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1974–2026 · THE DATABASE ERA, KEPT SEPARATE FROM THE FILE ERA
The National UFO Reporting Center is a different instrument from the Air Force file, and this article reads it as one. NUFORC was founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble as a telephone hotline and is now an online databank of self-submitted reports — more than 150,000 of them — which the Center posts essentially as received. Its own terms print on the databank's face: "The National UFO Reporting Center makes no claims as to the validity of the information in any of these reports." Reports received before March 2023 carry no grade at all; since then the Center sorts new reports into tiers, from the most dramatic to the explainable. Nothing in the database was investigated by the database. Read on those terms, Indiana's file in it stood at 2,762 reports when counted in September 2024, and has kept growing since.
Walkerton, Indiana's own record in the databank, read as whole as this run could reach, is two reports. February 16, 2000, 10:00 p.m. — filed under the shape "Light": "it had 3 white lights almost like an up side down triangle. In the center it had a red light which never blinked or flashed." The report was filed the next day and posted in the Center's index of February 23, 2000. April 5, 2017 — a five-minute sighting, shape not stated, carried in the NUFORC-sourced listings for the county's area. Two reports in the database's half-century: that is the town's modern mass, against the state's two-thousand-plus. One exclusion prints with them, on this history's standing rule that names are not ground: the databank also holds a Walkerton report of February 21, 2018, a slow-moving triangle over a driveway — seated at Walkerton, Virginia. It is not counted here, exactly as a Starke County address is not counted as this town in the crime leg. The county's reporting mass in the database sits where the county's people sit, in South Bend and Mishawaka; the exact county count was not read off the Center's state index in this run and stands as a named gap, its settler being that index — NUFORC's reports-by-state page for Indiana, read whole. The two eras do not merge: the file era's four county entries were investigated and disposed of by an office; the database era's two town reports were posted as received, and no rate, trend, or comparison between the two instruments is supported by either.
Sources: NUFORC Databank (nuforc.org), databank front page and tier note; NUFORC reports-by-date-posted index, Feb. 23, 2000 (Walkerton, IN, occurred Feb. 16, 2000); NUFORC-sourced sighting listings (UFO Hunters mirror of the NUFORC record), Walkerton, Indiana, Apr. 5, 2017, and the Walkerton, Virginia exclusion (occurred Feb. 21, 2018, posted Mar. 18, 2019); WJLT (my1053wjlt.com), Sept. 13, 2024 — Indiana total 2,762 reports.