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OCTOBER 1973 · THE GREAT WAVE, TWENTY-SIX YEARS ON
By 1973 there was no Blue Book; the Air Force had been out of the business for four years, and the great wave of that October was worked by the successor record — the press, the police blotters, and the civilian organizations' files. Nationally the wave peaked in mid-to-late October, October 17 standing as perhaps the most extraordinary single day of the flap in NICAP's chronology of it. Indiana's share was large, and its geography is measurable. The state's center of the wave lay in the east-central counties. Muncie and Delaware County went through what the Delaware County Historical Society's director calls a UFO mania: hundreds of reports across October, an explosion of five or six days, some one hundred calls to the Muncie police and more to the sheriff, sightings clustering at the intersection of Wheeling and McGalliard. Around that center the state record seats case after case in the same corridor: at Huntington on October 15 a low object followed a farm family's truck; at Connersville through October 15–21 the "fish-shaped" craft with its clear front compartment was reported again and again; at Hartford City on October 22, Mr. and Mrs. Dwayne Donathan reported two small silver figures on the road — the case the APRO Bulletin headlined "Occupants in Indiana," investigated by APRO's Donald Worley and later catalogued by the Center for UFO Studies for the impressions found in the adjoining cornfield. A second, older center worked the state's southwest: Francis Ridge's UFO Filter Center at Mt. Vernon, in Posey County, logged the region's reports through the wave and recorded its one instrumented event when its MADAR detection unit triggered on November 1. The northeast felt the wave at Fort Wayne, where a NUFORC-based state summary records October 9, 1973 as the night first-responder switchboards were overwhelmed by nearly 700 calls, among them radar operators at a Fort Wayne airfield reporting irregular activity on their screen.
Against that measured geography, this ground's share is sized honestly: none was found. NICAP's 1973 chronology — compiled with the Filter Center's own six-state log behind it, and searched for this build — carries Indiana entries at Indianapolis, Huntington, Connersville, Hartford City, Upton, and Mt. Vernon, and no entry at South Bend, Mishawaka, or Walkerton. No report seated in St. Joseph County appears in the 1973 record reached: not in the chronology, not in the Filter Center's published casework, not in the press summaries of the state's wave. The county that held Indiana's one official Unknown of 1952 sat out the state's biggest wave a generation later. That is the finding, and it prints at that size: the wave was real as a reporting event, its Indiana center lay east-central with outposts northeast and southwest, and Walkerton's ground contributed nothing to it that any record reached preserves, at a distance of some eighty to a hundred miles from every center the wave actually had.
Sources: NICAP, The 1973 UFO Chronology (nicap.org), introduction and Indiana entries; Francis L. Ridge, Regional Encounters: A Century of UFO Sightings in the Midwest (UFO Filter Center, Mt. Vernon), "The Wave of 1973" — Huntington and Connersville entries; Indiana Public Media, "Close Encounters of the Muncie Kind" (Delaware County Historical Society; Muncie Public Library archives); APRO Bulletin, Sept.–Oct. 1973, "Occupants in Indiana" (Hartford City), via the CUFOS physical-trace catalogue; Stacker, "States With the Most UFO Sightings" (NUFORC-based), Indiana — Oct. 9, 1973.