By 1947, there were two things that were obvious, according to the government files. First, that those in intelligence work at Wright Field and the Pentagon were aware that something disk shaped was flying around American skies, and second that there was already an unofficial investigation underway to try and find answers.
Colonel Howard McCoy had been involved with the Foo Fighter investigation during the Second World War. According to Keith Chester in his book Strange Company, on September 6, 1944, a group known as the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee met in London. Chester writes that the committee was set up to coordinate intelligence reports but they also investigated the reports of unconventional aircraft operating over the European Theater.
In 1946, while the Ghost Rockets were flying over Scandinavia, Colonel William E. Clingerman sent a note to Colonel Howard McCoy, asking for all the files on the Ghost Rockets. The files would have accumulated throughout late 1946 and early 1947 and were part of the first of several American UFO investigations. However, for some reason, most of these government files never made it into Project Sign.
McCoy had been involved in investigating the Foo Fighter sightings during the war and later, after the war ended, the Ghost Rocket sightings. At the time, the thinking was that both these were terrestrially based weapons systems, the former launched by the Nazis and the later by the Soviets. Had the Nazis or the Soviets created rockets, missiles, or some other craft capable of the performance described by the witnesses, the American military would have been at a disadvantage. The Americans needed to learn as much as possible about these weapons in order to develop a countermeasure, and thus, investigations into these sightings were regarded as an important intelligence matter.
But no real solutions were found. The Foo Fighters were never identified as some sort of Nazi or Japanese weapon, and when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, the Ghost Rockets could not be confirmed as Soviet technology. In the mid-1940s, however, American intelligence and Howard McCoy had no way of knowing that.
In early December, 1946, as noted earlier, the Swedish Defense Ministry issued a report on the Ghost Rockets. But there had been other sightings that would have interested those at Wright-Field in intelligence. One of the first reports came from the pilot of an Army Air Forces C-54 transport over France.
On August 1, 1946, Captain Jack Puckett was flying a C-47 transport about 40 miles north of Tampa, Florida, when he sighted a cigar-shaped craft. Puckett would later say:
At approximately 6:00 P.M. while flying a C-47 at 4000 feet northwest of Tampa I observed what I thought to be a shooting star to the southeast over the Atlantic Ocean. My copilot, Lt. Henry F. Glass and my engineer both observed this object at the same time.
This object continued toward us on a collision course at our exact altitude. At about 1000 yards it veered to cross our path. We observed it to be a long, cylindrical shape approximately twice the size of a B-29, with luminous portholes.
Puckett thought the object was rocket propelled. It trailed fire about half of its length. It remained in sight for two and a half to three minutes, eliminating the idea that it was a meteor.
These sightings, because they involved military pilots, were probably reported through the chain of command and would have arrived at Wright Field. Staff at Wright Field receiving the information would have been part of T-2, the intelligence function, including Howard McCoy and Colonel Albert Deyarmond.
By this time, T-2 had been receiving intelligence reports about these sightings for years. Although initially viewed as a foreign problem (the objects were being sighted over Europe or over the Pacific during the war), sightings were now being made over American territory. McCoy seemed to think that some sort of an investigation was needed, but he did not have authorization or funding to conduct one as he deemed necessary.
That first American investigation began, unofficially, in December, 1946, when, according to records reviewed by Wendy Connors and research conducted by Connors and Michael Hall, McCoy received a telephone call during the 1946 staff Christmas party. McCoy’s secretary took the call and McCoy and Deyarmond both returned to T-2, the intelligence section at Wright Field.
Wright Field in southwest Ohio was originally an air field during World War I and became a flight testing facility for the U.S. Army Air Corps and Air Forces.
Connors said that she wasn’t sure about the exact sequence or authorization, but she believed that General Nathan Twining received the initial order and passed it along to T-2. There may have only been a verbal order to begin the investigation because no documentation for this project has been found in the government files.
Edward Ruppelt, shown here in a newspaper photo publicizing his book, was chief of Project Blue Book.
