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OCTOBER 13, 1948 · SEAT: SOUTH BEND
The county's second case belongs to its industrial skyline. On Wednesday, October 13, 1948 — twelve days after the Gorman dogfight over Fargo made the national wires — two office workers of the Studebaker Corporation in South Bend stood at a window on a clear, cloudless day and watched, at 11:45 a.m. Central time, a silvery flat disc cross the sky in silence. The Loedding history's account, written from the Wright Field side of the record, gives the particulars the witnesses gave: the object flew at about 1,500 feet, straight, northwest to southeast, for eight to ten seconds; it looked a little smaller than a DC-3 but moved about three times as fast; no wings, rudders, or any visible means of propulsion showed. Both witnesses held responsible positions in Studebaker's engineering department, and the company's management vouched for them to the investigators. Brad Sparks's catalog names them: Brooke and Thompson.
The disposition prints with the case, and it is a divided one. Sparks's Comprehensive Catalog of Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns carries the case as entry 120 — "Oct. 13, 1948. South Bend, Indiana. Brooke and Thompson" — but it carries it on the strength of the McDonald list and the Saunders/FUFOR index, not from a surviving official designation, and Sparks himself appends a tentative verdict of his own: "Debris?" The case does not appear on the Air Force's official list of Unknowns as reproduced by Don Berliner, and no South Bend folder appears in the National Archives' sanitized case-file index for 1948, read whole for this build (that year's Indiana files seat at Indianapolis, Richmond, and one illegible location). So the Studebaker disc stands in the researchers' catalogs as a candidate Unknown with a question mark its own cataloguer attached, and in the official record as no case at all. It is printed here at that size: a well-witnessed report, two named engineering witnesses, eight to ten seconds — and a paper trail that runs through lists, not through a file.
Sources: Brad Sparks, Comprehensive Catalog of 1,600 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns, v1.16, entry 120 (archive.org text); Alfred Loedding and the Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947, "Final Word" (nicap.org); Berliner, Blue Book Unknowns list (NICAP), read whole — no South Bend entry; National Archives sanitized case-file index (Daily Dialectics T-1206 transcription), 1948 section read whole.