.” So did several others. And as the crowd grew, the vessel became more active. Bursting out of the apparent mother ship were several triangular-shaped, Cessna-sized crafts.

One buzzed a woman and her dog which cowered and whimpered. Another approached two young Coast Guard personnel called to the scene. A picture was taken of a smaller craft and published in the Plain Dealer. Still in their Chevy Suburban, the Coast Guard team gave a running report back to their base, said the Bakers, who also told their story to MUFON investigators.

“Be advised the object appears to be landing on the lake…e advised there are other objects moving around it.”

For more than an hour this continued. Ice cracking. Pulsating bright lights flashing on and off. Small ships circling and diving around the larger. Then like most UFO encounters… it vanished.

Nothing but chunks of ice, dead silence, and a handful of witnesses left with the shock of a lifetime. The Bakers said the Coast Guard personnel at that moment were “ghost-faced.”

This UFO story, like many prolific UFO tales, has spread across the Internet. And in this particular case, the story is accompanied by a copy of a Coast Guard incident report.

Whether it is legitimate is a mystery. A search of Archives.gov and other records was not successful, and Ohio Coast Guard public affairs officers said the 1988 report was shredded.

Nevertheless, the incident report states “the Large Object was almost on the ice,” and “Smaller Objects began hovering in the area where the large object landed and, after a few minutes, they began flying around.” The incident made the local press the following days, which brought out the skeptics.

One local astronomer said witnesses were looking at the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, coupled with “spontaneous gas emissions.”

But skeptics weren’t the only apparent naysayers to get involved in this UFO case. Later on the night of the sighting, the Bakers decided to call the local Coast Guard outpost. “They told us, ‘It was out of their league and out of their hands’,” said Sheila Baker to MUFON.

“A person in command there, and he got on the phone with me, and that’s exactly what he told me. That they had to forward all their information to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. They said they were not allowed to investigate it any further, and that they we’re told to stay out of it.” She also was told NASA was getting involved.

MUFON investigators tried to interview the two young Coast Guard personnel, but were rebuffed by their commanding officers. Twenty years later, however, one of the Coast Guardsmen there that night spoke to me. And if you believe what he says, you might think the Bakers and other witnesses were stretching the truth and that the Coast Guard’s own report is indeed a fake.

If you don’t believe hat he has to say, then you might think the US military grabbed the man’s forearm and twisted it until he cried for mercy, for his career and for his government pension.

John Knaub was on the beach that cold, clear night back in 1988. He’s retired from the Coast Guard and lives in Virginia. When told he is linked to one of America’s great UFO mysteries, he laughs out loud.

“I did not see any cigar-shaped ship. All I saw were lights. It was not a UFO,” he says.

Knaub says that night his station on Lake Eire began getting a high number of calls saying something odd was going on out on the lake. The station figured someone might be in distress. Knaub says when they arrived, they did see lights.

It should be noted that Knaub was the only eyewitness of this case to be reached by this reporter. Extensive efforts were used to reach the others, but none could be found.

For two years after that night, Knaub was harassed by UFO enthusiasts wanting to know what he saw. “It was ridiculous.” Up until now, he was “sick and tired of talking about it, and I refused to talk about it.”

When told he was “ghost faced”, he again laughs. What about the sounds of exploding ice? “I don’t remember it. We saw multi-colored lights, but they were not flares,” he said. “We went there to see if someone was in distress. But there was no boat.”

What was it then? “I have no clue.”