McCoy and his staff commandeered a room in the T-2 facility to set up the project, only allowing their team access to the room. McCoy then ordered Alfred Loedding, later the first director of JPL, to begin designing the basic project and to find a way to begin gathering information. All this was done in the months before the Arnold sighting, but not before other sightings were made.
Among the first that would have been sent to them and which would have ended up in their private investigation, is a report mentioned only in Ed Ruppelt’s private papers released after 1960. On January 16 and 17, 1947, two fighters based in England attempted to intercept a “violently maneuvering” UFO. Although Ruppelt, who would become chief of Project Blue Book, was aware of these incidents, they do not appear in the government files.
On April 1, 1947, a series of sightings were reported near Richmond, Virginia, involving the U.S. Weather Bureau. This would later become Incident No. 79 in the government files, in this case, the Project Grudge final report. It should be noted that the case disappeared from Project Blue Book files as they were released to the public. According to the information in the Grudge Report:
A weather bureau observer at the Richmond Station observed on three different occasions, during a six month period prior to April, 1947, a disclike metal chrome object. All sightings were made through a theodolite while making pibal [balloon] observations.
On the last reported sighting, the balloon was at 15,000 feet altitude, the disc followed for 15 seconds. It was shaped like an ellipse with a flat level bottom and a dome-like top. The altitude and the speed were not estimated, but the object, allegedly through the instrument, appeared larger than the balloon.
Another observer at the same station saw a similar object under corresponding circumstances, with the exception that her balloon was at an altitude of 27,000 feet and possessed a dull-metallic luster. There was good visibility on days of observation. Report of this sighting was not submitted until 22 July 1947.
AMC Opinion: There is no readily apparent explanation. If there were only one such object, it seems amazingly coincidental that it would be seen four times near the pibal of this station only. On the other hand, there would have to be a great number of these objects to rule out coincidence, and as they number of objects increases so do the chances of sightings by other witnesses.
Project Astronomer’s Opinion: There is no astronomical explanation for this incident, which, however, deserves considerable attention because of the experience of the observers and the fact that the observations was made through a theodolite and that comparison could be made with a pibal balloon. The observers had, therefore, a good estimate of altitude, of relative size, and of speed—much more reliable than those given in most reports.
This investigation would like to recommend that these and other pibal observers be quizzed as to other possible, unreported sightings.
This series of reports made by Walter Minczewski, are not mentioned in the Project Blue Book index, which lists only a couple of reports made prior to the Kenneth Arnold sighting. All were reported after the press coverage of the Arnold sighting, so there is no way to document the actual date of the sighting, except for Minczewski’s reports.
Dr. James McDonald did interview Minczewski, but twenty years after the fact. According to McDonald, and reported by Ted Bloecher in his book about the 1947 wave of UFO sightings, “Just a matter of days before this writing, I spoke on the telephone with Walter A. Minczewski, the U. S. Weather Bureau observer whose April, 1947, theodolite-tracking case is cited in the text. Minczewski emphasized that he had never reported it to other than his Weather Bureau superiors and hence was surprised to be called about it twenty years later. Yet his recollection of the details of the whitish disc-like object he had tracked one clear morning in Richmond, Virginia, was still distinct in his mind.”
Later, Bloecher, in The Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, added some important details to the case. He wrote:
James McDonald was a senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics and a meteorology professor at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
As early as the middle of April 1947, at the Weather Bureau in Richmond, Virginia, a U. S. Government meteorologist named Walter A. Minczewski and his staff had released a pibal balloon and were tracking its east-to-west course at 15,000 feet when they noticed silver, ellipsoidal object just below it. Larger than the balloon, this object appeared to be flat on bottom, and when observed through the theodolite used to track the balloon, was seen to have a dome on its upper side. Minczewski and his assistants watched the object for fifteen seconds as it traveled rapidly in level flight on a westerly course, before disappearing from view. In the official report on file at the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, at Wright-Patterson Field, in Dayton, Ohio, this sighting is listed as Unidentified.
