The Blue Book ledger for St. Joseph County

1947 — 1969, the project's whole span

The sweep: The county's Blue Book record can be enumerated because the Air Force indexed its own cases. For this section, the Air Force's published yearly indexes for every year of the project, 1947 through 1969 — in both digitized copies of each, the redacted and the unredacted, preserved from the National Archives records — were searched for South Bend, Mishawaka, Notre Dame and the one witness name the record supplies, and every Indiana location line in every year was read. The yield for St. Joseph County is four cases, and they are the whole of it: 13 October 1948, South Bend, evaluated "Other (DEBRIS IN AIR)"; 8 May 1952, Mishawaka, "Insufficient Data"; 23 July 1952, South Bend, "Unidentified"; and January 1957, South Bend, "Insufficient Data." No case is indexed under Notre Dame, the unincorporated community that holds the universities; none under Osceola, Walkerton, New Carlisle or any other county place; and the famous 1950 airliner case, for all its press, has no line in the 1950 index under either of its candidate cities. The Air Force's published list of official "Unknowns" was likewise swept in full: Indiana holds seven of its entries — Indianapolis twice (29 and 31 July 1948), Kokomo (8 April 1950), Terre Haute twice (9 October 1951 and 26 June 1952), Rockville (22 July 1952) — and South Bend once, Captain Kloth's case of the following night. Brad Sparks's catalogue of the Blue Book unknowns, the fullest scholarly enumeration of the unexplained residue, touches South Bend exactly three times: the 1948 Studebaker case, the 1950 airliner, and the 1952 Unknown.

The limit, stated: The enumeration is an enumeration of the indexes, made on digitized text layers of scanned documents, and it carries that limit openly. The two copies' texts differ — the Kloth line, for instance, is illegible on the redacted copy's degraded page for 23–24 July 1952 and reads cleanly in the unredacted copy — and a case whose index line was garbled past recognition in both copies could escape the net; the reading of every Indiana line, and not name-matching alone, is the guard against it. The case files themselves sit at the National Archives in chronological order on microfilm T-1206, with Fold3's indexed presentation of the same record the named route for reading any single file whole. What the index sweep settles is the county's official footprint: four cases in twenty-two years, one unexplained — a small city's small share of a national file of 12,618.

Sources:

1. U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book yearly indexes, 1947–1969 (redacted and unredacted digitized copies, archive.org, ProjectBlueBookIndexes, from the National Archives records) — searched in full for this section; the county's four lines as quoted in the case entries above; every Indiana location line in every year read.
2. U.S. Air Force, cases officially listed as "Unknown" (published list, as reproduced at nicap.org/bluebook/bluelist.htm; 564 entries of the 701 the Air Force claimed) — swept in full; Indiana's seven entries as listed.
3. Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns (version 1.16, 2009) — swept in full; South Bend at entries 120, 304 and 630; no Mishawaka or Notre Dame entry.
4. National Archives, Project BLUE BOOK reference report — the case files' chronological arrangement and microfilm publication T-1206.