13 October 1948: the disc over the Studebaker works

Wednesday, 13 October 1948, 11:45 a.m. CST

The report: South Bend's first Air Force case belongs to Project Sign, Blue Book's predecessor, and its witnesses were two office workers standing at a window of the Studebaker Corporation — both, the file narrative records, holding important positions in the company's engineering department. The narrative of the case, as Michael Swords reconstructs it from the Project Sign files, is precise about time and sky: 11:45 a.m. Central time on a clear, cloudless day. The men watched a silvery, flat, disc-shaped object speed silently through the sky at about 1,500 feet — just a little smaller than a DC-3 airliner, moving about three times as fast, on a straight course from northwest to southeast for eight to ten seconds. It "flashed" as it went because the sun reflected off it as brightly as from chrome, an effect that gave the appearance of rotation, though the witnesses were uncertain whether it actually spun. They could see no sign of propulsion, wings or rudders, and both felt certain it could not have been a balloon or an aircraft. Studebaker's management, asked about the men, described them as of "a high type of caliber" and highly reliable.

The disposition, in the record's three voices: The Air Force's own index for 1948 closes the case in a line: "South Bend, Indiana — Brooke, Thompson — Other (DEBRIS IN AIR)." The case's line in the Saunders/FUFOR index, as Brad Sparks's catalogue of Blue Book unknowns reproduces it, carries the same thought with a question mark — "Debris?" — and it is on the strength of that tentative line that the case sits in a catalogue of candidate unknowns at all. Swords's narrative from the Sign files, for its part, records no explanation reached. The three states of the record are printed here unaveraged: the index's evaluation is flat — debris in the air; the later index line is tentative; the narrative is silent. The witnesses' surnames, Brooke and Thompson, come from the index lines; their given names do not appear in the sources reached. The case does not appear on the Air Force's published list of cases officially listed as "Unknown," and no Sign incident number for it is legible in the digitized index copies consulted.

Sources:

1. Michael D. Swords, "Final Word," closing chapter of Alfred Loedding and the Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947 (hosted at nicap.org) — the case narrative drawn from the Project Sign files: the Studebaker window, the two engineering-department witnesses, the disc's size, speed, altitude, course and duration, the flashing, the absence of propulsion or wings, the management's character reference.
2. U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book index for 1948 (redacted digitized copy, archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes) — the index line: 13 October, South Bend, Indiana, evaluation "Other (DEBRIS IN AIR)"; the unredacted copy's line names the observers, Brooke and Thompson.
3. Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns (version 1.16, 2 October 2009), entry 120 — the Saunders/FUFOR index line: "Oct. 13, 1948. South Bend, Indiana (41.68° N, 86.26° W). Brooke and Thompson. Debris? (McDonald list; Saunders/FUFOR Index)."
4. U.S. Air Force, cases officially listed as "Unknown" (published list, as reproduced at nicap.org/bluebook/bluelist.htm) — searched in full; the case is not on it (the list's October 1948 entries pass from Neubiberg, 11 October, to case 218, Kyushu, Japan, 15 October).