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JULY 23, 1952 · SEAT: SOUTH BEND · CASE 1578 · UNIDENTIFIED
One case in this county's file was never explained, and it belongs to the county seat. On the night of Wednesday, July 23, 1952 — in the middle of the great 1952 wave, four days after the first Washington National Airport radar weekend and six days before General Samford's Pentagon press conference — Captain H. W. Kloth, a United States Air Force pilot, watched two bright blue-white objects over South Bend. The sighting is timed at 11:35 p.m. and lasted about nine minutes: the two objects flew together, and then the rear one veered off. NICAP's chronology of the wave, drawn from the Air Force's own summary, records it in one line: "11:35 p.m. South Bend, Indiana. Captain Harold Kloth, USAF, saw two blue-white objects arc over city." The Air Force investigated and could not close it. In the Master Index for 1952 the case stands with the evaluation UNIDENTIFIED, and on the official list of Blue Book cases carried as "Unknown" it stands as Case No. 1578, July 23, 1952, South Bend, Indiana.
Its proportion prints with it. The county's whole Blue Book file, compiled in the ledger article below, holds four index entries; this is the only one of the four the Air Force left unexplained, and it is one of 303 cases left unidentified in 1952 alone, of 701 across the program's twenty-two years. "Unidentified" is this section's own word and it means what the frame article said it means: the investigators did not match the report to a known cause before the files closed. It is not a finding about what the objects were, and this section promotes it no further than its control sheet. But it is a real distinction, earned by a serving Air Force pilot's nine-minute observation in the busiest week of the busiest year the office ever had, and it is the strongest single entry this county's unexplained record contains.
Sources: Berliner, Blue Book Unknowns list (NICAP) — Case No. 1578, July 23, 1952, South Bend, Indiana; Air Force Master Index, 1952 (archive.org), July 1952 sections; NICAP, UFO Evidence chronology, July 1952 (ufoe160); Sparks/Berliner case summary as carried at bibliotecapleyades.net and ufology.patrickgross.org (Blue Book unexplained cases, 1952).