Investigators and organizations: the local record

1947 — present

The negative, at true size: No South Bend-seated UFO organization, and no named South Bend UFO investigator, appears in the press or official record. The organized Indiana record of the subject belongs to the state level and to other cities: NICAP, the era's national civilian organization, ran its Indiana work through Fran Ridge in the Vincennes and Mount Vernon area of southern Indiana, whose regional files underlie much of this state's documented case record; the Mutual UFO Network's Indiana chapter is likewise a state body, quoted in the state surveys for its characterization of Indiana reports generally. This city's documented institutional actor in the subject is not a believers' group at all but its newspaper, which in 1952 did the organizing — with the Air Force's cooperation and its own radio station's communications net — that elsewhere fell to civilian saucer clubs. On the skeptical side the record is likewise institutional rather than local: the explanations in this section come from the Air Force's evaluation categories, from Indiana University's astronomer Frank K. Edmondson as Flying quoted him in 1950 — after the explainable reports are discounted, "there is a residue left that I cannot explain" — from the Condon study on which Blue Book's closure rested, and in the present day from the meteor analysts of the American Meteor Society and NASA, whose fireball reductions are printed in the database entry above. A city chapter, a local investigator, a Michiana saucer club: the record reached does not contain one, and this section does not invent one.

Sources:

1. This section's case entries and their sources, searched in full for a South Bend organization or investigator — none carried; the sky-watch entry (above) for the Tribune and WSBT's documented organizing role, 1952.
2. Stacker, "States with the most UFO sightings" (Indiana entry) — the Mutual UFO Network of Indiana as the state-level body characterizing Indiana reports.
3. Curtis Fuller, "The Flying Saucers — Fact or Fiction?", Flying, July 1950 — Dr. Frank K. Edmondson, director of the Goethe Link Observatory, Indiana University, quoted.
4. This history, Fort Wayne full-history dump, Aliens section — NICAP's Indiana organization under Fran Ridge (Vincennes / Mount Vernon) and the state's MUFON record, from the Indiana sources documented there.