23 July 1952: Captain Kloth's two objects — the county's official Unknown

Wednesday, 23 July 1952, 11:35 p.m.

The report: One South Bend case stands on the Air Force's own list of the cases it never explained. Case number 1578, in the published list of Blue Book cases officially listed as "Unknown," reads in its summary form: 23 July 1952, South Bend, Indiana, 11:35 p.m.; the witness an Air Force pilot, Captain H. W. Kloth; two bright blue-white objects flew together, and then the rear one veered off, after about nine minutes. The Air Force's own index for 1952 carries the same case in one line — "23 — South Bend, Indiana — Kloth — UNIDENTIFIED" — and Brad Sparks's catalogue of the unknowns, and Don Berliner's summaries of them, carry the same date, witness and description. Whether Captain Kloth was airborne or on the ground is not stated in the summaries reached; the full case file, on the National Archives' Blue Book microfilm, was not pulled, and the entry is printed at summary level with that caution, the disposition being the one fact every carrier agrees on: the Air Force investigated the report of one of its own pilots and left it Unidentified.

The moment: The date is part of the record. Kloth's report came in the middle of the great 1952 wave — after the first of the two Washington, D.C. weekends (19–20 July), when unidentified targets on the capital's radar screens made the saucers a national emergency of print, and before the second (26–27 July), which brought the Air Force's largest press conference since the war. July 1952 was the heaviest reporting month of the entire Blue Book era. South Bend's single official Unknown belongs to that fortnight, and the city's newspaper answered the same wave in its own way nine days later, as the next entry records.

Sources:

1. U.S. Air Force, cases officially listed as "Unknown" (published list, as reproduced at nicap.org/bluebook/bluelist.htm) — case 1578, 23 July 1952, South Bend, Indiana.
2. U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book index for 1952 (unredacted digitized copy, archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes) — the index line for 23 July: "South Bend, Indiana — Kloth — UNIDENTIFIED."
3. Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns (version 1.16, 2009), entry 630, and Don Berliner's summaries of the Blue Book unknowns (as carried in NICAP's 1952 July casebook and in Patrick Gross's Blue Book unknowns pages) — the 11:35 p.m. time, the witness's name and service, the two blue-white objects and the nine minutes.