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1947–1969 · THE COUNTY LEDGER
Here the county's whole official file stands in one place, every entry the official index record produced for St. Joseph County, the explained and the unexplainable together, each with its disposition as the record gives it:
1. October 13, 1948 — South Bend. The Studebaker works sighting (Brooke and Thompson). Carried in Sparks's catalog of Blue Book Unknowns (entry 120) from the McDonald list and the Saunders/FUFOR index, with Sparks's own tentative note "Debris?"; not on the Air Force's official Unknown list, and no folder in the National Archives' sanitized case-file index. Status: a list-carried candidate, never an official Unknown.
2. May 8, 1952 (also carried as March 8, 1952) — Mishawaka. Master Index, 1952: INSUFFICIENT DATA. Case number not legible in the copy read; the two dates print unmerged, each with its carrier, in the case article above.
3. July 23, 1952 — South Bend. Captain H. W. Kloth's two blue-white objects. Master Index, 1952, and the official Unknown list, Case No. 1578: UNIDENTIFIED. The county's one official Unknown.
4. January 1957 — South Bend. Master Index, 1957, first entry of the year: Insufficient Data. Day of month not legible in the copy read.
The count is four. Four index entries in twenty-two years of the Air Force's file system: one left unidentified, two closed as insufficient data, one carried only on researchers' lists with its cataloguer's question mark attached. Against the state, for proportion: Indiana's other official Unknowns seat at Indianapolis (twice, 1948), Kokomo (1950), Terre Haute (1951 and 1952), La Porte (1954, the next county west), Loogootee (1955), Bunker Hill Air Force Base (1959), and Indianapolis again (1960, 1962) — the county's one Unknown is one of eleven Indiana entries on the official list. Two boundary items were tested and excluded, and print as exclusions: the TWA Flight 117 case of April 27, 1950, seated at Goshen in Elkhart County, belongs to that county's ledger; and a July 1952 index entry seated only as "Indiana, Illinois Area" is an area entry, not a county case. One further file, an "Indiana [illegible]" folder of May 1948 in the Archives' index, cannot be attributed to any county and is counted nowhere.
Walkerton and Lincoln Township's share of the file era is zero. No case file, no index entry, no control sheet seats in the town or the township in any source read for this build — not in the 1952 Master Index read whole, not on the official Unknown list read whole, not in the Archives' sanitized file index for 1947–48 read whole. The town's entire saucer-era record in the official system is the absence this ledger records; its presence in the era is the single press-carried report of July 1947, printed in its own article above, which the file system never took up. The ledger's own limits print with it: the Master Index was read whole for 1952 and for January 1957; the Unknown lists (Berliner's official list and Sparks's catalog) were read whole; the Archives' file index was read whole for 1947 and 1948. The Master Index years 1949–51, 1953–56, and 1958–69 were not line-swept in this run, and any county entry hiding in them would amend this count; the settling source is the same archive.org set (Project Blue Book Indexes, 1947–1969), and the gap is named rather than the count overstated.
Sources: Air Force Master Index, 1952 (read whole) and 1957 (January read), Project Blue Book Indexes, archive.org; Berliner, Blue Book Unknowns list (NICAP), read whole — Indiana entries as listed; Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns, v1.16, entry 120; National Archives sanitized case-file index (Daily Dialectics T-1206 transcription; RearAccess parse), 1947 and 1948 sections read whole.