The evidence, some of which was available in the government files, and some of which has now disappeared from those files, based on documentation seen by UFO researchers, suggests an effort to ignore any report made prior to Arnold. This way, all the reports made afterward could be chalked up to “hysteria” caused by Arnold. People were now seeing all sorts of strange things in the sky, not because they were there, but because of the publicity resulting from Arnold’s sighting.
Since there was little official interest in these “aerial apparitions” in early 1947, McCoy and Deyarmond’s unofficial investigation was not causing a stir. They would have had access to everything that came into the Air Technical Intelligence Center and they could have posed questions to intelligence officers and military attachés around the world. They could screen reports received for anything that interested them.
One of the best sources was pilot reports. When pilots saw something strange in the sky, they would communicate it to their fellow pilots and that information could make its way to the investigation at Wright Field. The Foo Fighter and the Ghost Rocket sightings would have suggested something going on, and they would be attempting to learn about it. With sightings moving into the United States, McCoy and Deyarmond would be even more interested.
Finding documentation of the sightings would have been difficult in early 1947. There were no newspaper reports and people were not talking about these things. No civilian agencies and certainly no newspapers were covering stories about flying saucers or flying disks. In fact, Richard L. Bitters, an editor at a large newspaper, the Wapakoneta [Ohio] Daily News, reported his sighting on July 1, 1947. He later said that he had seen strange flying objects over Wapakoneta, Ohio, prior to Arnold’s sighting but did not publish anything about it at the time because, to him, it wasn’t news until after the Arnold story made it into the national limelight.
The lone exception to this was a short article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on June 23, 1947. A railroad engineer said that he had seen ten disk-shaped objects flying in a string formation. A careful search of the newspaper for that day and several that followed failed to verify that claim.
However, the story of a railroad engineer in Joliet, Illinois, published after the Arnold report, seems to be the genesis of this case. According to the article that did appear in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, “Flying Discs Seen By Railroad Man.” The newspaper is dated June 28, 1947, and appears two days after the Arnold story.
The article said:
A railroad man said Friday [which is June 27, 1947 and eliminates the need for further information right there because the story appeared after Arnold] he saw “about nine” spinning discs speeding through the sky last Tuesday [June 24] the same day an Idaho flyer said he saw some flashing objects in the air.
Charles Kastl, 60, an employe [sic] of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern railroad for 38 years, said he saw the discs about 1:50 P.M. (CST) as he was walking along the highway to work.
No other person in the Joliet area reported anything unusual.
Kastl said he saw a string of flat, circular objects going faster “than any plane I ever saw” about 10 to 12 miles east of Joliet [Illinois]. They were flying about 4,000 feet, he said.
“They appeared to be very high, and were going from north to south,” he said. “I could see no connecting link between them, but they acted as though the leading disc had a motor in it to power the others, because when it flipped, the others would too. When it would right itself, the others would right themselves.”
Kastl said he did not tell anyone but his wife about seeing the objects until Friday, “because I didn’t think anything about it.”
When he returned from a railroad run Friday, however, he learned that Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, pilot had reported seeing objects similar to the ones he claimed to have seen. Arnold said he saw objects over the Pacific Northwest.
Charles Preucil, head of the Joliet astronomical society, said there would be no natural cause for a display such as Kastl described.
Given the information in this article and given the descriptions given for the Cedar Rapids sighting, this must the source of the original claim. It did not happen in Cedar Rapids, nor did it happen on June 23. It seems that someone (Frank Edwards?) miscalculated the date of Tuesday, believing it to be the 23rd, and not realizing it was the 24th.
A second report, made by Dale Bays, a bus driver from Des Moines, also fit some of the information but that sighting is dated as June 29, 1947, which means it was made after Arnold. Bays said that he saw a single file line of “dirty white” round objects that were somewhere between circular and oval in shape. Bays thought they were 175 to 250 feet in diameter and twelve feet thick. He said they were at 1,200 feet and traveling about 300 miles an hour. The Air Force found the report to be unreliable.
