October 1973: the great wave's share, measured honestly

October 1973 · Run B #173

The state's centre lay in the centre and 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 not the St. Joseph valley. The wave's Indiana record runs through Muncie and Delaware County, where the county historical society and the public library's archivist describe an October “UFO mania” — hundreds of reports in the month, some 100 calls to Muncie police, a Dairy Queen advertising UFO sundaes by 9 November; through the east-centre, where APRO field investigator Donald Worley of Connersville worked the Hartford City occupant case of 22 October and the Laurel and Connersville reports of 11 October; through Huntington on 15 October, with an unconfirmed radar report near Fort Wayne the same night; and through Francis Ridge's UFO Filter Center at Mt. Vernon in Posey County, which took the state's south. Statewide, switchboards were overwhelmed on the wave's peak night — nearly 700 calls on 9 October 1973, in the compiled state record. Against that record, the national chronologies and the state wave literature 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 newspapers, under the same flap-filled sky, with no case of their own entering any file — a negative printed at full size because the wave is the standard against which local silence is usually, and wrongly, filled in.

Indiana Public Media, “Close Encounters of the Muncie Kind” (Delaware County Historical Society and Muncie Public Library testimony; the October 1973 Muncie mania); the APRO Bulletin's fall-1973 Indiana reports (Worley files: Hartford City, 22 October 1973; Laurel and Connersville, 11 October 1973, republished May 1976); Francis Ridge, Regional Encounters (the UFO Filter Center, Mt. Vernon; the Huntington report and Fort Wayne radar note of 15 October 1973); the Stacker state compilation from NUFORC data (the ~700 calls of 9 October 1973). Searches shown in the article.