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13 October 1948 · South Bend — the sister city's ground
At 11:45 a.m. CST on a clear and cloudless day, two office workers standing at a window of the Studebaker Corporation in South Bend watched a silvery, flat, disc-shaped object speed silently through the sky at about 1,500 feet — a little smaller than a DC-3 in apparent size, moving about three times as fast, on a straight southeasterly heading from the northwest, with no visible means of propulsion, no wings and no rudders. Both witnesses held important positions in Studebaker's engineering department and were described by company management in the file as reliable; neither could identify what they had seen, and both were certain it was neither balloon nor aircraft. The case is a Project Sign case, and the modern study of the Sign files printed in the NICAP Loedding volume ranks it pointedly: a much better sighting, that study argues, than the famous Gorman dogfight of 1 October 1948 that has overshadowed it — part of the mass of strong, obscure cases that pushed Sign's staff toward its developing conclusions. Disposition as the file system carries it: the case does not appear in Blue Book's final official list of unidentified cases, so the Air Force's closing accounting does not leave it an Unknown; its strength is the Sign-era file itself, printed here whole. Placement: the Studebaker works, South Bend, south of the river — the sister city's, and the strongest early case in the county.
From the Project Sign case as printed in the NICAP Loedding volume, “Final Word” chapter (case of 13 October 1948, 11:45 a.m. CST); the official Blue Book unknowns list (NICAP) checked for its absence.