July 1947: the first saucer wave — the Mishawaka test

June — July 1947

The record: The modern record opened eleven days after Kenneth Arnold's report, in the first great rush of sightings that swept the country in late June and early July 1947. The standard catalogue of that wave, Ted Bloecher's, as carried in Michael Swords's history of it, lists the places that reported on the wave's heaviest days; for Saturday, 5 July 1947, the list runs through cities in Canada and across the United States and includes, for this state, "South Bend and Huntington, Indiana." Mishawaka is not in it — not on that day, and in no other day's list the wave literature reaches. Nor does any Mishawaka line appear in the Air Force's indexes for 1947, which cover the reports the military collected; the index sweep described in the ledger entry below searched every year of the project for this city's name and found it once, in 1952. The 1947 entry therefore prints the same shape as the 1897 one, at the same strength: in the fortnight that named its county's larger city in the national catalogue, no report from Mishawaka survives in the records reached. What was or was not seen over the city that summer, the record does not say; the Enterprise's July 1947 issues are, again, the unworked local route.

Sources:

1. Michael D. Swords et al., Alfred Loedding and the Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947, chapter four, "The Onslaught" (hosted at nicap.org) — the 5 July 1947 list of reporting places, naming "South Bend and Huntington, Indiana," drawn from Ted Bloecher, Report on the UFO Wave of 1947; no Mishawaka named.
2. U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book yearly indexes, 1947–1969 (redacted and unredacted digitized copies, archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes, from the National Archives records) — the full sweep for Mishawaka described in the ledger entry below; the city's single line is dated 8 May 1952.