It was poor judgment not to send a project investigator to the site or work with LaPaz (or whatever experts were available) to interview witnesses and look for de­bris.

No one from Wright-Patterson seems to have gone to Norcatur, talked person­ally with LaPaz (or with H. H. Nininger, who finally discovered fragments of the largest stony meteorite found up to that time), or got any direct evidence at all. Moreover, it was not at all certain that they were dealing with a bolide.

For example, the letter from LaPaz in April 1948 contained the following facts:

1. LaPaz believed that the “flying lenses” were 99% hoax and imagination but 1% real.

2. He believed the Norcatur object was a bolide, but he could not be certain: “not a trace of meteoritic material has so far been found.”

3. An unusual number of such experiences had produced no meteorite finds and he wondered what was going on. Could it be that “many of the fireballs are not meteorites at all?”

4. “The situation cries aloud for thorough investigation” (LaPaz, 1948).

LaPaz was also puzzled by the testimony of witnesses who reported artificial ob­jects in association with the case.

One witness believed that a battery-like thing fell from the sky “too hot to handle” just after the explosion; another witness backed him up. Five individuals, including three in the tower at McCook Field in Nebraska, reported a dark object like a missile with a jet coming out the back. All specifically denied that the object was like a meteor.

And finally, a prominent farmer of good character who lived near Stockton, Kansas, gave amazing testimony of what we would today call a close encounter of the first kind: a close-range observation show­ing clear structural details.

Because this material is so rarely seen by ufologists, it might be of interest to recount farmer Leland Sammons’s description in full:

On February 18 at about 5 P.M., I was standing near my hog-pen about 100′ east of my house, when I heard the pheasants raising a distur­bance and the chickens all rushed to the chicken-house.

 

I looked around toward the house to see what was causing it and saw something hover­ing just above the house. I ran toward the house, and it then lowered over the north end of the house and settled toward the ground. I was then very near it, approximately 6′ when it stopped about level with my face, and just wobbled around for an instant, fire belching out of it and sucking back in. The thing was about 4′ long, shaped something like a funnel.

 

There was a pipe sticking out the back of it, and once as it wobbled around, the pipe was sticking right at my belly. Suddenly there was a lot of sparks showered from it, and the fire increased as if a fuse might have lighted, and it took off in a north-westerly direction very fast, gaining altitude as it went. My wife heard it leave and ran out where I stood, and we watched it go, leaving a trail of smoke all the way. Suddenly there was a great cloud of smoke in the sky, not more than 40 seconds after it left my yard, and in a few seconds or more, we heard an explosion.

 

I then stepped off from my house to where it had been, and it was five steps. Yes, it was hot, I could feel the heat from it. Had I not been washing my car prior to the occurrence, wetting the ground, there would have been a bare spot in the yard where the thing started up because there was a great rush of fire from it when it left. It must have been quite high when it exploded. [Cox, 1948]

One of LaPaz’s colleagues had interviewed Sammons, and believed him to “be sincere and very badly scared.”

One can almost feel LaPaz scratching his head be­tween the lines of his letter as he asks: How could a bolide create such a report in a mature and sincere person such as Sammons?

In addition to all this was extensive correspondence by Norman G. Markham, the first piece of which was sent to the Army Chief of Staff on February 20 (Markham, 1948). Markham was a lover of anomalies, a Fortean, and he felt that he had calcu­lated a connection between the Norcatur event and the position of the moon. Markham suggested that perhaps the moon was inhabited and that flying objects visiting earth come from there. Several other past events were cited to buttress his views.

This correspondence was not discarded as obviously crackpot. It went from the Army to the Air Force to Sign to the Scientific Board to LaPaz. Although LaPaz believed Markham’s views to be fantastic, he noted that Markham was correct to call atten­tion to certain unexplained incidents, possibly of real flying disks. One wonders whether Project Sign’s statements six months later—that they had been plotting disk reports in relation to the positions of planetary bodies (and finding correlations)— stem from Markham’s letters in this case file.

Whatever we have here in the Norcatur case, the investigation seems poorly per­formed. There were no direct interviews or other fieldwork, and the meteorite expla­nation was accepted on a letter from the uninvolved amateur, not a direct report from Nininger or LaPaz. No crater was ever found or photographed and placed in the file. And (this is the most telling aspect) the pattern of ignoring inconvenient contrary witness testimony was quietly condoned. What of the five “rocket” witnesses or Leland Sammons? It seemed that no one cared. But why this attitude, given the alleged concern at the times?

The next case activity worth citing was April 5, 1948, at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. Three highly trained balloon observers, including the project leader, J. W. Peoples, were working on a secret project for the Air Force’s Watson Laboratories. They saw two objects. One observer followed one object, and the others followed the second object as they diverged. All were certain that the objects weren’t bal­loons. They were large, whitish, roundish, very high, faster than any aircraft, and performing rapid, erratic motion.

One object was lost low. The other went up quickly and seemed to just disappear. This case was deemed important enough to send Loed­ding and one of Clingerman’s assistants, Lt. Col. J. C. Beam, to New Mexico to interview Peoples and the others. Unfortunately, the witnesses were gone when Sign arrived. (They were later interviewed at Watson Labs in New Jersey.) The witnesses were very sure of themselves and the case was classed as “Unidentified.”

While at Holloman, Loedding and Beam talked with a Lieutenant Markley who had worked with the Watson team. Markley remembered one of them speaking of unusual radar returns from their equipment, but later the Watson personnel said that these were probably just “angels” (spurious echoe due to atmospheric microstruc­tures, insects, equipment falfunction, or other stimuli).

Markley did report that UFOs had been seen around Holloman often. He himself had seen a disk in August 1947 and flat, round aeroforms on at least two further occasions.

Beam and Loedding took a side trip to Phoenix, Arizona, to check up on an old sighting that especially interested Loedding: the July 4, 1947, case of a scooped-disk aeroform photographed by William A. Rhodes. Loedding’s own views of a low-aspect, disk-like lifting body undoubtedly resonated with the object depicted in the Rhodes photos, and the report of their interview is very respectful. One might see this investigation as merely Loedding’s interest, but it was generally true that Sign was interested in all the evi­dence, not just the cases which occurred “yesterday.”

At the end of their trips Beam and Loedding suggested that it was premature to place a permanent observing team at Holloman, despite the amount of activity that seemed to have occurred there.

The Memphis, Tennessee, case of May 7, 1948, is worth a brief mention. Two adult witnesses saw 50–60 unusual objects, apparently moving very high and fast, traveling in straight lines with slight zigzagging. They seemed shiny, like bright aluminum, with silvery trails. Beam also went out on this one.

