8 May 1952: Mishawaka's one line in the Air Force record

Thursday, 8 May 1952

The record: The Air Force's index for 1952 carries one Mishawaka case, and an index line is all of it that the record preserves: "8 May 1952 — Mishawaka, Indiana — INSUFFICIENT DATA." The line stands in the index's block of sightings for 2–10 May 1952, in company the week kept — reports from Misawa, Japan, and São Paulo, Brazil, on the same date; a George AFB, California, radar report the next day that the index closes as a balloon, and a second George AFB report the same day it leaves UNIDENTIFIED. No observer's name survives legibly on Mishawaka's line in either digitized copy of the index, redacted or unredacted, and no case number survives legibly either.

The disposition, in the Air Force's own terms: In Blue Book's usage "Insufficient Data" is a statement about the file, not the sky: the report, as it reached the investigators, did not contain enough information to evaluate. The Air Force did not call the Mishawaka report explained, and it did not call it unexplained; it recorded that it could not judge what it had been sent. The distinction matters to this section, because the case is sometimes the kind of line that grows in the retelling. On the Air Force's published list of cases officially listed as "Unknown," Mishawaka does not appear: the list's May 1952 entries run from Moses Lake, Washington (1 May), through Tenafly, New Jersey (5 May), Keesler AFB, Mississippi (7 May), George AFB, California (9 May) and Ellenton, South Carolina (10 May) — and no 8 May case from Indiana stands among them. The city's single official touch with the subject is a report the investigators found too thin to evaluate, filed between two of the cases they could not explain.

The file itself: A further test was run for this entry, at the level of the surviving files. The National Archives holds the Blue Book case files as a catalogued series of folder titles — a place and a date, in the form "Fort Worth, Texas, July 1952" — and the published table of that series, all 10,622 files with their titles turned to data, was searched whole. It contains no folder titled for Mishawaka. The only St. Joseph County folder in the series is a South Bend one, "South Bend, Indiana, 1957," of eight pages. A second digitization of the same microfilm, an index of 10,808 transcribed case files, likewise carries no Mishawaka entry. The two sweeps are printed with their limit stated: they enumerate folder titles as catalogued, and a file could in principle sit under another title or have failed to survive into the series; but at the strength the surviving record offers, the 1952 Mishawaka case exists as an entry in the Air Force's own index and as nothing more — no folder of papers under the city's name stands in the archive the index points to. The report that began it presumably began, as such reports did, in the local press or a local call; the Mishawaka Enterprise and the South Bend Tribune of 8–9 May 1952 are not part of the free digitized newspaper record, and they are the named route to whatever the index line began as.

Sources:

1. U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book index for 1952 (redacted digitized copy, archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes) — the line "8 — Mishawaka, Indiana — INSUFFICIENT DATA," in the sightings block for 2–10 May 1952; the unredacted copy's location column confirms the entry's place in the same sequence; the line re-read in the index's digitized text, with the same result.
2. U.S. Air Force, cases officially listed as "Unknown" (published list, as reproduced at nicap.org/bluebook/bluelist.htm) — swept in full; the May 1952 entries as listed in the entry; no Mishawaka entry.
3. Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns (version 1.16, 2 October 2009) — swept in full; no Mishawaka or Notre Dame entry.
4. Encounter Atlas, "Project Blue Book UFO Case Files (Geocoded)" (Zenodo, published 25 October 2026) — the table of the National Archives' sanitized Blue Book case-file series (Record Group 341, series 597821; 10,622 files, one row per file, from the Archives' folder titles), searched whole for this section: no Mishawaka row; the county's single row, "South Bend, Indiana, 1957" (NARA id 28968753; 8 pages).
5. The Daily Dialectics, Project Blue Book case-file index (transcriptions from NARA microfilm T-1206; 10,808 case files indexed) — searched for this section; no Mishawaka entry.