27 April 1950: TWA Flight 117 and the red disc

Thursday, 27 April 1950, 8:25 p.m.

The report: The best-known case in this section is an airliner case, and it stands on the contemporary press and on the case summary preserved in the Blue Book literature. Trans World Airlines Flight 117, a DC-3 flying west from Washington to Chicago at about 200 miles an hour and 2,000 feet, was over northern Indiana on the night of 27 April 1950 when First Officer Robert F. Manning saw a bright light off to the right and well to the rear. Captain Robert Adickes, in the left-hand seat, watched with him as a bright red disc-shaped object — its width five to ten times its height, rolling on edge like a wheel, with no trail — overtook the airliner gradually over about two minutes on a parallel course slightly below its altitude, until it stood about a hundred degrees around and roughly half a mile away, the size, in the summary's comparison, of an orange held at twenty feet. The stewardess, Gloria Henshaw, and at least eleven passengers watched it too; among the passengers, the file summary names two Boeing engineers, C. H. Jenkins and D. C. Bourland, and two executives, E. J. Fitzgerald and S. N. Miller. When Adickes turned the airliner toward the object, it veered off at about 400 miles an hour, dropping to about 1,500 feet and heading north, showing its edge as it went, and was gone within a few minutes.

The contemporary press: The story was wire news within two days. The Associated Press account of 29 April 1950 has Adickes reporting a "round mass" which "glowed a dull red like hot steel," cruising about a half-mile from his Chicago-bound plane: "I used to laugh at all those flying saucer reports but it's no laughing matter now. I saw one." In the AP's telling the object, "20 to 50 feet" in diameter, cruised on its parallel course for eight minutes, and when the pilot turned north to close with it, "it picked up speed 300 to 400 miles an hour and ran out of sight right over South Bend." Flying magazine's July 1950 survey of pilot sightings gave the case its fullest contemporary treatment — the object in sight "six or seven minutes," Adickes a captain of six years' standing and thirteen years' flying, reluctant to say he saw a "flying saucer" at all — and recorded that he called South Bend air traffic control to ask whether it had any record of unusual craft in the vicinity, and it did not. A passenger, Jacob Goelzer, is quoted in Flying's account: "It looked something like a spinning exhaust, all aflame." Donald Keyhoe, the era's leading saucer writer, investigated the case himself for TRUE magazine (August 1950, "Flight 117 and the Flying Saucer"), interviewing the crew and, by his account, all but five of the passengers; his photograph caption states this section's geography in one line: "Disc appeared near South Bend, plane gave chase, only to lose it minutes later."

The conflicts, printed: The record does not agree with itself, and the disagreements are carried here rather than settled. Place: the case line in Sparks's catalogue, drawn from the Blue Book file literature, gives the location as "Near South Bend (or Goshen?), Indiana." Keyhoe's narrative puts the DC-3 "over Goshen, Indiana" when Manning first saw the light, with South Bend "a spreading glow" twenty-five miles ahead, and has the object finally "racing off to the north past South Bend"; the AP and Flying both place the encounter near or over South Bend itself, and NICAP's case directory heads the case "Goshen, Indiana." Goshen is in Elkhart County, east of this county's line; the case enters this section on the strength the record gives it — the file literature names South Bend first, the documented contact was with South Bend's air traffic control, and the object's documented departure ran past the city — and it is boundary-printed on those terms, not absorbed. Duration: about two minutes for the overtake in the file summary; six or seven minutes in sight in Flying; eight minutes of parallel cruising in the AP account. Passengers: sixteen in Keyhoe's investigation, of whom he interviewed all but five; nineteen aboard in the AP's account, about half of whom saw the object; at least eleven watching, in the file summary. The stewardess's name is spelled Henshaw in the file summary and NICAP's directory, Hinshaw in one magazine-archive retelling; the file summary governs here.

The official status: No Air Force evaluation of the case was reached in the sources consulted. The case is not on the Air Force's published list of official "Unknowns," and it does not appear under South Bend, Goshen, or the pilots' names in the Air Force's 1950 index as digitized — the county's one famous case is, officially, a press case: fully documented as a report, made by professional aircrew and multiply witnessed, and carrying no documented official disposition in the record reached.

Sources:

1. Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns (version 1.16, 2009), entry 304 — the file summary: Flight 117's course, altitude and speed; the object's form, overtake, and departure; the named witnesses (sources as Sparks gives them: Sparks; McDonald 1968; Project 1947; Keyhoe 1953; NICAP); location line "Near South Bend (or Goshen?), Indiana (BBU)."
2. Associated Press, 29 April 1950, as carried in the Northern Daily News, Kirkland Lake, Ontario — "Airline Pilot Reports Seeing Flying Saucer": the "dull red like hot steel" mass, 20 to 50 feet, eight minutes parallel, the departure "right over South Bend," Manning's confirmation, about half of 19 passengers.
3. Curtis Fuller, "The Flying Saucers — Fact or Fiction?", Flying magazine, July 1950 (as reproduced by Project 1947) — six or seven minutes in sight; the call to South Bend air traffic control and its negative answer; Adickes's experience and reluctance; the Goelzer quotation as carried in the magazine's coverage of the case.
4. Donald E. Keyhoe, "Flight 117 and the Flying Saucer," TRUE magazine, August 1950 — the personal investigation, the Goshen framing of the first sighting, the departure past South Bend, the caption quoted.
5. NICAP, AVCAT case directory, "Goshen, Indiana" (nicap.org/500427goshen_dir.htm) — the case headed under Goshen; and the Air Force's published "Unknown" list and 1950 index (archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes), searched in full — the case appears in neither.