Three things are noteworthy about this case:

1. Astronomer Paul Herget of the Cincinnati Observatory said that he doubted that these objects were meteors.

2. This case was the first to mention J. Allen Hynek, then an astronomer at Ohio State University, whom Herget recommended they talk to.

3. A year later, the military Research and Development Board was viewing such observations of luminous, “definitely or possibly non-meteoritic,” objects as impor­tant and requiring immediate action—including requesting this particular case file.

In the official Blue Book records, the Air Force unaccountably classed this case as a “meteor.”

Perhaps it was, but the experts appear on record as not thinking so. The assessment was probably not the original thinking of the Sign office. It is more likely the late-1948 thinking of Allen Hynek, once he was formally asked to make astro­nomical determinations, when possible, for UFO reports. His study, which was more an embarrassment to him in later years, would appear as an appendix to the reports of projects Sign and Grudge, Sign’s new designation in 1949 (Hynek, 1949). Hynek viewed his job in these first case assessments as debunking. He was to get rid of UFOs as any sort of exceptional anomaly even when the so-called explanation he came up with was a huge stretch.

He said that he originally enjoyed his job as a de-bunker (Hynek, 1973: 171–172; 1977: 34–38). Unfortunately this was a completely wrong-headed attitude, and it took him a long time to shake it thoroughly and return to a properly objective analysis of cases as they came in. But in May and June of 1948, Hynek was not yet around to throw water and rocks at mysteries, so Sign personnel probably viewed this and the next three cases to be real puzzles rather than foolishness, ignorance, or misperception.

The next case occurred between Plevna and Miles City, Montana, on May 17.

There was one witness, a professional man named William A. Bonneville who be­lieved that reporting this air intruder was a patriotic duty. Abright white ball, bril­liantly illuminated (three times as bright as a locomotive’s headlight would be), sailed over the hills from the northwest, and then to the south and back to the west, and repeated these meanderings for 20 minutes until sailing away into a dark cloud. No sounds could be heard. Along, bright light shot out from beneath.

Somewhat stunned by this performance, the witness stated (with the charming naivete of the 1940s):

. . . anything of this nature which we are not familiar with we are duty bound to report to our Defense Forces who may be better equipped to understand the unfamiliar than we are.

Sign was probably as boggled by this experience as Bonneville was.

But later, someone was up to the task: The case was explained away as “refraction of the planet Mars.” This explanation is of interest not only because of its apparent ridicu­lousness, but because it is precisely the sort of idea continually used by Donald Menzel (Harvard astronomer and arch-enemy of UFOs in the 1950s and 1960s) in his later books and articles (Menzel, 1953).

This refraction or mirage hypothesis was Menzel’s siege gun. Almost any UFO case became a game to find some bright astronomical object in the general direction of the witness’ line of sight, and then invoke misperception, ignorance, confusion, or rare atmospheric phenomena to ac­count for the report. But as far as we know Menzel was not consulting on any of these 1948 cases.

So where did this explanation come from?

INTERLUDE: J. ALLEN HYNEK AND SIGN

J. Allen Hynek formally became an astronomical consultant to Sign in 1948.

The Plevna, Montana, explanation is one that probably came from an astronomer. This is a good place to try to understand Hynek’s role, though it will not be possible to do so with any great certainty because of the lack of documentation concerning his earliest relations with the project. But it does offer an important glimpse of the Air Force’s approach to UFO analysis.

We know that Hynek was officially tasked with studying UFO cases for astronomical explanations on December 16, 1948. This was Air Materiel Command contract W33-038-1118, the final report of which became the appendix for the Project Grudge report that largely debunked UFOs in 1949 (Hynek, 1949; USAF AMC, 1949b). We also know that Herget suggested him as a consultant to the project around late May 1948.

Sometime between these two dates, Hynek was signed on as a regular consultant and made “interim reports.” It sounds as if the idea of a larger formal report (the Grudge appendix) was already in both Hynek’s and Wright-Patterson’s mind in the summer or fall of 1948. Still, Hynek said that he sent interim reports earlier than his formal study period. These reports were largely debunking in nature (Hynek, 1977: 15–17). Could Hynek himself have been the source of the “refraction of Mars” pseudoexplanation for the Plevna case? What an irony it would be if Hynek himself initiated the pseudoscientific mirage hypothesis that he would so vehemently criticize when touted by Menzel.

Let us first examine the key characteristics of the Plevna report. The  object was an extremely bright ball of light (brighter than the moon, and three times brighter than a locomotive headlight) that flew through many viewing angles (north or northwest through “south of the road”). Whoever was doing the analysis must have had a hard time dealing with both the wide angular travel north to south and the extreme bright­ness. How any refraction would allow Mars to pick up that much extra luminosity should have given any astronomer pause. Hynek should have known better.

In his final report to Grudge he stated:

“If this report is to be taken on face value, then no astronomical explanation of this incident is possible.”

Unfortunately, he continued:

However, in seeking even a remote logical explanation for the incident, the present investigator is impressed with the fact that on this very night, May 17, Venus was at its greatest brilliancy, with a magnitude of –4.2, or about 100 times brighter than a first magnitude star. It would have appeared that night as an intensely bright light in the north­west. [Hynek, 1949: 151]

This statement is of interest in several ways: Mars doesn’t enter into it; the language is very subdued, though it stretches for a debunking answer; and there is a subtle hint of Hynek’s (and the military’s?) fundamental mindset. Let’s comment on each of these characteristics.

This is a Venus answer, not Mars. Hynek was quite ready to relegate many UFOs to Venus (e.g., the Mantell case, even though Sign refused to buy that). Hynek’s Venus proposition tried to deal with the brightness while ignoring the traveling ex­cursion. Refraction is never mentioned. Where then does the refraction of Mars come from? It is my opinion that Hynek was blameless. Refraction and mirage explana­tions were not his style.

Of the 200-plus analyses in the Grudge appendix, only two —case number 33 (Mantell) and 229—even hint of such a phenomenon, and the word “refraction” appears in neither place. In case number 148, with a Venus expla­nation crying out for him to tie up its loose ends with refractions, he never resorts to it. Hynek believed refractions of any spectacular kind to be very rare, and even then limited in what they could do (e.g., move erratically about two or three lunar diam­eters as in case 33).

