FORM 112 - MADAR SIGHTING INFORMATION REPORT
 


BUFKIN, INDIANA   -   NOVEMBER 1, 1973


I.   MADAR DATA

November 1, 1973; Mt. Vernon, Indiana
9:47 pm. There was a documented geomagnetic anomaly in the form of a compass variation that lasted about (1) second. The MADAR system also recorded the background radiation which was a normal 18 cpm. 

II.   DESCRIPTION OF INCIDENT

At 10:40 pm, just  a little over an hour later, there was a visual sighting of a blue and green light at Bufkin, a tiny rural community just five miles north of the MADAR site. The light had been maneuvering up and down, back and forth, first from the west to east, then north to south, and there was a humming noise associated with it. The male witness had called the UFO hotline at the UFO Filter Center at Mt. Vernon and reported the sighting while it was happening and observed it for about 10 minutes. It was last seen to the south at the Meade Johnson Plant just east of at Mt. Vernon near highway 62. The report was one of many calls coming in to the Center "hotline" which operated the only MADAR site in the world during the UFO wave of 1973. The call was recorded. The encounter range was determined by the humming noise reported. (UFOFC, Ridge files, FI-4)

III.   STATUS OF THE INVESTIGATION

When the call came in it was one of hundreds received that week during the great wave of 1973. The message slip used was an FI-4 and it had the date, time, location and witness name and phone number. At the time, and since it wasn't an exact correlation, it was just considered a insufficient data Hynek nocturnal light. But in today's standard would have been an important correlation of a type now referred to as an ITR or "In The Region" MADAR incident.

IV.   CONCLUSIONS

The object was a UFO and less than 5 miles north of the MADAR site, but did not trigger the system which was a magnet variometer. With the MADAR-III dataprobe (2018-todate) there probably would have been data recorded by either the magnetometer or the onboard compass. All one has to do is look at graph of regional UFO activity during that period in history and note the temporal location of the MADAR encounter and the Bufkin sighting to see its relevance. And the detail is obvious if one looks at the NICAP UFO Chronology of 1973.

Fran Ridge
MADAR OPERATIONS CENTER