The database era: the National UFO Reporting Center

1974 — present

The system now: Since 1974 the national record of sightings has been kept not by the Air Force but by the National UFO Reporting Center, founded that year by Robert J. Gribble — a volunteer center, reachable by hotline and web form, which has catalogued more than 150,000 reports and states its own discipline on its databank page: "The National UFO Reporting Center makes no claims as to the validity of the information in any of these reports." The counts below are report counts throughout, exactly as this project's Fort Wayne file states its own: they measure reporting, not visitation. Indiana's totals, as the compilations give them, are these. The UFO Sightings USA compilation of February 2024 counts 2,667 reported sightings in Indiana from 1969 to 2023, seventeenth among the states, and ranks the state's cities Indianapolis first with 265 reports, Fort Wayne second with 118, then Evansville (101), Mount Vernon (87) and Newburgh (86). South Bend stands outside that top five, and the center's own web index did not yield a machine-readable South Bend city total; the city's absence from the state's leaders is the documented fact, and no total is invented for it. Stacker's state survey, built on the center's data, ranks Indiana twenty-seventh among the states at 40 reported sightings per 100,000 residents.

Specimens, at the database's own size: The center's South Bend reports, as its database carries them, are the ordinary currency of the modern record — lights, discs and durations, unadjudicated. One can stand for the file. On 17 April 2017 (report no. 133659, filed 20 April), a South Bend witness watched about ten red lights rise in the northeast over five minutes, changing their rate of climb, some descending, each fading in turn and replaced by another rising — "second sighting in five years, same part of the sky," the witness wrote, closing with the database era's characteristic sentence: "I am an avid airplane enthusiast… a general skeptic… These were not aircraft lights or flares. I do not believe they are alien craft but I cannot explain them by phenomena known to me." The same database rows give the city's recent rhythm: a disc reported for one minute on 13 October 2017; bright lights for fifteen to twenty minutes on 14 February 2017; an "other" form for two hours on 5 February 2017; and, in the county's other cities, a circle over Mishawaka for thirty seconds on 6 April 2019 and a cylinder over Osceola for fifteen minutes on 17 April 2018. None carries an official finding; the center investigates none of them to a conclusion, and this section reports them as reports.

The explained sky, documented: The modern record also documents its own explanations at scale, through a second reporting system: the American Meteor Society's fireball logs, whose eyewitness reports NASA's analysts reduce to trajectories. On the night of 10 February 2026 a fireball crossed northern Indiana bright enough to draw about a hundred eyewitness reports across five states; the Post-Tribune's account placed the reports' center from West Lafayette to southwest of South Bend, with motorists stopping on the road, and the society's and NASA's analysis resolved the event in a paragraph: a small fragment of an asteroid, first visible 48 miles above the Indiana town of Trinity, travelling southeast at 29,000 miles an hour and disintegrating 27 miles above Laura, Ohio. A Mishawaka witness stands in the society's reports for an earlier fireball, of 12 November 2023. The two systems together are the modern shape of this whole subject in the record: an unexplained-reports database that claims no validity, and a meteor database that explains, in public and in detail, the single most reported class of sky event.

Sources:

1. National UFO Reporting Center, databank front page (nuforc.org) — the center's founding purpose, its report indexes, and its disclaimer: "The National UFO Reporting Center makes no claims as to the validity of the information in any of these reports"; report totals as carried in Stacker's survey (more than 150,000 processed) and the center's reference summaries (some 170,000 catalogued).
2. UFO Sightings USA compilation (February 2024), as carried by WBKR (11 February 2024) and 103GBF (7 February 2024) — Indiana's 2,667 reports, 1969–2023, seventeenth among states; the top-five city table (Indianapolis 265, Fort Wayne 118, Evansville 101, Mount Vernon 87, Newburgh 86).
3. Stacker, "States with the most UFO sightings" — Indiana twenty-seventh, at 40 reported sightings per 100,000 residents (NUFORC data).
4. National UFO Reporting Center report no. 133659 (sighted 17 April 2017, reported 20 April 2017, South Bend), and the center's South Bend, Mishawaka and Osceola report rows for 2017–2019, as carried in the UFO Hunters mirror of the center's database (source stated there as NUFORC, with case numbers).
5. American Meteor Society / NASA fireball event record 20260211-043200 (fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov) — the 10 February 2026 fireball's analysis (asteroid fragment; Trinity, Indiana, to Laura, Ohio; 29,000 mph); Post-Tribune (Chicago Tribune Media) — the same evening's reports centered from West Lafayette to southwest of South Bend, the Adler Planetarium's Michelle Nichols quoted; American Meteor Society event 2023/6941 — the 12 November 2023 fireball, with a Mishawaka witness report.