So where did this Menzelian answer come from? Herget? The University of Dayton? A chance interaction with Menzel? We’ll probably never know. It does demonstrate a sad, early willingness on an unknown scientist’s part to grasp for a debunking explanation wherever one could be found.

Unfortunately, Hynek’s tentatively worded guess demonstrated the same thing. He was just being more polite about it. He saw his job as explaining away UFO reports. His typical Grudge style was to make a simple and honestly defensible state­ment, then (if the first statement didn’t explain the case) launch into some low-key speculation. The latter often went well beyond the official descriptions and well outside his charge of providing astronomical analyses. He regularly speculated on balloons, aircraft, subjectivity, and you-name-it. His motives appear to lie in sociol­ogy.

Hynek’s memory of the Air Force consensus was that there were two contrary schools of thought (Hynek, 1977: 13–14). One school, mostly at Wright-Patterson, felt that UFOs were real, technological, and, probably interplanetary. The second school, a majority in the Pentagon and a minority at Wright-Patterson, felt that the UFOs were nonsense.

The Air Force’s elite Scientific Advisory Board lined up on the side of nonsense; and these were the Elders of the Tribe of Science to which Allen Hynek belonged.

It may be that my interim reports helped the transformation of Project Sign into the extremely negative Project Grudge, which took as its premise that UFOs simply could not be. I tried hard to find astronomi­cal explanations for as many cases as I could, and in those that I couldn’t I reached to draw out as many natural explanations as possible. Some­times, I stretched too far.

 

Clearly, I, too, thought at the time that UFOs were just a lot of non­sense. I enjoyed the role of debunker... [Hynek, 1977: 17]

Hynek’s mea culpa would have done much to relieve the sting of his early unsci­entific behavior in this matter if no one had paid any attention to him.

Some did not, but others did. The core team at Project Sign apparently paid little or no mind to Hynek’s negative analyses or interim reports: They were well on their way to their famous Estimate of the Situation and its interplanetary conclusion. If Hynek influ­enced bigger movers and shakers, like Clingerman and McCoy, there is no evidence of it. Who then did he affect?

Possibly he influenced the negative school in the Pentagon, though there is no direct evidence of this. The Pentagon-created anti-UFO report of December 10, 1948 (USAF AID & USN ONI, 1948) shows nothing that could be attributed to Hynek. He may well have spoken to his tribesmen on the Scientific Advisory Board though, and in doing so reinforced their stance.

Those who were clearly influenced by Hynek were the people who read the Grudge report and who took over the UFO project after the sympathetic Sign team was broken up and dispersed. The evidence is abundant: It consists of the case evalua­tions written on the lower right-hand corners of the project’s cards that led off the files of each individual report.

There, scrawled in the corners, one can get the di­gested version of what the Grudge project was concluding about the cases: balloons, Venus, meteors, aircraft. Usually these were stolen directly from Hynek’s report. Most regretfully, they were lifted from the speculation or stretch sections of each case, even when it was obvious that Hynek didn’t think much of the explanation himself. Hynek had been very helpful.

One last thing before getting back to Sign’s history. Note this phrase in the Plevna analysis: “in seeking even a remote logical explanation.” A logical explanation.

This was a telling phraseology. These cases couldn’t be what they seemed; this would not be “logical.” Such objects were irrational, unscientific; they could not make sense. This was probably not only Hynek’s restricted mind-set, but the Scientific Advisory Board’s in toto.

It was something that we do not understand enough about scientists and do not like to admit about them. Their curiosity is great; and it is restricted within broad but nearly ironclad limits. Outside of those limits is the realm of illogic and ridicule. Even in 1977, as he reminisced about his early sins, Hynek had still not made the complete transformation. He still spoke of “rationally” and “astronomi­cally” as if one somehow defined the other (Hynek, 1973; 1977). His Grudge report, with its astronomical and often irrational comments, stood as a rich source of expla­nations for things not explained, and doubtless he and his tribesmen felt good about it.

What an odd and dangerous way to come to conclusions on a matter of possible national security interest.

SIGN ROLLS ON

Ignoring the negative attitudes of consultants and the Pentagon, the Sign team was moving toward the watershed moment for the Project: the Chiles-Whitted case.

We’ll take two brief stops before arriving there. First, east of Monroe, Michigan, May 25, 1948. Two Air Force officers were flying as passengers in an Air Force plane; one saw three objects come down from above and level off, approximately even with the plane and ahead of them. They were fuzzy-edged disks, and flying “astern” (one in line behind the other) and “stepped up” (those behind slightly elevated in step fash­ion).

The objects were in sight about 10–15 seconds, flew opposite the plane’s direc­tion, took a sharp right turn, and were lost to sight. The viewer was fascinated by this and didn’t call it to the other’s attention until too late. Fortunately, moments later, a similar performance was put on by two disks instead of three. Both officers saw the action the second time.

The officers made wildly different size estimates (showing the dangers of this well-known subjective error when there are no clear referents), but the rest of the descriptions matched. Later for Grudge, Hynek followed his pattern: He said that there was no astronomical explanation. Then he speculated freely about holes in clouds, allowing a pattern of isolated shafts of sunlight to bounce off lower clouds and cause perfect echelon reflections moving opposite aircraft motion. The Grudge debunker was happy to write “Probable reflection” on the case record card, despite the fact that when Sign specifically asked for an opinion of the witness about reflec­tions, they received a flat “no.” Sign almost certainly felt that this was a UFO case. Grudge later “explained” it. Who knows what Hynek thought?

Next, Hecla, South Dakota, June 30, 1948. A husband and wife were driving and saw an unusual “star” high in the sky. The husband, an amateur astronomer and engineer, stopped the car and they got out to look for a while. The star, which they were pretty sure was not a star but a much larger (in angular aspect) mass, was not moving at all.

They drove on, stopped again, and got others to look. More driving and another stop. This time, something seemed to be happening. The mass, still visually small, seemed to be larger and changing shape. A piece “fell off,” moved away, and appeared like a round ball. Two more pieces now did the same, and moved to positions off the central body, which formed a perfect equilateral triangle. All the balls and the central object looked like polished aluminum. The central object now appeared like an aggregation of much smaller objects that dispersed and faded away.

The three equilateral balls kept moving outward, always keeping their perfect geom­etry. Then they seemed to get smaller and fainter, as if rising to great height, and vanished. The astronomer-engineer said: “my convictions at this point were that it could not be anything terrestrial.”

