1973: Fort Wayne's share of the great wave

20 June — October 1973

The local reports: The autumn of 1973 brought the largest national sighting wave since 1952, and Fort Wayne's part in it is documented report by report. On 20 June 1973, at 10:30 p.m., a resident reported a large hovering object, round or pear-shaped, with four or five red lights on top and bottom and a large white light on top (NICAP's regional data file). On 23 September 1973, at 7:20 p.m., a woman waiting in her car to turn into the Glenbrook Shopping Center watched, for several minutes, a huge object shaped like an ocean liner — rounded back, flat bottom and top — with five rows of throbbing yellow lights on its side, moving slowly until it went out of sight behind trees. The next night, 24 September, two Fort Wayne patrolmen, checking a report from a woman from Churubusco, saw an unidentified light moving slowly; authorities at Baer Field were notified, reported that no aircraft or balloons had been launched, and themselves saw the object in the west (Skylook magazine's account, as carried in NICAP's regional file). The Fort Wayne newspaper glance adds the wave's local tail: a spherical object with no exhaust or visible windows reported between 10:15 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. on 24 September in its telling; at least two objects with red and white lights near New Haven on 18 October; a fireman near St. Joe reporting "20 or 30" greenish-white lights circling on 21 October, one appearing to plummet; and a woman and her grandson reporting a greyish-white object south of Fort Wayne in October.

The state night and the radar line: Indiana's peak came on 9 October 1973, when, as Stacker's state summary (compiled from NUFORC data and MUFON of Indiana's account of the era) puts it, first-responder switchboards were overwhelmed by nearly 700 calls reporting sightings across the state — blinking lights near the ground, an object watched through a telescope by astronomy students, and radar operators at a Fort Wayne airfield having irregular activity show up on a screen. Francis Ridge's Regional Encounters, the UFO Filter Center's history of Midwest cases, carries the radar element in its own careful form: against 15 October 1973 it records, "An unconfirmed radar track near Huntington at Fort Wayne, Indiana was reported." Unconfirmed is the word the source uses, and it is the word this section keeps: a radar return was reported at Fort Wayne's airfield during the wave, and no confirmation of it stands in the record reached.

Sources:

1. NICAP, 1973 regional data file (madar/graphs) — the 20 June 1973 Fort Wayne report; the 24 September 1973 patrolmen and Baer Field account (citing Skylook, SL-72, p. 15).
2. Francis L. Ridge, Regional Encounters: The FC Files (UFO Filter Center, Mt. Vernon, Indiana, 1994) — the 23 September 1973 Glenbrook account; the unconfirmed radar track reported near Huntington at Fort Wayne, 15 October 1973.
3. "Close Encounters: A Glance at What's Been Spotted in the Sky Around Fort Wayne," UFO Newsclipping Service, no. 198 (January 1986) — the September–October 1973 local entries.
4. Stacker, "States with the most UFO sightings" (Indiana entry) — 9 October 1973: nearly 700 calls statewide; the Fort Wayne airfield radar report.