The 10 Weirdest UFO Cases in Indiana History

As a subject of two recent TV documentaries, the case of former Brownsburg resident Matthew Reed—detailed in IM’s March 2014 feature, “Alienated”—might presently be Indiana’s most famous extraterrestrial encounter. But it’s certainly not the first.

Mysterious “Airship” Sightings / Vincennes (1897)

Starting in 1896, witnesses in California reported seeing a large, unidentified craft in the sky, and numerous sightings surfaced in other states as the object (or objects) purportedly made its way east across the country—that is, before the invention of the airplane and long-range dirigibles. Newspapers hyped the progress of the “airship,” including the Vincennes Morning Commercial, which, in April 1897, printed the accounts of a number of “reputable citizens” who variously claimed to have seen something resembling a sphere of golden light, a ball of fire, and a flying steamboat.

A “Huge Metallic Object” / Terre Haute (1951)

Just four years after the oft-disputed UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, a Teletype message arrived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, addressed to a member of the USAF intelligence brass. It related that Roy Messmore, chief aircraft communicator at Terre Haute’s Hulman Municipal Airport, had “joined the ranks of those who now believe in flying saucers” after he saw a “huge metallic object speeding across the field.” Air Force intelligence ordered an immediate investigation and discovered that a pilot flying over nearby Paris, Illinois, had separately reported a similar sighting only three minutes later. An official report concluded that what the men saw “may have been jet aircraft observed when the reflection of the sun may have distorted the aircraft in the eyes of the observer.” In his bestselling book The Hynek UFO Report, J. Allen Hynek—an astronomer and pioneering UFOlogist known for introducing the “close encounter” classification system—described the incident as “one of the rare cases in which observers in separate localities saw the same UFO at almost the same time.” (Hynek, left, is pictured with fellow UFOlogist Jacques Vallee.)

J. Edward Roush and the Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects / Washington, D.C. (1968)

Roush, a congressman from Huntington, Indiana, and member of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, was, in his own words, “keenly interested in the whole problem of UFOs.” Accordingly, he organized and chaired the Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, held on July 29, 1968—only the second (and last) time the topic has had a formal hearing on Capitol Hill. The proceedings included testimony from the likes of Hynek and now-famous cosmologist and author Carl Sagan; then-congressman Donald Rumsfeld, also in attendance, astutely noted that the study of UFOs was “a rather unique situation.”

UFO Invasion of 1973 / Delaware County

On the night of October 9, residents of east-central Indiana lit up first-responder switchboards with upwards of 700 calls reporting UFO sightings, according to an article in The Cincinnati Post. Local law-enforcement officers spent hours tracking the object, described as “blinking a red-white-blue revolving light and often hovering near the ground.” (We can only presume they weren’t merely seeing the flashers of their own squad cars.) Astronomy students at Ball State University claimed to have seen the UFO by telescope, and radar operators at an airfield in Fort Wayne allegedly “picked up an unexplained blip on their screen.” In fact, a widespread flurry of such activity—known as a “flap”—that October came to be known as the UFO Invasion of 1973, and congressman Roush, quoted in the Columbus Citizen Journal, worried that “the increased sightings nationally could lead to a state of panic and hysteria, and we ought to be concerned about it.”

The “Visitations at Copley Woods” / Indianapolis (1983)

As the story goes, Debbie Jordan-Kauble, then a young woman living with her parents at their eastside home, was abducted by alien beings and subjected to transgenic experimentation. Evidence of the “visitations” remained in the form of a bare spot in the yard where, it was said, no vegetation would grow for years. Her account was documented in the bestselling book Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (which identified Jordan-Kauble as “Kathie Davis” and used a fictional place name), by popular paranormal author Budd Hopkins. The story also inspired a television miniseries.