Sign probably agreed. Hynek again did his thing: This was nothing astronomical; on the other hand, “in all probability the object was a cluster of balloons, carrying, perhaps, cosmic ray apparatus.” The explanation was within the normal pattern of Air Force explanations for the next 20 years: Find something sort of like what’s described, ignore some awkward elements, say “maybe,” and count it explained.

The ignored awkward element here was the perfect equilateral triangle allegedly formed by the unintelligent, motorless balloon parts. Hynek’s “maybe” became “fact” when the Grudge record card was labeled “BALLOON JAH,” in honor of J. Allen Hynek.

And then came the Chiles-Whitted case. Capt. Edward Ruppelt, chief of the UFO Project in 1951–1953, said:

According to the old timers at ATIC [Wright-Patterson T-2 Intelligence division was then named Air Technical Intelligence Center], this report shook them worse than the Mantell Incident. This was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to anything resem­bling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it. [Ruppelt, 1956: 40–41]

Between this event and the ultimate demise of Project Sign, many other interest­ing cases and activities occurred; but because of the overriding significance of this experience for the project’s history, the other cases will be (mostly) ignored. From this point forward, the history of Project Sign primarily reflects the Chiles-Whitted case and those thoughts, beliefs, and actions that became closely related to it.

The observation occurred in the early morning hours of July 24, 1948. An Eastern Airlines flight was near Montgomery, Alabama, flying at 5,000 feet and soon to land. The night was mainly clear. Pilot Clarence Chiles and copilot John Whitted were at the controls. Most of the passengers were asleep. Ahead of the plane and slightly above (the pilots estimated about 5,500 feet), a flying object came into view. Chiles said to Whitted: “Look, there comes one of those new jet jobs.”

As the device came nearer, they became more amazed. It was shaped like a DC-6, but with neither wings nor tail: a “flying fuselage.” It seemed to be about 100 feet long with a barrel diameter about three times that of a B-29. At an estimated 500 miles per hour it took about 10 seconds to pass their plane and pull up sharply through the broken clouds overhead. They estimated its closest approach to be about half a mile. The device was dark at the front with a blue glow underneath. Red-orange jet exhausts spewed out 30 feet behind.

The most spectacular aspect of its design was two double-decked rows of brightly lit, large, rectangular windows along the sides. Chiles thought he saw a more dimly lit front-cockpit area. Whitted did not. The whole display seemed a lot brighter and more vivid to Chiles than it did to Whitted. Still, in general esti­mates and configuration, the two pilots concurred.

The Eastern flight landed shortly afterwards and the pilots reported everything to their managers. Eastern released the reported details to the newspapers that day. The case immediately made national news: “Buck Rogers-like Plane Passes 2 Airline Pilots!” Everyone was reading the story the evening of July 24. It caught the atten­tion of the Pentagon as well. The next day, Chief of Air Force Intelligence Gen. Cabell phoned McCoy’s office at Wright-Patterson. Sign was ordered to get into the field immediately and investigate. By that afternoon, Loedding, Deyarmond, and Llewellyn were being flown by Capt. Clarence Groseclose to Atlanta. They met Chiles and Whitted in the Henry Grady Hotel the next day.

The interviewers (Loedding and Deyarmond) were impressed. The pilots told their stories, as recounted above, and were consistent. Both pilots had been military veter­ans and had good commercial reputations. Chiles particularly was considered by his bosses to be outstanding. Loedding, an excellent aeroengineer who leaned towards the extraterrestrial hypothesis, must have been stunned. Deyarmond seemed a more grounded military engineer, but he too had to be enthusiastic. This seemed to be the case Sign was looking for.

Later, Llewellyn was able to locate and interview the lone passenger who had awakened and noticed something. He only saw the bright red­orange exhaust of the retreating object and no details. Still, it was a small corrobora­tion. Presumably, as Cabell himself had ordered this, they made some preliminary report to the Pentagon and began their analysis back at Wright-Patterson.

The pieces of Sign’s thinking coalesced around this case during August and Sep­tember of 1948. In the first week of August they received word of an independent ground witness (an experienced observer on a military base) to the Chiles-Whitted object. They immediately requested details from the base. Although official forms took about a month to arrive, this was another corroboration. Cross-checking anoma­lous cases, they noted that an apparently identical object had been sighted over The Hague, Netherlands, on July 20.

They also recalled the wave of so-called “ghost rocket” sightings over Scandinavia in 1946 and early 1947—more jet-propelled, flying fuselages. They requested special interviews for more information on August 19. It looked like the Chiles-Whitted object was the real thing.

But how could it fly? It was the exploration of this question that, I believe, finally tipped the balance. The object was a wingless, tailless fuselage. It was not simply a missile; it had windows, ergo, presumably, pilots and passengers. It must be able to take off, maneuver, and land. But how? This is exactly the sort of problem that air­intelligence engineers love.

When they dove into it and (in their minds) came up with the solution, it placed the last powerful overlay of reality on the investigation. They found their aerodynamic answers in the advanced theories of the German aerodesign geniuses. Ludwig Prandtl’s theory of lift provided not only the rationale of how such an object could fly, but also a guesstimate of the required power plant (USAF AMC, 1949a). The latter then took them the final step into the Land of Oz. Conventional power plants were nowhere near sufficient. It would take something much more powerful to fly the Chiles-Whitted object . . . perhaps something nuclear.

This investigative odyssey must have been as exciting as it was astounding. Nuclear­powered aircraft, or something even more unsuspected. We couldn’t do it. The Sovi­ets couldn’t do it. Sometime during all of this the project personnel must have won­dered about the correlations that they felt they were finding between UFO events and close approaches of the inner solar-system planets.

Based on these correlations and their new conviction about Chiles-Whitted, Sign later sent notice to the Penta­gon to alert all operatives, bases, and the other services to the potential for new UFOs reports in mid-October (Earle, 1948).

THE ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION

In September 1948, Sign heard the details of the Chiles-Whitted ground-witness corroboration.

The third qualified observer had seen a cylindrical object jetting red­orange exhaust over Robins AFB in Georgia, one hour earlier. It was heading in the direction of Montgomery. Project officer Capt. Robert Sneider had decided that the time had come to climax the project’s task and write the required “Estimate of the Situation.” Every intelligence operation’s task was ultimately to present such a best­guess summary, strongly backed with as much fact (“proof”) as possible.

Using Chiles-Whitted as the core, and collecting around it many cases from the summer of 1947 to September 1948, Sneider composed the fateful document. The latest case known to have been utilized in the document took place on September 23, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

We know that two prominent Air Force intelligence officers (Ruppelt and Fournet) saw the document in 1952. Ruppelt described it:

It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on legal-sized paper. Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET. [Ruppelt, 1956: 41]

As project officer, Sneider would have been the primary author.

