Captain Edward Ruppelt, one-time chief of Project Blue Book alerted the world to the existence of an official “Estimate of the Situation” discussing UFOs. Ruppelt, in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, noted, “In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem you write a report that is known as an ‘Estimate of the Situation.’ A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed [a reference to the Chiles-Whitted UFO sighting], the people at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) decided that the time had arrived to make an Estimate of the Situation. The situation was the UFO’s [sic]; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!”
Although the sighting that sparked the analysis had occurred only a few days earlier, the genesis of the Estimate went back to the summer of 1947. At this time, according to Ruppelt, the Pentagon was in a panic over the sudden appearance of the flying saucers. “As 1947 drew to a close, the Air Force’s Project Sign had outgrown its initial panic and had settled down to a routine operation.”
When the UFOs first appeared that summer, there was panic because, according to the government files, newspaper reports, and military officers, nobody knew exactly what was happening. Theories were floated on an almost daily basis and some of them were just plain silly. A scientist suggested that the flying saucers were simply spots before the eyes. As people left dark movie theaters and went into bright sunlight, before their eyes adjusted, they saw floating images. The scientist seemed unaware that such a problem would likely create black spots and not silver disks.
Other ideas had some merit, and were based on the observations of military and civilian pilots, highly educated individuals, and scientists assigned to some of the most highly classified projects in existence at the time. One of those theories spoken of quietly, but with some support, was the belief that some of the saucers were interplanetary spacecraft.
Those whose responsibility it was to determine the nature of the saucers wondered if the saucers were a highly classified research project, which meant that only a few people at the very top of the chain of command would have access to the information. Army Brigadier General George Schulgen and FBI Special Agent S. W. Reynolds believed that it was a waste of time, money, and personnel to investigate something that would eventually lead to a classified project, one they would not be allowed to truly investigate.
LTC George Garrett also believed that nothing useful would be found by an additional Air Force investigation. Garrett and Schulgen decided that the answer was above their pay grade and wanted to pass the buck back up the chain of command. They were quite certain that once they assembled their information in an intelligence Estimate of the Situation, they would be asked to stop investigating since those at the top already knew what the flying saucers were.
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects was published in 1956. The author explains such sightings as the Lubbock Lights and the UFOs over Washington, D.C.
Nonetheless, Garrett began his work on the Estimate in the beginning of July, 1947. He selected sixteen flying saucer reports that seemed to demonstrate the truly unusual nature of the phenomenon, and then provided his analysis of the collected data.
The first case Garrett mentioned preceded the Kenneth Arnold sighting by over a month. Many believe this sighting “launched” the UFO phenomena as we know it today. This sighting, from Manitou Springs, Colorado, happened sometime between 12:15 and 1:15 P.M. on May 19, 1947, and involved a silver object that remained motionless. The three witnesses got a good look at it before the object made a number of aerobatic maneuvers before disappearing at incredible speed. The sighting report mentioned that the object had been observed through optical instruments and remained in sight for over two minutes, meaning they had time to study it carefully. This sighting does not appear in the Project Blue Book files, though Garrett used it to support his conclusions at the end of this study.
The second report included in Garrett’s study was from Oklahoma City on May 22, 1947. There are few details available about this sighting in the government files other than it was made by a businessman pilot who saw the object or light from the ground and not the cockpit.
The third case used by Garrett came from Greenfield, Massachusetts on June 22, 1947. According to the government files:
Edward L. de Rose said … there appeared across his line of vision a “brilliant, small, round-shaped, silvery white object” moving in a northwesterly direction as fast as or probably faster than a speeding plane at an estimated altitude of 1,000 feet or more. The object stayed in view for eight or ten seconds until obscured by a cloud bank. It reflected the sunlight strongly as though it were of polished aluminum or silver…. He said it did not resemble any weather balloon he had ever seen and that “I can assure you it was very real.”
According to the information available, this case had been secretly investigated by the FBI, and given Special Agent Reynolds’ participation with Schulgen and Garrett, it is not difficult to believe that the FBI was involved.
Next was the report that got everyone talking about flying saucers. This was Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of June 24. In 1947, as Garrett was putting together his Estimate, this sighting was still considered an unknown by those who had investigated it and talked to Arnold.
Garrett’s next sighting involved multiple witnesses and pilots. The government files available show that two Air Force (at the time Army Air Forces) pilots and two intelligence officers saw a bright light zigzagging in the night sky over Maxwell Air Force Base on June 28, 1947. The sighting lasted for about five minutes.
Ruppelt reported it this way:
That night [June 28, 1947] at nine-twenty, four Air Force officers, two pilots and two intelligence officers from Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, saw a bright light traveling across the sky. It was first seen just above the horizon, and as it traversed toward the observers it “zigzagged,” with bursts of high speed. When it was directly overhead it made a sharp 90-degree turn and was lost from view as it traveled south.
