The Muncie / Delaware County UFO Night

October 1973. America was in the middle of a UFO wave. Within days, Pascagoula and the Coyne helicopter incident would make national headlines. In Delaware County, Indiana, the phones were about to start ringing.

Tuesday, 9 October, about 7:30 p.m. In Eaton, a small town in the north of the county, workers at a canning factory looked up. A lighted object was hovering above the plant in a residential part of town. A circle of multicoloured lights ran around it, pulsing or moving in a counterclockwise sequence. The employees watched it over the plant and then, finally, west of it.

The Eaton chief of police thought the object may have been 3,000 or 4,000 feet high. He tried to photograph it. No luck.

The calls poured in, about 200 at Eaton alone. Across Central Indiana, UPI reported that calls from at least 700 citizens flooded law enforcement switchboards, while another version of the wire story put the number at 750. Delaware County police logged calls from 15 different areas of the county. The wire described a light "blinking a red-white-blue revolving light and often hovering near the ground." Delaware County officers tracked it for hours, while Ball State University astronomy students in Muncie found it in a telescope and snapped pictures.

To the north, at Baer Field in Fort Wayne, military radar picked up "an unexplained blip." A light plane went up to find it. It failed to locate the object. Airport communications personnel said they couldn't get the object to respond.

One officer offered a guess. Probably "nothing more than a weather balloon or a mirage or a star," he said, "or something." The students' photographs were still undeveloped that night. They have never surfaced. The Ball State Daily News of 10 October carried no UFO story at all.

Muncie was gripped by what local historians now call the UFO mania of 1973, with about 100 calls reaching Muncie police that October and more going to the sheriff. A woman reported that an object had landed in her backyard, while her neighbor heard loud clicking noises. A deputy said she "definitely saw something because she was frightened." From the Wheeling Avenue and McGalliard Road area came one more call: "There are people out here that aren't people." Not all of these reports can be tied to 9 October.

Project Blue Book had closed in 1969, and no official body reached a conclusion. Investigator Don Worley, who also covered Connersville and Laurel for APRO that month, kept the Eaton cannery account in his files. NICAP logged the radar item under Fort Wayne. The same Baer Field blip also appears in a wire story datelined Dayton, Ohio. Whether the radar return and the Eaton lights were the same thing has never been established.

Over the following years, Muncie Public Library archivist Sara McKinley notes, more and more of the Muncie reports found rational explanations. Tinfoil caught in trees, reflecting neon business signs. Aircraft towing banners for a local steakhouse. Helicopters. Weather balloons. None of them has been tied to the object of 9 October.

The mania left its mark on the town. Space costumes at a mall Halloween contest. A Dairy Queen advert for a "Horrible Creature Sundae." In 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind gave its hero, Roy Neary, a home in Muncie. A Journey Indiana segment wonders whether 1973 played a part. No direct link has been found.