Birthday Road Trip on a ‘UFO Highway’
Well, can you think of a better way to kick off a surprise birthday road trip? Dream-come-true fiancée (too mushy for a paranormal newsletter? Fine.) “See You on the Other Side” podcast producer & co-host Wendy Lynn Staats ‘abducted’ me for a weekend getaway of mysteries. Driving north through Wisconsin, we drove alongside the expansive Kettle Moraine State Forest in Eastern Wisconsin. The southern portion of this forest is where Bigfoot hunter Jay Bachochin lead me on two expeditions, each of which left me beyond words (check out his documentary, “Finding Jay” now free on Amazon Prime). So, already, I knew I was in a strange area. Little did I know, I was about to come face-to-face with a being that came from another world.
 The first thing that really caught our attention on the drive was Dundee Mountain. Yes, a mountain peak in Wisconsin… not a common sight in the Midwest.
Within 10 minutes, we were at our destination… Benson’s Holiday Hide-A-Way, a small lakefront bar that appeared closed and possibly out of business at first blush, owing to a ‘For Sale’ sign that has been on the building for over a decade. Fortunately for us, the bar was open and we were the only revelers to go along with bar owner Bill Benson and dozens of alien figures of various sizes.
Quickly, I realized I was at ground zero of a UFO sighting hot spot. You would assume a small, lakefront bar like this would be inhabited by ‘salt of the earth,’ blue collar recreational fishermen, and that is likely still true, but the conversation tends to be about strange lights in the sky, frequently seen in the area of Dundee Mountain, like Devil’s Tower in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
 According to Benson, UFOs had been seen in the area for decades, even before he ran the bar. Crop circles have popped up in the area well before the phenomena took the media by storm in the early ‘90s. Within the last two decades, the bar and shoreline has been a great spot to set up a camera to wait and catch a glimpse of strange crafts flying through the sky, especially at sunset or shortly thereafter. He’s even got a well-worn photo album (pictured, left) sporting dozens of unexplainable pictures taken on the premises. I must admit, many of them were very compelling.
Perhaps the landmark feature of this dive is hidden away in a foggy jar behind the bar... (Click here to continue reading)
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By the time we reached our final destination, the weather had turned. Soon intense lightning strikes were replaced by intense snow. Very long, dark, narrow, wooded roads finally opened up to a single lane, converted railroad bridge that leads to the remote, tiny, haunted Miscauno Island, which is located in the middle of the Menominee River on the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in Pembine, WI.