Throughout this era, several other staff members typically got involved in approvals and sign-offs on drafts and reports. Deyarmond, Loedding, and Truettner almost certainly were part of the writing. Llewellyn certainly looked in. All these people, as well as higher-ups in Clingerman’s and McCoy’s offices, had to approve, at least in some sense. And an Estimate of UFOs as extraterrestrial would have been no small thing to assent to.

No one can give a detailed description of the contents of this famous yet mysteri­ous document, as it has not been available for modern analysts to read. Yet the fol­lowing cryptic description by Ruppelt, only the last paragraph of which made it into his book, offers some hints:

As documented proof, many unexplained sightings were quoted. The original UFO sighting by Kenneth Arnold; the series of sightings from the secret Air Force Test Center, Muroc AFB; the F-51 pilot’s observa­tion of a formation of spheres near Lake Meade; the report of an F-80 pilot who saw two round objects diving toward the ground near the Grand Canyon; and a report by the pilot of an Idaho National Guard T­6 trainer, who saw a violently maneuvering black object.

 

As further documentation, the report quoted an interview with an Air Force Major from the Rapid City AFB (now Ellsworth AFB) who saw twelve UFO’s flying a tight diamond formation. When he first saw them they were high but soon they went into a fantastically high speed dive, leveled out, made a perfect formation turn, and climbed at a 30 to 40 degree angle, accelerating all the time. The UFO’s were oval-shaped and brilliant yellowish-white.

 

Also included was one of the reports from the AEC’s Los Alamos Laboratory. The incident occurred at 9:40 AM on September 23, 1948. A group of people were waiting for an airplane at the landing strip in Los Alamos when one of them noticed something glint in the sun. It was a flat, circular object, high in the northern sky. The appearance and relative size was the same as a dime held edgewise and slightly tipped, about 50 feet away.

 

The document pointed out that the reports hadn’t actually started with the Arnold Incident. Belated reports from a weather observer in Richmond, Virginia, who observed a “silver disk” through his theodo­lite telescope; an F-47 pilot, and three pilots in his formation, who saw a “silver flying wing”; and the English “ghost airplanes” that had been picked up on radar early in 1947, proved this point.

 

Although not re­ceived until after the Arnold sighting, they all had taken place earlier.

[Unedited MS of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects in Ruppelt files]

The Estimate would have been addressed to Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, but it really was meant for Director of Intelligence Gen. Charles Cabell.

It was prob­ably sent near the end of September, just prior to the next stunning UFO case: the George Gorman “UFO Dogfight” in Fargo, North Dakota, on October 1 (Ruppelt, 1956: 41–43). It would have landed in Garrett’s Collections office and been hand­carried to Cabell. Cabell may or may not have been shocked. It is my guess that he and his operatives knew what was coming.

Very few real surprises are good strategy in military circles. Still, with a pro-ETH Wright-Patterson intelligence group on one side, an anti-ETH Pentagon Intelligence Requirements Office on the other, and open­minded collections officers and the powerful Research and Development chief (Gen. Donald Putt) in between, Cabell didn’t want to decide this on his own. He handed the Estimate further upstairs to Vandenberg himself (Ruppelt, 1956: 45).

Upon reflection, this seems a bit extraordinary. Cabell’s job was to deal with these Estimates and not burden Vandenberg with them. And Cabell almost certainly had to know that this was coming. But he still ducked. This situation, UFOs and extrater­restrials, was too big for anyone but the chief of staff himself to rule on. Cabell must have been in doubt about this, not just about the reality of UFOs but their extraterres­trial nature.

It was Cabell who reinitiated the Wright-Patterson UFO project in 1951 as a serious investigation and cleaned the anti-ETH elements out of Wright-Patterson and the Pentagon (Ruppelt, n.d.). And much later, in the 1960s, Cabell told UFO and ETH-friendly CIA photo analyst Art Lundahl that he still felt the UFO matter de­served serious investigation (McDonald, n.d.).

But Vandenberg didn’t have any doubts—not about action anyway. In what was apparently a very short time period for contemplation, the chief sent the Estimate cascading back down channels to Sign as unacceptable. We don’t know who Vandenberg consulted or why he did this, but he was quick and decisive. He did not want an extraterrestrial assessment. He was saying clearly and loudly to Sign and everyone in between that he was not happy with this.

The timetable is uncertain, but a few facts are known. An October 7 document from Sign to Garrett and Cabell is an upbeat Sneider report on the initial investiga­tion of the Gorman dogfight, making the object sound extremely unusual and intel­ligent in behavior. This was almost like a supplement to the Estimate (Sneider, 1948a).

However, on the same day a separate set of letters, composed not by Sneider but by S. Z. Hunnicutt, a member of T-2 and the Sign team, and approved by MCI heavy­weights McCoy, Clingerman, and Leland Money, went out to the CIA, U.S. Army Intelligence, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. The query: What domestic (U.S.) technological developments do you know of that might explain UFOs and help us differentiate them from inimical (Soviet) foreign developments?

McCoy writes in Hunnicutt’s letter:

To date, no concrete evidence as to the exact identity of any of the reported objects has been received. Similarly, the origin of the so-called “flying disks” remains obscure.

[McCoy, 1948a]

This certainly was not the conclusion of the Estimate. McCoy may have already gotten the word. None of the primary Sign personnel signed off on the draft.

The intelligence roil over this extraterrestrial conclusion for UFOs must have been fierce in October. Headquarters had expressed dissatisfaction over Sign’s views but, fueled by the enthusiasm over the Gorman case investigation, Sign was undaunted at first. McCoy was caught in the middle. The fact that Sign proceeded with their ETH opinions in the face of high-level Pentagon opposition is a source of some wonder.

Either Vandenberg’s slap down was very mildly delivered, or there was much sup­port, albeit in the minority, for the respectability of the ETH in the Pentagon. Other­wise, McCoy would have reined in his staff at Sign. My guess is that both  conditions were true.

In October, Sign personnel met with Garrett in the Pentagon to make reports, especially those from foreign sources, more efficiently transferrable to the project. Word was spread about the impending new wave of reports due soon (which appar­ently actually happened). Internal memos referred to the Gorman case as possibly nuclear-powered and interplanetary. A request was made for the Rand Corporation to assess the feasibility of interplanetary spaceships (Clingerman, 1948a).

