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October 1973
The state's centre lay in the south, and this ground's share was a watching brief: the October 1973 wave was the largest in American history, and Indiana's share of it was real — but its documented centre was southern and central Indiana, not the St. Joseph valley. The wave's Indiana record, in the NICAP chronology and the investigators' own files, runs through Francis Ridge's UFO Filter Center at Mt. Vernon in Posey County, where Ridge — MUFON state-section director for Posey, Vanderburgh and Gibson counties, later Indiana state director — took calls constantly through October and November: the L&N train encounter east of Mt. Vernon at 6:50 a.m. on 20 October, the Ford Road object the night of the Mansfield, Ohio, helicopter case on 18 October, MADAR anomaly detections on 1 November; and through Don Worley's APRO field work in the east-centre, the Hartford City occupant case of 22 October and the Fayette County and Laurel and Connersville reports of 11–24 October. Indianapolis contributes one chronology line (19 October, a Cessna pilot and a radar object, no details). Against that record, the Tribune's October 1973 coverage and the national chronologies were searched for a St. Joseph County case: none is carried. No Kloth of 1973 stands in any file reached; the county that produced the 1952 Unknown produced no documented case in the greatest wave on record. This ground's share of October 1973 is therefore measured at its true size: readers of the same newspaper, under the same flap-filled sky, with no case of their own entering any file — a negative the leg prints at full size because the wave is the standard against which local silence is usually, and wrongly, filled in.
From the NICAP 1973 chronology and Francis Ridge's own Filter Center account (NICAP), the APRO Bulletin's fall-1973 Indiana reports (Worley files), and the Tribune coverage as reached. Searches shown in the article.