The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1960–2014 · WHO ACTUALLY WORKED THIS SKY
Organized investigation came to Indiana early, but it was never headquartered here, and this article prints the local record at exactly the size it reaches. The state's first organization of record was NICAP's Indiana Subcommittee, Indiana Unit No. 1, authorized in November 1960 and headquartered at Vincennes, in the southwest; its rapid-deployment team worked the great Indiana wave of 1967 across the region, and its report on that wave survives. APRO's Indiana man was Donald Worley of Connersville, in the east-central counties: when the 1966 flap opened over his ground he was, the APRO Bulletin says, the only APRO representative in his area, and he investigated and filed case after case himself — the October 5, 1966 Connersville landing report among them — and he was still the state's APRO investigator of record when he worked the Hartford City occupant case in October 1973. The third figure is Francis L. Ridge: transferred to Mt. Vernon, in Posey County, in January 1973, he set up the UFO Filter Center there and ran it to 1995, serving as MUFON state section director for his three-county area — the Filter Center doubling as headquarters for the State Director, Indiana Group, MUFON — logging reports across a six-state region into his Regional Sighting Information Database and working closely, by his own account, with media and law enforcement. It is Ridge's documentation team work, with Richard Hall's, that stands behind NICAP's chronologies, in which this county's Kloth case is carried.
For St. Joseph County itself, the organizational record reached is one man's one evening. On September 26, 2014, at about 8:38 p.m., Dr. Bob Wenzel Gross of Mishawaka watched a bright orange orb from his own backyard and sent his account, by Facebook message, to two members of MUFON of Indiana; he had earlier researched a similar orb reported near Mishawaka around 2010. Gross — a member of a Pennsylvania investigators' association, writing later on the value of UFO experiences — is the county's whole named organizational trace in the record reached: a resident witness who routed his own report to the state organization, as the system is designed to be used. No MUFON chapter or section seated in this county, no county section director, and no filed county investigation by any organization appears in the record reached for this build. The settling source for the full picture is named: the MUFON Case Management System's extract for St. Joseph County, which would show every case the modern organization has opened on this ground, and which this run did not pull. Until it is pulled, the honest statement stands: Indiana's investigators were real, named, and productive — at Vincennes, Connersville, and Mt. Vernon — and on this ground their organizations were a mailbox, not an office.
Sources: Francis L. Ridge, "The Sighting Wave of 1967 — Indiana" (NICAP, Indiana Unit No. 1); APRO Bulletin, Nov.–Dec. 1966 (Connersville flap; Worley investigations), and Sept.–Oct. 1973 (Hartford City); Ridge, Regional Encounters (UFO Filter Center, 1973–1995; MUFON Indiana Group headquarters note); Bob Wenzel Gross, "The True Value of UFO Experiences" (2019), and his account of the Sept. 26, 2014 Mishawaka orb (theufochronicles.com).