Michigan often plays a starring role in UFO documentaries. Sightings from Lake Michigan were a recent subject of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries and the melancholy short John Was Trying to Contact Aliens was based on the explorations of a northern Michigan man.

UFO sightings over the Blue Water region of Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario played a pivotal role in the life of Rob Freeman who says an encounter in this boyhood hometown in 1966 led him to a lifetime passion of UFO hunting. His story will be told in a documentary due out in early 2023, The Man Who Wanted to Make Contact.

The doc follows Freeman far from his Blue Water roots as he embarks on a globetrotting search for the truth behind UFOs by seeking out other witnesses.

The sighting that launched his ambition was part of a widely obseved outbreak across southern Canada and Eastern Michigan in spring 1966, the case famously dismissed by the government as "swamp gas" despite pressure from the future president and then Michigan congressman/House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford for further investigation.

The Sarnia Observer dug into the making of Rob Freeman's project:

A decade or so ago, he met Mark McNabb, a filmmaker now living in Toronto, who grew up in Petrolia and made several films in the Sarnia area...

Freeman said he was on a film set with McNabb when the subject of UFOs came up one day, so he told the story about his experience as a youngster in Sarnia.

After doing some research, McNabb proposed he and Freeman work on a documentary about what he discovered is a worldwide movement of individuals seeking to make contact with otherworldly visitors....

He and Freeman spent the past eight years travelling the world to document efforts people have made to make contact with extraterrestrials.

Check out the trailer for the documentary:

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