UFO field investigation files · Wisconsin and Upper Michigan · 1965–1972
My father investigated UFO sightings in Wisconsin. This is his file, all of it, scanned and put on the open web as primary source documents. 102 documents, 563 pages.
He was Ronald M. Anderson, of Chippewa Falls. By 1972 he was doing two jobs for MUFON at once: State Director for Wisconsin, and Amateur Radio Communications on the national staff. That second job meant he ran the ham network the organization used to move sighting reports between states. He had been licensed since he was a teenager, so by the time they needed somebody to run it he had been on the air for years. He later worked as a deputy sheriff and dispatcher for Chippewa County.
The files run from about 1965 to 1972, and they are not what people expect from this subject. Reports came in by letter, by telephone, by tape, and secondhand from newspaper reporters. He logged them in a hand ruled table with columns for date, observer, area, nature of sighting, time, and type of data. Most entries are a few lines. The comments column says things like "needs evaluation" and "no replies to letter."
Note what he wrote in the observer column. "Woman." "Farmer and wife." "Two boys, 10 and 12." "Policeman and others." He was keeping names out of his own summaries in 1968. That tells you how he treated the people who called him, and it is why I have been careful with those same names here.
Alongside his casework is the correspondence: letters back and forth with Walter H. Andrus, Jr., who ran MUFON, and with Dr. Allen Utke, the Oshkosh chemistry professor who ran it in Wisconsin. There are internal circulars, staff directories, jurisdiction arguments, and a parallel set of material from APRO, the older and competing organization out of Tucson. One sheet describes the group under its original name, the Midwest UFO Network, back when the master case file for the entire country was kept on McBee Keysort punched cards.
I am not interpreting any of this and I am not arguing for or against anything in it. I am not the person to ask what it means. What I have is the paper, and the paper is worth more to somebody doing real work on this than my opinion would be. So here it is.
His two titles come from the organization's own staff directory dated 4 May 1972, which is in this archive. The same sheet lists Stanton T. Friedman among the consultants, and still carries the original name, Midwest U.F.O. Network, Inc.
102 documents. They fall into a handful of groups:
Sighting reports and case files. Individual investigations dated between 1965 and 1968, plus four regional compilations — Wisconsin–Upper Michigan UFO Reports for before 1966, 1966, 1967 and 1968. Photographs, witness drawings, location notes, and one report from as far away as Tasmania.
Correspondence. Letters to and from Walter H. Andrus, Jr., who ran MUFON, and Dr. Allen Utke, who ran it in Wisconsin, running from 1968 through 1971. This is the working traffic of the organization rather than its public face.
MUFON internal circulars. The Message From Your Director series from late 1970 and early 1971, staff and organizational directories, jurisdiction notes, and a set of periodic check-ins from 1970–71.
APRO material. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization's directory, application forms, and circulars to representatives.
Blank forms. The unused report and membership forms, which are useful on their own if you want to know what these organizations were actually asking witnesses.
One document worth calling out for anyone who cares about the organization's history: a single-sheet description of the group under its original name, the Midwest UFO Network, signed by Andrus from 40 Christopher Court in Quincy, Illinois, back when SKYLOOK was still the official publication and the master case file was kept on McBee Keysort punched cards — a description of how the organization actually ran, written by the man running it.
Published in full: his own reports and notes, his correspondence, the photographs and drawings, the blank forms, and the organizational circulars he was sent. Those circulars are more than fifty years old, from a body that has since changed its name, and they are the part a researcher can't get anywhere else. Reprinting them is the point of the exercise.
Redacted: home addresses and telephone numbers of private individuals, wherever they appear. That matters most in the staff and membership directories, which are page after page of people's home details, and in the sighting reports, where witnesses talked to an investigator on the understanding it stayed in a file. Some of them, or their children, are alive. Named organizational officers acting in their public role stay unredacted. Every page gets reviewed before it goes up, and redactions are marked on the page rather than done quietly, so you can see that something was removed and ask about it.
The originals still exist. Nothing has been destroyed, edited, or thrown away. The redactions are made on the published copies only. The paper my father kept is intact and in my hands, and the unredacted scans are held offline. If a redaction is standing between you and real research, write to me and tell me what you are working on.
If you are one of those people, or a relative, and you want a document taken down or a name restored, write to me and I'll do it.
Planned: one entry per document, each with its date, its type, the people involved and a short neutral description, linking to the PDF. OCR text layer on everything so the archive is searchable and quotable. URLs that never move, because a source that changes address is no use to anyone citing it.
Cite it, quote it, link to it. If you publish something that leans on a document here, link the document rather than re-hosting it, so your readers can check the original against what you say about it. The scans are made available for research and study; the underlying papers remain my family's.