By Charles Lear
1973 was a special year for UFO enthusiasts. Not only were there a huge number of reports in the
newspapers as can be seen in the issues of the UFO News Clipping Service from that year, there were many that were especially strange. This was the year of the Coyne Incident involving a report that a U.S. Army Reserve helicopter in the sky over Cleveland was pulled up by a UFO while its controls were set to descend, and the Pascagoula Incident, involving a report by two men that they were taken aboard a craft by floating, elephant-skinned, robot-like creatures. These two cases made the front page of the September-October 1973 A.P.R.O. Bulletin, but a case that has been overshadowed by these two cases has the big headline, “Occupants in Indiana,” as the lead story in that issue.
According to the reporter (presumably one of both of the Lorenzens, Jim and Coral, who were the founders of A.P.R.O. and ran it until their deaths in the late 1980s), at 9:45 p.m. on October 22, 1973, Donna and Dewayne Donathan were heading east on Indiana State Road 26 from Mrs. Donathan’s mother’s house to their home in Hartford City, Indiana. The description in the article of what happened from there is made up of quotes taken from an interview Mrs. Donathan gave to A.P.R.O. Field Investigator Donald Worley. Mrs. Donathan was driving, and Mr. Donathan was in the passenger seat with their baby. About one block from their home, after rounding a curve and coming over a small hill, they saw what they thought were two children about four feet tall, standing in the road.
Mrs. Donathan stopped about 30 feet away from them, and with the headlights on them, saw that they weren’t children. According to her, they seemed confused and hopped. She said: “Their feet would come up slowly, one at a time, and the arms would flop funny. They moved slower than humans, and their feet and arms would go up funny. Their feet came off the ground easy, and they were bright silver in color.”
According to the reporter, Mrs. Donathan said they had a light build, and in the reporter’s words, “straight in form to the ground.” Her attention was on their feet, and she didn’t remember seeing heads or any other features. She said the feet had what looked like boxes on them somewhat larger than a shoe, and she said she didn’t see any hands. She said she didn’t remember hearing a sound, but the car was still running and a tape was playing in the machine at a high volume. She didn’t notice an odor and said that, in the reporter’s words, “the clothing or the surface of the creatures appeared to be tight-fitting.”
According to the reporter, Mrs. Donathan was quite frightened and sped off quickly past the creatures. She drove in a panic for several blocks before Mr. Donathan got her to stop at an old church.
Mr. Donathan hadn’t gotten a good look at the creatures and wasn’t convinced they weren’t children. Despite her fear, Mrs. Donathan was convinced by Mr. Donathan to drive back to the area and if it turned out that what they saw were children, he was prepared to scold them. When they got there, all they saw were unidentified lights in the north and “paid little attention to them.”
They went back to Mrs. Donathan’s mother’s house and Mrs. Donathan was so upset they thought she would need a doctor, but she eventually recovered.
Another witness account is described in the article after the Donathan account. According to the reporter, gas station owner and “wrecker” driver Gary Flatter heard a call come in about the Donathan’s sighting when he was with his friend Deputy Sheriff Ed Townsend and a state policeman that didn’t wish to be named. They went out to the area and saw nothing, but they did report hearing a high frequency noise at a certain spot along the road.
Flatter returned in his wrecker along with the state policeman in his patrol car. They separated and Flatter noticed a large number of animals running across the road. He stopped to avoid hitting them and counted “6 or 7 rabbits, a possum, a raccoon, and some cats.” He also heard the same sound he’d heard before.
Looking around, he spotted two small creatures in a plowed field. He got them in his headlights and stayed 75 feet away. According to him, they were about four feet tall, and wore silvery, tight-fitting uniforms. He said they glared in the light “about halfway between galvanized sheet metal and aluminum.”
He put a spotlight on them, and they turned their entire bodies around giving him the impression that they didn’t like the light. The light from the spotlight that reflected off the creatures was blinding, so he turned the spotlight off.
Flatter’s description added more details to that of Mrs. Donathan. He said the creatures had egg-shaped heads with masks that had a tube coming out of them that went into the creatures’ chests. He didn’t see eyes or ears. He said their arms had no hands on the ends of them, and that their feet “were square with the heel a little over in the back.”
Flatter described their movement, and his description was similar to that of Mrs. Donathan: “They would move up about three feet off the ground and then go back down, all of this in slow motion.” They did this three times and then they “flew off like a helicopter in the feet-down position” and disappeared into the darkness.
The next day, Flatter, Deputy Townsend, and Mr. Donathan went to the area of the Donathans’ encounter. In a nearby cornfield, they reportedly found seven three-quarter inch impressions three inches wide that, according to the reporter, “looked as though they had been made by a heel that was not as round as ordinary heels.” It had not rained for days and the three men, weighing an average of 200 pounds, left no footprints.
This story also appears in the 1976 book, Encounters With UFO Occupants by Jim and Coral Lorenzen in the chapter titled “Floating, Flying, UFOnauts.” In this version, it is reported that the Donathans drove into Hartford City to report their sighting to the sheriff’s office where Flatter was with Townsend, who was on duty. The story also shows up in the 1974 Center for UFO Studies publication, 1973 – The Year of the Humanoids, by David Webb, with an additional sighting by a woman, Mrs. Debbie Carne, the same night as the other sightings. According to the narrative, she saw “two silver-suited, 4 foot humanoids” while driving, and they “made a loud noise and raised their arms as if to scare her.” Flatter’s sighting is reported to have been the next day. What would a UFO story be without, at least, a little discrepancy.