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Saturday, 5 July 1947
The record: South Bend's name enters the modern record eleven days after Kenneth Arnold's report, in the first great rush of the 1947 wave. Michael Swords's history of that wave, built on Ted Bloecher's standard catalogue of it, lists the places that reported on Saturday, 5 July 1947 — the day after the wave's Independence Day onslaught — and the list runs, in part: St. John, New Brunswick; Sherbrooke, Quebec; Port Huron, Michigan; Anaconda, Montana; Hollywood, California; Waterloo, Iowa; Akron and Cincinnati, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; "South Bend and Huntington, Indiana"; New Orleans, Louisiana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Denver, Colorado; Seattle, Washington. No description of what was seen over South Bend survives in the wave literature — no witness, no shape, no hour — and no South Bend line appears in the Air Force's indexes for 1947, which cover the reports the military collected. The entry therefore stands at one line's size: on the fifth of July 1947, in the first fortnight of the flying-saucer era, something was reported over South Bend that the wire-era catalogues counted among that day's national reports, and the content of the report is not preserved in the sources reached. The city's own newspaper for that weekend is the unworked route, as with 1897.
Sources:
- 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, and the Associated Press report of 7 July 1947 cited in the chapter's notes.
- U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book index for 1947 (redacted and unredacted digitized copies, archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes, from the National Archives records) — searched in full; no South Bend line.