Case: 13 October 1948 — the disc over the Studebaker works

13 October 1948 · South Bend — the sister city's ground · Run B #171

The works case, and the strongest early case in the county: at 11:45 a.m. on a clear and cloudless day, two men 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, 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 modern unknowns catalogue gives the file its names — Brooke and Thompson, at 41.68° N, 86.26° W — and carries a tentative one-word query against it, “Debris?”, from the McDonald list and the Saunders/FUFOR index. The case is a Project Sign case, and the modern study of the Sign files ranks it pointedly: a much better sighting, that study argues, than the famous Gorman dogfight of 1 October 1948 that has overshadowed it. Disposition, stated as the two catalogues leave it and not merged: 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; the tentative “Debris?” in the secondary catalogue is a query, not a signed evaluation. Its strength is the Sign-era file itself, printed here whole. Placement: the Studebaker works, South Bend — the sister city's.

The Project Sign case as printed in the NICAP Loedding volume's “Final Word” chapter (13 October 1948, 11:45 a.m. CST); Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns (entry 120: South Bend, Indiana, 13 Oct. 1948, Brooke and Thompson, “Debris?” — McDonald list; Saunders/FUFOR Index); the official Blue Book unknowns list (NICAP) checked for the case's absence.