Mean­while, opposing elements in the Pentagon were marshalling their forces for a counterstrike. The most hostile area, the Defensive Air branch of Air Intelligence, had been pursuing a study of “flying saucer tactics” since early August, when the first assessment of the Chiles-Whitted object had reached them. Now AFOAI-DA brought the Office of Naval Intelligence seriously into this game.

ONI had been mildly involved with USAF concerns about UFOs since it had requested to be in­cluded in January 1948 (USN Chief of Naval Intelligence, 1948). Out of this liaison would come a counter-ETH report in December. More immediately, AFOAI-DA and ONI would begin to change the atmosphere in the Pentagon to a more hostile, overt position. Ultimately these efforts swayed Cabell into writing a firm letter to Wright-Patterson on November 3 (Cabell, 1948a; see Appendix 2).

It would be interesting to know who composed this letter for Cabell to sign. Two prime candidates are AFOAI-DA, the office of the consistently anti-ETH saucer­killer, Maj. Aaron J. Boggs; or the Office of Director of Estimates, wherein resided Boggs’s main anti-ETH confederate, Col. E. H. Porter, who was its deputy director. Essentially, the letter asked Sign for another Estimate. While admitting that the ob­jects seemed real, it also cautioned that they were not identified. (Read: You may not identify them as extraterrestrial craft.)

Efforts at identification must be serious and increased, since national security was concerned. Countermeasures must be consid­ered. All of these comments were in line with Boggs’s and Porter’s concern (as well as many others) that some objects could be Soviet- or Nazi-inspired weaponry. While Sign had been immersed in a world of investigating essentially local cases, the darker Pentagon corridors had been fixated on the Soviets and German scientific geniuses. Two different realities had been created.

Wright-Patterson’s response was timely. By November 8, a Sign viewpoint was sent over McCoy’s signature to Cabell and presumably Boggs, Porter, and ONI (McCoy, 1948b; see Appendix 3).

The letter, written by Sign operative Deyarmond, was overtly submissive but covertly rebellious. It contained several comments agreeing with Cabell that the phenomenon was not identifiable and that no concrete physical proof existed to identify it. At the same time it dropped all sorts of hints, doubtless the same arguments used in the original Estimate, that the objects really were extra­terrestrial whether the Pentagon thought so or not: It mentioned the ETH; it men­tioned plotting waves against planetary approaches and finding a correlation; it men­tioned the books of Charles Fort as indicating that this has been going on for at least a century (Fort, 1941); it mentioned that odd shapes (like Chiles-Whitted) can fly but require more advanced power plants than we have.

It is interesting that the letter was written by Al Deyarmond, who was McCoy’s old WWII buddy. One can imag­ine the two conferring personally on exactly what tactic Sign could take that would still be consistent with what McCoy was willing to say. The letter seems very strate­gically worded. McCoy was sympathetic to UFOs and remained so his whole life.

In the late 1950s, stationed in Washington, he was a frequent and interested visitor at the major civilian UFO organization in the world, the National Investigations Com­mittee on Aerial Phenomena (Swords, 1997).

SHOWDOWN AND AFTERMATH

The Pentagon surely recognized the letter for what it was: a diplomatic refusal to give up.

Either it or Sign initiated a confrontational meeting on this scheduled for November 12. Meanwhile, on the 10th, Deyarmond completed his reassessment of the Mantell crash from the beginning of the year. The object could not have been Venus, he concluded, and therefore was a true unidentified.

With this added ammu­nition, some Sign personnel trekked to Washington to attempt to convince Cabell and Vandenberg of the ETH (Ruppelt, 1956: 45). Other than Sneider, we don’t know who attended from the pro-ET side. Deyarmond, Loedding, and perhaps even McCoy are good candidates. Ruppelt wrote that a “group from ATIC” went.

The meeting was held at the National Bureau of Standards. Again, we don’t know who attended on the D.C. side. Boggs is known to have been there. Ruppelt hints that Vandenberg himself was there. Some representative of the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board came (probably Col. Ted Walkowicz). NBS personnel attended. As Edward Condon was then director, he may have had a stiff introduction to ufology at that time. Oth­ers, including Cabell, were certainly present.

I suspect that this was the final watershed moment for the project.

Boggs, Porter, and ONI essentially won the war.

Suddenly all the big scientific guns and overseers were required to peek over Sign’s shoulders and assess their work. The Scientific Advisory Board and George Valley of MIT were to be made aware of all cases. So too Boggs’ office, ONI, and maybe even the NBS (USAF DI, 1948; McCoy, 1948c; Clingerman, 1948b; McCoy, 1948d). Hynek was to be formally commissioned for an assessment, as well as Irving Langmuir and Rand. Going back home to Dayton, Deyarmond and Truettner went about the labor of writing the sanitized final Project Sign report of November 30 (USAF AMC, 1949a).

Loedding met with Langmuir and had his views rebuffed. He said that he learned that “his stock was at an all-time low” in Washington (Trenton Times-Advertiser, 1954). Sneider continued to believe that the Chiles-Whitted case was undeniable evidence, but it was a battle lost for almost everyone else.

On December 10 the victorious powers in the Pentagon published their own ver­sion of an Estimate—Air Intelligence Report number 100-203-72, Analysis of Fly­ing Object Incidents in the U.S. (USAF AID & USN ONI, 1948). This was the cul­mination of AFOAI-DD’s work since early August, augmented by ONI collabora­tion over the past two months. UFOs are not extraterrestrial (the idea was hardly noticed). UFOs are probably real, but if so there is a small chance that they are Soviet and therefore dangerous. All in all, the word “Soviet” dominates the com­mentary.

This estimate, like that of Sign, was classified top secret. Sign’s Estimate was ordered destroyed. Six days later, the director of research and development or­dered that the code word Sign be changed to Grudge. Ruppelt said that the choice of words was not random (Ruppelt, 1956: 59–60). The Air Force bore a grudge against UFO reports. One would guess that quite a few grudges remained among the con­tending intelligence elements. Ruppelt said that by the end of 1948 the morale on the project was very low and no one wanted to do the work any more.

Sneider persisted with his analysis of the Chiles-Whitted object, and his five-page summary, Air Intel­ligence Report number 102-122-79, was forwarded to Cabell on December 20 (Sneider, 1948b). It has been called, probably insightfully, “The Ghost of the Esti­mate” by some UFO researchers. Report no. 100-203-72 has also been given this nickname, much less insightfully. It might more properly be labeled “The Assassin of the Estimate.”