The collection of such reports changed the day Kenneth Arnold made the report that began the blizzard. Over the next three or four weeks, hundreds of sightings were made and reported by the media.
It was Kenneth Arnold’s sighting on June 24, 1947, that set the whole thing off, at least in the mind of the public. Arnold, a businessman pilot, was flying his private plane at about 9,500 feet when a bright flash of light caught his eye. In the distance, near Mount Rainier, Washington, he saw nine objects that he first thought might be other aircraft, flying at about the same altitude and at an estimated speed of more than 1,500 miles per hour. As he watched them, however, he realized that they were not something conventional.
When Arnold landed in Yakima, Washington, he told reporters that the objects moved with a motion similar to saucers skipping across the water. The shape, however, according to drawings that Arnold completed for the Army within days of the sighting, showed objects that were heel shaped. In later drawings, Arnold elaborated, drawing objects that were crescent shaped, with a scalloped trailing edge.
An artist’s depiction of the nine UFOs that Arnold reported seeing while flying his small aircraft in 1947.
Arnold’s sighting didn’t gain front page status immediately. Newspaper stories about the sighting appeared a day or two later, and the tale was regarded as an oddity. Arnold later claimed that he thought he had seen some sort of new jet aircraft.
According to the government files, however, Arnold wasn’t the only person in the area to see strange objects in the sky that day. Fred Johnson, listed as a prospector, also reported sighting five or six disk-shaped craft as they flew over the Cascade Mountains. Johnson said the objects were round, with a slight tail and about thirty feet in diameter. They were not flying in any sort of formation and as they banked in a turn, the sunlight flashed off them. As the objects approached, Johnson noticed that his compass began to spin wildly, and when they finally vanished in the distance, the compass returned to normal.
After learning of the Arnold sighting, Johnson wrote to the Air Force on August 20, 1947, saying:
Saw in the portland [sic] paper a short time ago in regards to an article in regards to the so called flying disc having any basis in fact. I can say am a prospector and was in the Mt Adams district on June 24th the day Kenneth Arnold of Boise Idaho claims he saw a formation of flying disc [sic]. And i [sic] saw the same flying objects at about the same time. Having a telescope with me at the time i [sic] can asure [sic] you there are real and noting like them I ever saw before they did not pass verry [sic] high over where I was standing at the time. plolby [sic] 1000 ft. they were Round about 30 foot in diameter tapering sharply to a point in the head and in an oval shape. with [sic] a bright top surface. I did not hear any noise as you would from a plane. But there was an object in the tail end looked like a big hand of a clock shifting from side to side like a big magnet. There [sic] speed was far as I know seemed to be greater than anything I ever saw. Last view I got of the objects they were standing on edge Banking in a cloud.
The letter is signed: “Yours Respectfully, Fred Johnson.”
Johnson was eventually interviewed by the FBI, whose report contained essentially the same information that was in the letter Johnson had sent to the Army. The FBI report, found in government files, ended by saying, “Informant appeared to be a very reliable individual who advised that he had been a prospector in the states of Montana, Washington, and Oregon for the past forty years.”
Johnson’s report is important because it corroborates what Arnold reported and comes from an independent source. Of course, the problem is that Johnson did not contact anyone about his sighting until after all the publicity about Arnold’s sighting.
Regardless of the possible corroboration and his aviation experience, the Air Force eventually decided that Arnold had been fooled by a mirage, and, in the end, that was how they labeled the case. In 1947, as members of the Army Air Forces and various intelligence communities were attempting to learn what was happening, Arnold’s sighting was listed as an unknown.
As of June 1947, there was no official investigation of the flying saucers. Though McCoy and Deyarmond may have provided some direction from Wright Field, all investigations were handled by the local bases and local units. For example, the Fourth Air Force, at Hamilton Army Air Field, California, investigated the Arnold sighting, but there was no coordinated effort into which the flood of new information could be directed. It was all hit or miss.
