Midland, Michigan: Sparkling ball of fire hovers over sand, Dow Chemical analyzes residue

At 5:15 p.m. on July 9, 1947, electrician Raymond Edward Lane and his wife Laura were picking huckleberries near Midland, Michigan, when they heard a kind of 'puff' noise and saw a ball of white, sparkling fire, like a Fourth of July sparkler and about the size of a bushel basket, hovering several feet above a stretch of sand no more than 100 feet away. After about 10 or 15 seconds the light went out and the object vanished, leaving only a peculiar dark substance on the sand and some metallic fragments. Lane collected fragments in a tin can and brought them the next morning to Robert S. Spencer, a senior researcher at the Dow Chemical Company materials research laboratory in Midland, who went to the site with Lane and Dow's internal security chief Edward Fales. Dow's spectroscopy laboratory found the shiny pellets to be largely silver mixed with a bit of silicon and concluded that they consisted of fused sand; by the end of September an ash-like powder from the site had been identified as slightly radioactive thorite mixed with magnesium hydroxide and other trace minerals. The conclusion was that the sighting resulted from some kind of home-made fireworks experiment, although Dow chemist John Josef Grebe suspected it might have been a small missile. The entry cites NICAP, the FBI file released under PURSUE, Bloecher's 1947 wave report and Joel Carpenter's 1998 IUR article. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.