By the beginning of 1949, Sign personnel had begun to evaporate. Loedding dis­appeared from project records. Deyarmond’s attention went elsewhere. Truettner made one last serious attempt at interviewing about nuclear propulsion (at Oak Ridge), and was given a negative opinion on UFOs by Col. Wassell. He, too, disappeared from the project. The civilian members were relieved of their duties and reassigned to other intelligence tasks within T-2. For Loedding in particular, his role and pres­tige were never the same.

After a few further years of intelligence work, both he and Truettner left AMC. For the higher military ranks (Llewelyn and Sneider), all we know is that they were soon no longer involved, perhaps not even assigned to the same base. Even Clingerman and McCoy became less involved, perhaps because they had also heard that their tenures would soon be up and they would be sent to school and then transferred. The only persons left active on the project were two of the lower ranks: Lieut. Howard Smith and civilian George Towles. Their job was reduced basically to collection and filing. In this condition, or worse, would remain the Air Force commitment to a UFO investigation project until the summer of 1951: two years of neglect (Ruppelt, 1956: 59–95).

The Estimate and Sign had their revenge, however, in an unintended way. For whatever reason, the public and the media had become more interested in UFOs at the turn of the year. Perhaps the Mantell, Chiles-Whitted, and Gorman cases were having an effect on popular opinion, as well as behind the doors of secrecy. Or perhaps the doors of secrecy were leaky. Either way, the media was becoming proactively interested (Shalett, 1949). Sidney Shalett’s push into the Pentagon to get Defense chief Forrestal’s permission for a Saturday Evening Post article was the most spectacular example of this, but other magazines such as Argosy and True were snooping around as well (Moorehouse, 1949; Keyhoe, 1950a).

Shalett visited the Pentagon and Wright-Patterson in early 1949, and got case information and quotes for his two-part article that would appear in April 1949 (Clingerman, 1949a). While he was collecting information, two things happened directly related to our story. The first was that the Pentagon really didn’t like the idea of a civilian press person mess­ing around a classified subject and then writing a “Lord knows what” rendition of what he’d found with apparent government approval (Cabell, 1948b). Therefore, the Pentagon determined to produce its own more elaborate report to be released simul­taneously with the Post article (Boggs, 1949).

The second awkward moment occurred when Walter Winchell apparently was given a “Pentagon rumor” that the UFOs were Soviet missiles, and announced as much on his national radio program (Clingerman, 1949b). The rumor was pretty much what some Pentagon loose cannons would have said if they had been privy to the informa­tion and attitude of Air Intelligence Report number 100-203-79, the so-called “As­sassin of the Estimate.” By killing the Estimate, the Pentagon had produced an awk­ward and unhelpful rumor that they hurried to deny, but which stuck in many citi­zens’ minds.

The Pentagon was clear in its intent to create and release a countering UFO report, but it blundered in executing the task. Whoever was responsible did not use the AIR information or perspective, or a strong debunking attitude of any kind. Instead, the report—called Project Saucer to match the nickname given Shalett to use in his article—was written in the mildest agnostic tradition of the post-Vandenberg Project Sign (USNME, 1949). It read like a sanitized Estimate.

How this UFO-friendly report was released is itself a mystery. Someone at AMC in the Public Relations Office had written something called “Flying Saucer Story,” which was aimed at public release in order to give the official story. This was de­scribed as an article, whereas the Project Saucer press release was 22 pages long. Still, they may have been one and the same.

This article was shipped to the Pentagon’s director of public relations, and from there to the Intelligence Department. There some disagreement occurred between Boggs, Brig. Gen. Moore, and Cabell (Boggs, 1949). Apparently Cabell himself approved the friendlier Project Saucer release, coming down squarely between the attitude of the Estimate and the attitude of his antipathetic underlings Boggs and Moore.

A line from Boggs’s memorandum cited above reads like a comment from Cabell:

AFOIN [Cabell] found no grounds for denying information to the press on incidents and investigative accomplishments such as were furnished Mr. Shalett.

Whether the busy general had time to think through all the aspects of this decision can be debated.

So the Pentagon’s poor communications and blundering had produced the exact opposite effect from what they had seemingly intended: Shalett’s article was the mainly debunking publication and the Pentagon’s release looked like a corrective in the pro-UFO, amazing-unidentified-technology direction.

The individual most confused by all this was a freelance writer brought in by True magazine in the hopes of getting more information on the flying disks. The Project Saucer release convinced him to make a serious investigation, which got more and more fascinating.

This, of course, was Donald E. Keyhoe: the Ultimate “Revenge of the Estimate,” and an ongoing nightmare for the Air Force for the next 20 years (Keyhoe, 1950b, 1953; Swords, 1996; Jacobs, 1975).

REFERENCES

• Boggs, Aaron J. (1949). USAF report to be released simultaneously with Sidney Shalett’s article. Memorandum. April 25.

• Cabell, Charles P. (1948a). Flying object incidents in the United States. Memorandum to Commanding General, Air Materiel Command. November 3. (Reprinted as Appendix 2.)

• Cabell, Charles P. (1948b). Publicity surrounding flying saucers. Memorandum. November 30. Clingerman, William R. (1948a). Letter to Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force. October 22. Clingerman, William R. (1948b). Letter to George Valley. December 2. Clingerman, William R. (1949a). Letter to Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force. February 9.

• Clingerman, William R. (1949b). Letter to Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Air Force. April 5.
  Cox, Roy W. (1948). Notes taken at Norcatur, Kansas, night of February 18.

• Craigie, Laurence C. (1947). Flying discs. Memorandum to Commanding General, Air Materiel Command, establishing Project Sign. December 30.

• Earle, Wilton. (1948). Letter to Chief, Office of Naval Intelligence. October 14.

• Faulk, Melvin W. (1948). Interview with Mr. Oscar E. Monnig, Secretary, National Meteoritical Society. March 18.

• Fitch, E. G. (1947). Flying disks. Memorandum to D. M. Ladd. July 10.

• Fort, Charles. (1941). The books of Charles Fort. New York: Henry Holt.

• [Garrett, George D.] (1947). Flying discs. Summary of 16 UFO cases. July 30. (Reprinted as Appendix 1.) Hynek, J. Allen. (1949). Report on unidentified aerial and celestial objects. Ohio State University Research Foundation project no. 364, for USAF Air Materiel Command. April 30.

• Hynek, J. Allen. (1973). The UFO experience: A scientific inquiry. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

• Hynek, J. Allen. (1977). The Hynek UFO report. New York: Dell.

