The date was October 9th, 1973, and it was pretty much just another low-key autumn evening in east-central Indiana. The sun had long gone down, and 911 dispatch operators were settled into their night shifts expecting nothing out of the ordinary tonight. Suddenly, a strange call came in: someone in Delaware County saw something bizarre in the sky. And then one call turned into two. Two turned into three. Soon enough, Delaware County found itself plunged into one of the most credible mass UFO sightings in Indiana – as well as the entirety of the Midwest!

Muncie, Indiana, is your average cute small town, and it always has been.
D.Liv/Flickr
Well, except for this one night, anyway.
To back up the more than 700 calls from terrified residents, Ball State University students and staff confirmed that there was SOMETHING visible in the skies by telescope.
Michael Privorotsky/Flickr
In Fort Wayne, folks at an airfield determined that there was a strange blip on radar, plain as day.
...only right now, it wasn't day. And this was a problem.
David Ellis/Flickr
It was tough to see the craft - or whatever the thing was - in its entirety. Witnesses described a red, white and blue revolving light that dipped incredibly close to the ground on several occasions.

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Local law enforcement was dispatched to check everything out, and they, too, had some truly bizarre experiences that night.
Tom Natt/Flickr
They tracked the thing in the sky for hours, watching it light up, dim down, fly higher, fly lower, etc; many of the maneuvers it made were too fast for known aircraft to have pulled off at the time.
Indiana wouldn't even be the only state to sight this bizarre craft in the air.
Domiriel/Flickr
Within minutes of the calls tapering to a stop in Indiana, they began again in Ohio. Several people on the ground that night claim to have had some sort of close encounter with the thing, and they insist it was not of this earth.
October 1973 ended up being a WILD one for UFOs; the sighting on the ninth of October was just the beginning.
Lee Brizell/Flickr
There were so many compelling reports that 1973 was nicknamed "The UFO Invasion". Talk about bizarre.

Of course, no official explanation for any of the sightings on this night exists.

Naysayers often cite unknown-to-the-public-at-the-time aircraft as being the most obvious explanation for this flap, but no other UFO sightings in Indiana or the Midwestern states come close to the sheer size of this one. With more than 700 official reports called in, it’s incredibly difficult to simply hand-wave it all away as some strange coincidence.

If anything, 2023 has been an utterly bonkers year for the whole UFO phenomenon, which has been rebranded as UAPs instead thanks to the stigma surrounding the term UFO. Hopefully, we’re a little closer now than we’ve ever been to getting a formal explanation for the “UFO Invasion” of 1973. If you’re interested in more coverage about Indiana’s UFO flaps and sightings, check out this amazing database of UFO sightings in Kokomo Indiana alone.

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