The officers at Fourth Air Force sent to interview Arnold were Lieutenant Frank M. Brown and Captain William L. Davidson. They developed a respect for Arnold and viewed him as an honest man who had seen something extraordinary. At the end of their meeting, Brown and Davidson asked Arnold to give them a call if he had any questions. Little did they know that Arnold would eventually ask for their help, dragging them into what has been called the dirtiest hoax in UFO history.
Collaborating with Ray Palmer, Kenneth Arnold published his The Coming of the Saucers in 1952.
Arnold’s sighting had drawn the attention of Ray Palmer, a magazine editor in Chicago. Palmer had been editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories at one time, and he had rebuilt its circulation with the story of an underground world of advanced technology, responsible for many of the problems faced by humans on the surface. Known as the Shaver Mystery, Palmer’s story featured robotic beings, who tormented the human race from inside the Earth. Palmer promoted the story, may even have written parts of it himself, and insisted that the story was true. Coincidentally, he published an installment of the Shaver Mystery in the June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories.
When Arnold’s story burst into the public arena in late June 1947, Palmer viewed it as proof that the Shaver Mystery was real. As far as Palmer was concerned, the flying saucers were craft from the inner Earth civilization in the Shaver story. Palmer contacted Arnold to learn more about his sighting, but Arnold wasn’t interested in discussing it with the editor, nor was he interested in writing anything about his sighting for publication in the magazine. Palmer then offered Arnold a fee for his story. Arnold merely sent him a copy of the report he had forwarded to the Army Air Force.
A few days later, Palmer called again, but this time he wanted Arnold to investigate another sighting, this one from Washington state. Although Arnold was reluctant and had no experience as an investigator, Palmer offered him $200 to follow up on the story, and Arnold eventually agreed to investigate.
The basics of the Washington story were not all that incredible. A harbor patrolman named Harold Dahl said that on June 21, he was out near Maury Island on a small boat with his son and their dog. They saw six doughnut-shaped objects, one of which seemed to be in trouble. It leaked some liquid metal that fell on the boat, injuring Dahl’s son and killing the dog. Dahl was able to recover some of this metal.
In a slightly different version of the story, told sometime later by the witnesses to other investigators, the sixth object touched down on Maury Island. It then disintegrated, leaving behind a residue, which Dahl was able to collect. In either case, the Maury Island sighting was important because of the physical evidence associated with it.
At this point, Dahl hadn’t told anyone about the sighting or the physical evidence. Dahl also told Palmer that a dark-suited, somewhat bizarre looking stranger told him all about the sighting, as if he had seen everything, or had, at the very least, known exactly what had happened. This stranger said that it would be best for Dahl to forget about what he had seen and not mention it to anyone else.
Dahl ignored the advice and told his immediate supervisor, Fred Crisman about the sighting. Crisman was able to recover some of the strange metal himself, and it was Crisman who wrote to Palmer, telling him the whole story. Palmer, in turn, contacted Arnold, asking him to investigate.
When Arnold arrived and talked to Dahl and Crisman, he realized that he was out of his depth. He called Captain E. J. Smith, a United Airlines pilot who had seen several flying disks while on a flight in the Pacific Northwest. Smith’s sighting, according to the government files, remains as “Unidentified.”
Even with Smith’s help, Arnold still was unsure how to proceed. According to the government files, Arnold then called Frank Brown, believing that something very strange was going on. Ed Ruppelt wrote in his book:
The tale of the Shaver Mystery was recounted in the June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories.
For the Air Force the story started on July 31, 1947, when Lieutenant Frank Brown, an intelligence agent at Hamilton AFB, California, received a long-distance phone call. The caller was the man whom I’ll call Simpson [Kenneth Arnold] who had met Brown when Brown investigated an earlier UFO sighting … He [Arnold] had just talked to two Tacoma Harbor patrolmen. One of them had seen six UFOs….