• Jacobs, David M. (1975). The UFO controversy in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

• Keyhoe, Donald E. (1950a). Flying saucers are real. True, January, pp. 11–13, 83–87.

• Keyhoe, Donald E. (1950b). The flying saucers are real. New York: Fawcett.

• Keyhoe, Donald E. (1953). Flying saucers from outer space. New York: Henry Holt.

• LaPaz, Lincoln. (1948). Letter to Deputy Executive Director, Committee on Geophysical Sciences, Research and Development Board. April 11.

• Loedding, Alfred C. (1948). Low aspect ratio aircraft. U.S. Patent Office no. 2,619,302. Filed Nov. 25.

• Markham, Norman Garrett. (1948). Explosion in the sky near Norcatur, Kansas. Letter to U.S. Army Chief of Staff. February 20. McCoy, Howard M. (1947a). Letters to Col. George Garrett. August–September. McCoy, Howard M. (1947b). Letter to Commanding General, Army Air Forces. September 24.

• McCoy, Howard M. (1948a). Letter to Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Naval Intelli­gence, and U.S. Army Intelligence. October 7. McCoy, Howard M. (1948b). Letter to Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force. November 8. (Reprinted as Appendix 3.)

• McCoy, Howard M. (1948c). Letter to Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force. December 2.

• McCoy, Howard M. (1948d). Letter to Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force. December 7.

• McCoy, (Mrs.) Howard M. (n.d.) Personal communication.

• McDonald, George C. (1947). Letter to Director, USAF Research and Development. December 22.

• McDonald, James E. (n.d.) Annotation in his copy of Edward Ruppelt’s The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects at page 92.

• Menzel, Donald H. (1953). Flying saucers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University.

• Moorehouse, Frederick G. (1949). The case of the flying saucers. Argosy, July, pp. 22–24, 92.

• Ruppelt, Edward J. (1956). The report on unidentified flying objects. Garden City: Doubleday. Ruppelt, Edward J. (n.d.) Edward Ruppelt manuscript archives. Held for CUFOS by the author in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

• Schulgen, George F. (1947a). Memorandum to FBI Liaison Section. September 5.

• Schulgen, George F. (1947b). Intelligence requirements on flying saucer type aircraft. Draft of collection memorandum. October 6. Shalett, Sidney. (1949). What you can believe about flying saucers. Saturday Evening Post, April 30, pp. 20–21, 136–39; and May 7, pp. 36, 184–86.

• Sneider, Robert R. (1948a). Letter to Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force. October 7.

• Sneider, Robert R. (1948b). Report to Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Air Force. Air Intelligence Report no. 102-222-79. December 20.

• Swords, Michael D. (1991). The summer of 1947: UFOs and the U.S. government at the beginning. In George M. Eberhart (Ed.), The Roswell report. (pp. 9–38). Chicago: Cen­ter for UFO Studies.

• Swords, Michael D. (1996). Donald E. Keyhoe and the Pentagon: The rise of interest in the UFO phenomenon and what the government really knew. Journal of UFO Studies, new ser., 6, 195–211.

• Swords, Michael D. (1997). The McCoy letter. International UFO Reporter, 22 (1), Spring, 12–17, 27.

• Todd, Robert. (1997). Bill Moore and the Roswell incident: The true believers deceived. The Spot Report, 7, March 7, pp. 1–8.

• Trenton (N.J.) Times-Advertiser. (1954). Princeton engineer believes flying saucers the real thing. October 10.

• Twining, Nathan F. (1947). AMC opinion concerning “flying discs.” Letter to Commanding General, Army Air Forces. September 23.

• United Press. (1948). Meteor blast alarms thousands in Midwest. Unattributed news clip in Project Blue Book file. February 19.

• U.S. Air Force. Air Intelligence Division, & U.S. Navy. Office of Naval Intelligence. (1948). Analysis of flying object incidents in the United States. Air Intelligence Report no. 100-203-79. December 10.

• U.S. Air Force. Air Materiel Command. (1946). German flying wings designed by Horten Brothers. Technical Intelligence summary report no. F-SU-1110-ND. Dayton: Head­quarters, Air Materiel Command. January 10.

• U.S. Air Force. Air Materiel Command. (1949a). Unidentified aerial objects: Project “Sign.” Technical Report no. F-TR-2274-IA. Signed by Albert B. Deyarmond and Lawrence Truettner. Dayton: Headquarters, Air Materiel Command. February.

• U.S. Air Force. Air Materiel Command. (1949b). Unidentified flying objects: Project “Grudge.” Technical Report no. 102-AC 49/15-100. Dayton: Headquarters, Air Mate-riel Command. August.

• U.S. Air Force. Directorate of Intelligence. (1948). Information for Dr. George Valley. November 22.  

• U.S. Air Force. Project Blue Book (1947–1969). Microfilm records, 92 reels. Available at the National Archives. Specific case files used in this article include: Harmon Field, New­foundland (1947); Mantell case, Godman Air Field, Kentucky (1948); Norcatur, Kansas (1948); Holloman AFB, New Mexico (1948); Memphis, Tennessee (1948); Plevna and Miles City, Montana (1948); Monroe, Michigan (1948); Hecla, South Dakota (1948); Chiles-Whitted case, Montgomery, Alabama, and associated Chamblee, Georgia, case (1948); Gorman case, Fargo, North Dakota (1948); as well as information on personnel and activities gained en passant, 1947–1949.

• U.S. National Military Establishment (1949). Project “Saucer.” Memorandum to the press, no. M 26-49. April 27.

• U.S. Navy. Chief of Naval Intelligence. (1948). Letter to Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Air Force. November 4.

APPENDIX 1

GEORGE GARRETT’S FIRST ESTIMATE

FLYING DISCS

30 July 1947

For purposes of analysis by AFBIR-CO, eighteen reported sightings of “Flying Discs” were selected for breakdown into detailed particulars. Each report was as­signed a number and each number appears in the left-hand column of the data on the following pages.

One report, Number 7, has not yet been received and therefore no information is included other than Date, Name of Observer, and Location. The Fourth Air Force is attempting to secure a statement from this observer.

 

Four reports, Numbers 2, 4, 17, and 18, have not yet been analyzed.

The subject headings on which the breakdown has been made are:

Date
Hour (Local standard Time)
Location
Observer’s Name
Observer’s Occupation
Observed from Ground or Air
Number of Objects Sighted
Altitude
Direction of Flight
Speed
Distance Covered
Length of Time in Sight
Deviation from Straight Flight
Color
Size
Shape
Sound
Trail
Weather
Manner of Disappearance
Remarks