The Mongo Photo / Mongo (1994)

In northeastern Indiana, near the Michigan border, six men were sitting around a campfire on the night of August 31, when, according to a Michigan Department of Natural Resources fire supervisor identified only as “JK,” they saw something “glowing through the treetops” that “moved right out from behind the trees and into an open area near a road and hovered toward us. And it was clear as can be. It was a flying saucer, just that vivid.” One of the men managed to take a photograph of the object (pictured). Although a blimp was reportedly in the area that night, an investigator from the Indiana chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)—an organization of volunteers who investigate accounts of extraterrestrial phenomena—looked into the report and determined that “the aerial object photographed cannot be positively identified at this time. It remains a UFO.”

Kokomo Boom / Kokomo (2008)

At approximately 10:30 p.m. on April 16, several loud, percussive noises rattled homes in Kokomo, and residents reported seeing streaks of light illuminate the sky. The event prompted local authorities to dispatch law-enforcement officers to look for a possible downed aircraft, but no evidence of a crash was ever found, according to an Associated Press article printed the next day. An Indiana Air National Guard officer based in Fort Wayne said the “boom” and accompanying lights could have come from F-16 jet training exercises breaking the sound barrier and deploying flares—but added that his unit’s logs did not show that any sonic booms were produced that night. In the transcript of a radio transmission from the evening, a sheriff’s deputy says, “Grissom [Air Reserve Base, near Kokomo] just advised me their security forces advised that there’s not any military aircraft that’s been up or doing anything in that area because they just contacted Ft Wayne as well, just to make sure.” Some UFOlogists have disputed that F-16s were the source of the phenomena, claiming on one website, for example, that monitoring revealed “at least three (3) anomalous radar-only tracks which exhibited ‘unusual flight characteristics.’” The Discovery Channel’s Investigation X and History Channel’s UFO Hunters programs highlighted the incident on national TV:

Matthew Reed Abduction / Brownsburg (2009)

On the night of March 30, while driving home to Brownsburg after seeing a movie in Avon, Matthew Reed (pictured) reportedly saw an orange ball of light in the sky. Then, about an hour and half later, he found himself outside of his vehicle, which was parked on the side of the road. He later revealed that he had been taken aboard a spacecraft and examined by extraterrestrial creatures—and that he and his brother were abducted on three separate occasions as boys living in Massachusetts. The case has been featured in documentaries on the Science Channel and Destination America.

A Family Secret Revealed / Logansport (2011)

MUFON Indiana only recently logged case no. 32747—but it contained the oldest report in its files. On October 20, a man submitted an old video recording of his great grandmother and her sisters, recounting the details of an alleged UFO encounter their father, a farmer, had experienced in the Logansport area, probably sometime in the 1890s. On the tape, one of the women describes taking food to her father and grandfather in the field one day, when they yelled at her to hide in the woods. They later told her they’d seen a machine fly over the field, and that little people had gotten out of the craft, collected samples of corn and soil, and then departed. The woman’s father then made her promise never to talk about it.

 
Lucky Point: A Hoosier Hot Spot / Monroe City vicinity (ongoing)

In southwest Indiana, near Vincennes, a patch of land near a rural stretch of White River—known as Lucky Point—has purportedly been the site of unexplained phenomena for several decades. In 1986, the Vincennes Sun-Commercial, citing then-MUFON Indiana assistant state director Jerry Sievers, reported that there had been nearly 100 UFO sightings there in the past 10 to 15 years. In one case, a farmer claimed to have seen an “orange ball of light” hovering over his cattle pen and, the next day, found a calf whose brain had been removed from a precise, egg-shaped incision. In other account, a sheriff’s deputy had stopped his car in the area and seen a “large black triangle, 100 feet on a side,” with beings looking out of the craft’s windows. One evening in 2006, investigator Kerry Teverbaugh, who lives in the area, received 10 calls in the span of a half an hour, from witnesses who, according to his statement, claimed to have seen “a domed disc, dark in color with three large orange lights along the edge in a triangle configuration.”

For an up-close encounter with professed alien abductees Matthew and Thomas Reed, read “Alienated,” a feature in the March 2014 issue of IM.

Images: Hynek and Vallee via Wikipedia; Roush via congress.gov; Intruders cover via Amazon; Mongo via nicap.org; Matthew Reed by Evan West