Brown and Davidson arrived at Arnold’s hotel about five that evening. Once Arnold showed them some of the recovered metal, both officers recognized it for what it was, that is, worthless slag, and that lead them to the conclusion that it was a hoax.
There is another interesting point to all this which needs to be remembered. While Brown and Davidson were in the hotel room with Arnold and Smith, Arnold asked what the Army had learned about the flying saucers. According to George Earley, a UFO investigator living in Oregon and who has studied this case in-depth, Davidson drew a picture of a flying saucer. He told Arnold it was based on one of several pictures that the Army had received.
Ray Palmer, who was the editor of Amazing Stories and later Fate Magazine, did a lot to publicize the testimonies of UFO eyewitness in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.
Earley reported that Brown agreed with Davidson’s rendering of the flying saucer, saying, “It came from Phoenix, Arizona the other day. We have the prints at Hamilton Field, but the original negatives were flown to Washington, D.C.”
This is a reference to the photographs taken by William Rhodes in Arizona on July 7, 1947. The Fourth Air Force was involved in that investigation as well, according to the government files. The object photographed was similar to that seen by Arnold, including a cockpit centered on the heel-shaped craft. According to the government files, the pictures would eventually be written off as a hoax, based not on the photographic evidence but on the unconventional lifestyle of Rhodes, whose abrasive personality rubbed most of the investigators the wrong way.
As Brown and Davidson were leaving Arnold’s room, he insisted that they take a sample of the metal with them. Neither Brown nor Davidson wanted to, but they didn’t want to embarrass Arnold or Smith, according to Ruppelt. They took the metal and thanked Arnold for all his help. They drove back out to the airfield to claim their aircraft for the return flight to California.
Not long after takeoff, the engine on the left wing caught fire. Brown, according to the government files and the accident investigation, left the cockpit to assist their two passengers, Woodrow D. Matthews and Sergeant Elmer L. Taff, into their parachutes. After the two bailed out, Brown apparently returned to the cockpit to help Davidson. Earley theorized Brown and Davidson believed they could save the aircraft because the B-25 could be flown on a single engine and they were not carrying a heavy load. Unfortunately, the engine hadn’t just failed, it was also on fire.
Taff later told the investigators that he saw the left wing burn off. It smashed into the tail, spinning the aircraft out of control. Neither pilot was able to get out and both were killed in the accident.
The government files, and Ed Ruppelt, suggested that the Air Force thought about prosecuting Dahl and Crisman in the deaths of the two officers. Both men had admitted that the rocks given to Arnold, and later to Brown and Davidson, were nothing more than useless slag. The whole story was a hoax that got out of hand when Crisman wrote to Palmer. Crisman was willing to say almost anything that Palmer wanted him to say to advance the story and see his name in print.
Kenneth Arnold, shown here, gained the trust of Fourth Air Force officers Lieutenant Frank M. Brown and Captain William L. Davidson, whom he would lead into what has been called one of the biggest UFO hoaxes in history.
The government file on these photographs is quite large, and the investigation that began in July 1947 continued for several years. What is interesting is that the FBI was involved early on, but the role of the Army in the investigation was concealed.
Rhodes, who seemed to be unemployed in July 1947, held a number of patents and was also listed as the Chief of Staff of the Panoramic Research Laboratory. The lab was apparently located in his backyard, but given his background and the fact that he had done some high level work for the Navy (and would later assist in the development of equipment for the Kitt Peak Observatory) a little bit of self-promotion seemed harmless.
According to the government files, Rhodes was walking toward his lab when he heard what sounded like the “whoosh” of a P-80 Shooting Star, one of the new jets. He grabbed his camera and ran back outside to take a photograph. Rhodes told reporter Robert C. Hanika that he had sighted an object along the side of his camera and took one photograph.
Rhodes advanced the film but didn’t take a second picture. He only had one frame left and hoped that the object would come closer. When he realized that it was moving away, Rhodes took the second photograph.
