The MUFON Years

1980 MUFON Indiana Mini Symposium
(L-R, Jerry Sievers, Assistant State Director; Fran Ridge, State Director)

Due to financial and organizational woes NICAP was in its last days. Fran Ridge served with NICAP from 1960 until 1971.  He was then recruited by Walt Andrus, MUFON's Director, as MUFON State-Section Director for Villa Grove, Illinois in 1971 and SSD for Hillsboro, Illinois in 1972. Upon moving back to Indiana in 1973 Ridge became SSD there until 1987 when he was asked to take over the State Director position. Although he now lived in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, most of MUFON Indiana (he referred to the organization as "MINDY") meetings were at his home town of Vincennes, Indiana, where he conducted a mini symposium coinciding with National UFO Information Week every year in August.



While State Director he trained 150 field investigators using the MUFON Field Investigators Manual and the FI Exam. With his leadership and training skills he had all 92 counties covered with FI's, some of which he selected to be State Section Directors of several counties each. The rest of the team were referred to as FITs, for Field Investigator Trainees.  At any one time Ridge had at least 30 FI's  trained and ready as part of his Rapid Deployment Team.

He took advantage of the annual National UFO Information Week, along with the national MUFON PR campaign, to work the media. Ridge wrote a monthly newsletter called the "UFO Intelligence Summary" and mailed it to national subscribers, state members, the news media, police, sheriff and state police posts. He also sent them to airport tower controllers. A UFO Hotline was established and calls came in from all over the State, and other states, including some Air Force bases.

Ridge was State Director until 1997 when he dropped out of UFO work for a short while and created The Lunascan Project. Within a few years he was back at the UFO front. Before the century ended he had met Dan Wilson, someone well versed on Air Force Project Blue Book documents, which contained a gold mine of information since the Project closed in January of 1970. For almost 30 years these reports were thought, by many, to be worthless "table scraps", left over from the official government flying saucer project. This was not the case.

By mid December of 1997, he began work on the new NICAP web site, to try to archive all the work he and others had done over a lifetime. He was able to get expert help from NICAP's Assistant Director, Richard Hall, and with the aid of Michigan's Jean Waskiewicz and Dan Wilson the quest began.  Brad Sparks had already compiled a list of the original 741 Blue Book "Unknowns" and had added quite a few new cases, doubling the original number of unexplained ones.  NICAP's A-Team had been formed and now contains two dozen of the top names in UFOlogy.

So the effort began with NICAP, continued with MUFON, and is now concentrated on NICAP once more. MUFON had served its purpose and is still an active organization, while the efforts of all the groups is being peer reviewed and preserved as NICAP celebrates its 12th year on December 15, 2009.