by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In 1969, just before the December 17th press release that Project Blue Book was being terminated, Donald Keyhoe was removed from his position as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. NICAP quickly became a shadow of its former formidable self, but it never fully ceased being active thanks to Fran Ridge, who passed away on January 20th of this year. Ridge maintained the NICAP website, which is still operating as of this writing, and this week, we’ll look at one of the last cases Ridge investigated.
In the 2025 Chronology in the section of the site headed “The Chronos,” there is a file headed “2025-MADAR.htm.” This is the “Project Report: 2025” covering “Potential Sightings of Interest & MADAR Anomalies,” which is a joint effort between NICAP, the National UFO Reporting Center, and MADAR (Multiple Anomaly Detection and Automatic Recording). MADAR was a project started by Ridge in 1970, and by 2023, there were 221 members operating 168 sites with systems designed to collect and record geomagnetic, electromagnetic, and background radiation anomalies.
In the June 11th entry, there is a brief description of a sighting by a couple in Branford, Connecticut, that has a link to a report by Ridge and Phil Leech. Leech interviewed the witnesses, and Ridge did an analysis of data recorded by MADAR stations in the area.
According to the “Preliminary Report,” at around 8:47 p.m. on June 11, 2025, in Branford, Connecticut, a husband and wife were driving south on Montowese Avenue. They had just gone through the underpass beneath the Amtrack railroad tracks on Pine Orchard Road when the husband happened to look up. He was “stunned” by the sight of what looked like the front end of a car hovering silently in the air.
In the report by Leech headed “Investigation by CCO – Phil Leech,” there is a description based on the one given by the “primary witness.” In Leech’s words, “the object was a silver-colored, typical UFO with an array of lights on the side of the object.” It is estimated to have been 18 feet long based on the witness’s comparison of its size to two semi cabs parked next to each other.
The lights reportedly consisted of a red and blue light with four white lights between them. In the illustration by one of the witnesses, the red light is on the left and the blue light is on the right. Their positions are similar to those of a car’s headlights. The lights were not blinking, and the witnesses said they weren’t so bright that they couldn’t make out the shape of the object.
According to Leech, he interviewed the couple on speaker phone on July 19, 2025, for an hour and a half starting at 10:30 a.m. The husband said he was driving home with his wife in the passenger seat after a regular monthly meeting. They were at a stop light when the wife spotted the object coming at them at a 45-degree angle and said, “Look at that.” The husband was unable to see it until after they had gone through the underpass. They said it was 100 feet away, hovering at a 30-degree angle, and that the lights from it lit up their car but not the area around them. The time at this point was 11:47 p.m.
They watched the object for a total of 20 seconds, and neither of them could recall seeing it leave. The husband didn’t recall them leaving either while his wife only remembered thinking, “pull over,” without saying it. Both witnesses said they felt like they were, as they put it, “mesmerized.”
The husband sent Leech an email (transcript included in the report) telling him when the CGAUX (Coast Guard Auxillary) meeting started and how much time it typically takes to drive between the community center where it’s held and their home. According to him, the meeting started at “1915 hours,” the drive takes 7 minutes, and he added that he estimated that it took 2.5 minutes to get from the community center to the underpass. He doesn’t mention when the meeting ended, but he says they “do not hang around” as he is “beat” and wants “to get home asap!”
Leech examines the time involved between the end of the meeting and the couple’s arrival at home. He says “If the meeting concluded near the 8:15 p.m. time frame,” their 9:00 p.m. arrival time at home presented the possibility that there was “20 minutes plus unaccounted for.” According to him, he discussed this with the witnesses, and “they agreed, but it did not dawn on them that this could have occurred.”
Leech offers his opinion that what the witnesses reported to NUFORC was actually the end of an encounter which may have begun as much as 27 minutes earlier. He says this new time frame lines up with two MADAR “hits” and that he would be requesting that the MADAR Director (Ridge) “add any compelling data related to the event to the case file.”
Leech finds the witnesses credible and describes the husband as “a retired electrician” and the wife as “retired from the medical field.” As for any future interviews, he says they will focus on a “missing time/abductee scenario” and concludes that what they saw can only be described as an “Unknown Object.”
Ridge’s thoughts regarding the MADAR data are presented in two sections: one headed “MADAR Data Analysis” before Leech’s report, and the other headed “Preliminary Conclusions” after it. The first section is a bit technical and is written for those familiar with MADAR, but the main points are that there were magnetometer spikes at two sites in the area around the time of the sighting and a radiation spike at one of them.
The first site that Ridge analyzed data from was site 106 in Newington, Connecticut, 20 miles northwest of Branford, which showed a “magnetometer spike of 13.5 milligause” that occurred “five minutes after the reported time of the sighting.” Upon further investigation, he found a spike of around 25 cpm (counts per minute) recorded from the Geiger counter at the site. Ridge includes a graph showing this, and although not very high, it was a definite bump above the average cpm readings of between 10-15 shown there. Below this, there is a graph showing the Geiger counter and magnetometer readings superimposed, and the spikes line up.
Ridge found a second site (139) in Wallingford, Connecticut, 21 miles south of Branford, that was not “Geiger-equipped,” but had recorded a magnetometer spike of 11.25 milligause and a compass deflection of as much as 15 degrees at around 6 minutes after the reported time of the sighting.
According to Ridge, he contacted NUFORC and “filed a contact information request for the Branford case.” The request was approved, and Ridge turned the case over to Leech, his “primary Case Certification Officer.”
Under “Preliminary Conclusions,” besides inferring that the magnetometer spikes at the two stations around the time of the sighting were beyond coincidence, Ridge includes the information that a submarine that was likely built at Groton’s Electric Boat yard (around 40 miles east of Branford) had launched 30 Tomahawk missiles at nuclear facilities in Iran ten days after the sighting.
As for the missing time element, Ridge points out that after bringing up the idea that there might have been an abduction, it is important that they don’t “leave the witnesses hanging.” He reports that Leech will provide them with “contact information for communication and support.”
Under “Final Conclusions,” Ridge reports that due to “the nature and complications involved,” the case is pending, and he provides a link to the “existing folder of data.”