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APRIL 27, 1950 · SEAT: GOSHEN, ELKHART COUNTY
The airliner case is the best-witnessed report in this section, and it is not this county's. On the evening of April 27, 1950, TWA's Flight 117, a DC-3 westbound for Chicago with Captain Robert Adickes in the left seat and Captain Robert F. Manning as first officer, was over Goshen, Indiana — Elkhart County, the next county east — at 2,000 feet and about 175 miles per hour when, at 8:25 p.m., a bright red object, turning orange-red, came up from behind and below and paced the airliner. Adickes described a disc "like a round blob of hot metal," five to ten times as wide as it was thick, subtending about the size of an orange held at twenty feet. It held station about half a mile off, slightly below the airliner's altitude, for roughly two minutes. When Adickes banked toward it and called the South Bend radio range, the object dived to about 1,500 feet and veered away north at an estimated 400 miles per hour. Fourteen people saw it, among them the hostess, Gloria Hinshaw, and passengers C. H. Jenkins and D. C. Bourland — both Boeing engineers — and E. J. Fitzgerald. Donald Keyhoe investigated the case for the press within days; it ran in TRUE Magazine in August 1950 and in his Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953). NICAP's air-visual catalog seats the case, correctly, at Goshen.
The seat matters, and this article prints it plainly because the retellings blur it: the "near South Bend" version of this case is a carrier effect — South Bend was the radio range the crew called and the city's glow lay some twenty-five miles ahead — while the file seat is Goshen, and the case therefore belongs to Elkhart County's ledger, not this county's. Its Air Force disposition prints at the size the record reached: the case does not appear on the Air Force's official list of Unknowns, so Blue Book did not leave it unexplained; but no evaluation for it was carried in the NICAP case record read for this build, and the entry that would state it — the Goshen line of the Air Force Master Index for 1950 — was not pulled in this run. That is a named gap with a named settler, and the case is not promoted past it: a two-minute, fourteen-witness pacing of an airliner, officially not an Unknown, its exact file verdict unpulled.
Sources: NICAP, AVCAT case directory and Keyhoe investigation report, Goshen, Apr. 27, 1950 (nicap.org, this history and this history); Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), pp. 145–148, and TRUE Magazine, August 1950; Berliner, Blue Book Unknowns list (NICAP), April–May 1950 section — no Goshen entry.