INVESTIGATOR'S REPORT
MOTHERSHIP OR CARRIER AT MARTINSDALE, INDIANA
December 21, 1989
Fran Ridge


The field investigator who investigated this case was one of my best FI's in the Indiana group. I trained over 150 as Indiana State Director, and I always had about 30 active in the 92 counties at any given time. This case is not representative of the run-of-the-mill UFO reports we have come accustomed to. I hesitate to label what the purpose of the craft was, but the first thing that comes to mind is a "carrier" or "mothership", although there were no scout-type craft or drones seen during the encounter. And recent searches of NUFORC and MUFON CMS files turned up no other incidents that were reported.

FI Norma Croda:
Sometime between 1:00 & 2:00 AM A lady and her husband observed two objects while returning to Indianapolis from Bloomington early that Thursday morning. They were driving on Hwy 37 and were talking when they noticed something with lights on it over a field. "It was hard to tell the actual shape of the craft but the lights were circular around it. There were orangish-yellow lights around the bottom of the craft, but I could not see all the way around it." When they were close enough to see it better (200 yards) they noticed lights here and there around it and could see quite clearly that the object was "hovering above the ground about as high as a helicopter". They had to turn around after passing a pulled-over semi, and when they returned, "the craft was on my (lady's) side of the car and it took off to the west up over a ridge of hills", and then the lights went out. (Field extends approximately 1/4 mile from the road to the trees). "It did not go down, but it disappeared. I very much got the feeling that it knew we were watching." They got back to the main road and headed north to Indy.

The FI found upon checking the area that an Indianapolis Power & Light generating plant was located just over the ridge right near where the object disappeared.

About seven miles down the road the witnesses were discussing the sighting and the lady was searching the sky. On her side of the road (east) "there was this craft that was huge and it was right there!  It hung in the air. It was a large craft like an aircraft carrier or barge. It was angled or tilted toward me. It had a dome on the back and a long flat area on the front with two huge searchlights (Exhibit 7L). They made me nervous. It just hung there!  We stopped the car and I rolled down the window. I could not hear any noise except my heart beating very fast. Daniel was trying to lean around me to see it, but he could not see the whole thing but could see the lights and felt the presence of it (a strange feeling in the joints, energy rushing through his body). That physical feeling stayed with us for quite a while afterward. So we sat and watched it, then it began to move toward me. I did not want the lights to shine on my car and I told Daniel to go. It stopped turning and, as we drove away I continued to watch it until I could not see it anymore."

She described the second craft as "very industrial looking, too heavy to be hanging in the sky. Industrial metallic with intricate squares on the outer sides, metal working that might have been indentations. If this had been a boat, the indentations would be for stairs, wasn't smooth. Dome was smooth looking, iridescent, illuminated from inside. It was not a high dome. The two lights on front of craft were like search lights." (MUFON Indiana, FI Norma Croda)

Martinsdale craft

Fran Ridge:
Years later while constructing intelligence summaries from chronos, in hopes of finding correlations with MADAR hits, I noticed that a few days prior to this major sighting, MADAR had a couple of anomalies. The first one, APD #22, had been logged on December 15, at 6:03 PM. The event occurred with a momentary power outage so brief that there was no loss of stored info. It was only a flicker of lights and power but the magnet variometer deviated from north, cycled back in 18 seconds, then deviated again in the opposite direction. It was a 2-pulse 18-second deviation with no return on second pulse!!!  The sensor housing had to be physically rotated to get the unit back to north. And twenty miles to the east of our station TV Channel 14 at Evansville reportedly lost all computer graphics and had no explanation for the incident.

The second one, APD #23 occurred on December 17, at. 9:14 AM. It was "phantom pulse", with again, no return to north". A "phantom pulse" is the first time the compass lets the light beam strike the photo cell, which then turns on the recorders, therefore the first pulse is not capable of being recorded.

Here in one glance one can see all  APDs recorded at the Mt. Vernon, Indiana site from 1970-1992.

Finally, for the record, Martinsdale...is only 130 miles NE of the Mt. Vernon site.

ENDREP