Case description
At about 9:00 p.m. on November 1, 1980, an unnamed sheriff's deputy was on routine patrol near Lucky Point, a rural area on the White River floodplain east of Vincennes, Indiana. He stopped and stepped out beside his cruiser, either to rest or stretch his legs. Looking across the roof of the patrol car, he noticed a very large dark object hovering only about two hundred feet away. The object was triangular, tilted at an angle and estimated at roughly one hundred feet on each side. Its black surface blended into the night, but a row of large windows made the structure and its occupants visible.
Inside those windows, the deputy reported seeing five humanoid figures from the waist up. They appeared only as gray or dark silhouettes. Each had a disproportionately large head, a thin neck and a slender body; facial features, hands and clothing could not be made out. The figures did not leave the craft, gesture to the deputy or approach his vehicle. The encounter's contact element was instead something the witness experienced as a question entering his mind. The question concerned why he hated Iranians. The deputy said he answered silently that he did not hate anybody.
Immediately after that mental reply, the figures changed position. Francis Ridge's later summary says the figures at both ends of the group turned inward to face the other three; another catalogue says only one figure turned toward the others. As they did so, the object accelerated upward or away and disappeared within seconds. No landing, physical trace, equipment failure, injury or conventional spoken exchange is described in the accessible account.
The report passed through the Unexplained Phenomena Research Organization's files and later summaries by Indiana researcher Francis Ridge. A 1986 Vincennes Sun-Commercial article described a Knox County deputy, a large triangular object, slender large-headed figures in windows and reported telepathic communication. That newspaper dated the event to November 1984, while Ridge's chronology assigned November 1, 1980. The date differs between these published accounts, and the deputy remains unnamed.