Although the Air Force spent years investigating the sighting, they eventually labelled it a hoax. Their reasoning was based more on Rhodes’ unconventional lifestyle and his abrasive nature, which annoyed military investigators and certainly didn’t help with the evaluation of the case.
Interestingly, according to the government files, the Army’s role in the investigation was concealed when they interviewed Rhodes. A document in the government files notes, “It should be stated that at the time of the interview with [name redacted, but clearly is Rhodes] Mr. BROWER identified himself as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and he exhibited his credentials. However, pursuant to a request from Mr. FUGATE [who was an Army counterintelligence corps agent], he was introduced only as a representative of the United States government. His exact official connection was not made known to Mr. [again, name redacted, but it is Rhodes].”
In another interesting aside to this case, there is a reference to this investigation in the Grudge Report, which includes synopses of cases written by various experts called in to assist with the investigations. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was the consultant in astronomy, wrote about “Incident #40—Phoenix, Arizona—July 7, 1947”:
This case is especially important because of the photographic evidence and because of the similarity of these photographs to the drawings by Kenneth Arnold (incident #17). The two incidents are separated by slightly more than two weeks, and, of course, they occurred in different locations. It is, however, perhaps more than coincidence that these two best-attested, entirely independent cases should agree so closely concerning the shape of the object and its maneuverability.
It is evident from other documentation in the government files that Fourth Air Force headquarters, located at Hamilton Field, California, the same base where Brown and Davidson served, ran part of the investigation. They would have had access to the Rhodes’ photographs and would have been able to describe them to Arnold.
Given this early connection, and the obvious similarity between the Arnold drawings and the Rhodes photograph, it appears that investigators wanted to keep information about both sightings secret. If they could bury the Rhodes photograph under a cloud of controversy and slam them as a hoax, it would be easy to dismiss them. The problem is that there is no good link between what Arnold had said and what the photographs showed. In other words, Rhodes couldn’t have created the hoax based on descriptions given by Arnold because those descriptions had been skewed by the press. Following today’s logic, that flying saucers are the result of Arnold’s poor description or the press grabbing a term that sounded good but did nothing to illustrate what he had seen, the Rhodes photographs should have shown a saucer.
The information and testimony seems to suggest that when the sightings began in the United States, although they were not publicized until Arnold, the investigation was already in progress. Since it was being conducted out of T-2 at Wright Field, General Nathan Twining, while not involved in the day-to-day activities, would have known about it. As the number of sightings and newspaper reports increased, the importance of the investigation was growing, and a disconnect developed among the various agencies providing quotes to newspapers. On July 3, 1947, for example, Major Paul Gaynor, apparently speaking for the Army Air Forces said that their preliminary investigation of the “flying disks” had been dropped due to a lack of evidence.
On the very same day, Dave Johnson, a reporter for the Idaho Evening Statesman, got a statement from Twining, which said that the top secret research they were conducting had not been able to duplicate the performance of the flying disks. Twining added that they had not produced any technology that would be considered comparable to what had been observed. He confirmed that a “reputable scientist” had seen one of the flying disks and that his report was being analyzed. While Twining did not say that the investigation was continuing, it is clear from later information found in government files that it was.
General Nathan Twining launched Project Sign in 1947; in 1953 he would replace Hoyt Vandenberg as chief of staff.
Gaynor and Twining’s conflicting statements demonstrate a level of confusion inside the military during the summer of 1947. The one investigation that was in progress was housed in a single office in the T-2 facility and very few knew about it. That was about to change. Too many sightings were being made, too many of them were being reported in the newspapers, and there were too many questions being asked.
What was about to happen was that someone, who decided that they needed to make an assessment of the situation, was about to take action. A brigadier general, George F. Schulgen, was about to gather the best cases that he knew about and forward them to Wright Field, the Air Materiel Command, and General Twining for an analysis. It would change the course of the investigation.