The eventual conclusion was that the object sighted was a balloon. Although it seems that four officers, including the intelligence officers, would have been able to identify a balloon, this was the accepted explanation. It would also seem that the maneuvers of the object would rule out a balloon, regardless of how strong the winds aloft were blowing.
Garrett’s next case was witnessed by three scientists at White Sands, New Mexico. The object was silver in color and no external details were reported. There was the possibility of a slight vapor trail, but none of the three were sure how it disappeared, suggesting that the angle changed and they lost sight of it.
Civilian pilots were responsible for the next sighting that Garrett quoted. Captain E. J. Smith was piloting a United Airlines plane when one of the flying saucers appeared, coming at the plane. When the first officer, Ralph Stevens, reached down to blink the landing lights, Smith asked what he was doing. Stevens responded that another plane was coming at them, but as it closed, both pilots realized that it wasn’t another aircraft, but a flying disk.
When Chiles and Whitted first made their UFO report, it was suggested that they had seen a fireball. Of course, that didn’t explain the detail of their drawings, including the cigar shape of the double row of square windows. It was the drawings that convinced many that they had seen something that was extraordinary and probably extraterrestrial.
On March 3, 1968, there was a series of UFO reports in the Midwestern United States. These described a cigar-shaped craft with lighted windows. Skeptics, including Philip Klass, UFO researchers, and the Air Force identified the UFO as the reentry of one of the Zond 4 booster rockets. The spacecraft had been placed in orbit the night before, so this sighting was of a spacecraft or rather part of one, but not one that was extraterrestrial.
Ufologists James Moseley (left) and Philip Klass are shown here at a CSICOP conference in Buffalo, New York, in 1983.
Klass suggested in his book, UFOs Explained, that this was also the conclusion regarding the Chiles–Whitted sighting of July 24, 1948. Chiles and Whitted were the pilot and co-pilot of an airliner who reported they had seen what they first thought was some kind of jet aircraft, but later described it as a cigar-shaped object with lighted windows. Originally it was concluded that they had seen a meteor, but that explanation was rejected once the pilots clarified that their aircraft had been rocked by the passing UFO. It was a short sighting but one that originally baffled the Air Force investigators. Later, or maybe eventually, it was identified as a “Fireball.”
Many weren’t happy with the explanations offered by Klass and the Air Force, but now there are videos available of meteor falls, which appear to resemble some kind of craft with lighted windows, especially as the meteor begins to break up. Given the coincidence of the Zond 4 reentry, with the drawings and descriptions of the Chiles–Whitted sighting, it appears that these cases can be marked as solved, as Klass and the Air Force has suggested.
The Zond 4 illustrations, reentry, and descriptions by Chiles and Whitted suggest they probably saw a meteor as it approached them, before it broke up. Given that this was 1948 and extremely early in the morning, there simply weren’t any other witnesses awake to see the object, though there were some ground reports.
The illustrations made by them seem to match those drawn to reflect the Zond 4. This case can be removed from the lists of the unsolved.
They could not make out a real shape but did say the craft was flat on the bottom, very thin, and seemed to be irregular on the top. The object appeared to be at the same altitude as the airplane and followed them for ten to fifteen minutes.
Moments later, four more objects appeared on the left of the aircraft. Smith was quoted in the newspaper as saying, “We couldn’t tell what the exact shape was except to notice that they definitely were larger than our plane (a DC-4), fairly smooth on the bottom and rough on top.”
Although the case was thoroughly investigated, the Air Force found no explanation for the occurence. In the government files, including Project Blue Book, it is still carried as “Unidentified.”
The next case cited was reported by three airmen on a B-25, near Clay Center, Kansas, who saw a silver-colored object pacing their aircraft. One of the witnesses was the pilot, who said that a bright flash drew his attention to the object, which was thirty to fifty feet in diameter and very bright. The object appeared to be pacing the aircraft at 210 miles an hour. When they turned toward it, the object seemed to accelerate to high speed and disappeared. The Air Force would later suggest that the sighting was caused by a reflection on the windshield.
Garrett next reported that on July 6, 1947, Captain James H. Burniston, while at Fairfield-Suisun Army Air Base, saw one of the flying disks. According to the government files:
He observed an object traveling in a southeasterly direction at an estimated height of 10,000 feet or more and at a speed in excess of that of any aircraft he had ever seen. The object was in his view for approximately sixty seconds during which time it travelled over three-quarters of the visible sky. Burniston could distinguish no definite color or shape. It appeared to roll from side to side three times during his observation and one side reflected strongly from its surface while the other side gave no reflection. He estimates the size to be about that of a C-54 and states that between the time the top of the object was visible and the time it rolled over … the bottom became very difficult to see and almost disappeared.
Although the next two reports seem to be related, Garrett broke them into two separate incidents, one from Koshkonong, Wisconsin, and the second from East Troy, Wisconsin. In the government files, they are listed on the same “Project Card,” which supplies very little information. Both sightings lasted under a minute, and in both cases the witnesses were members of the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian volunteer organization and an official auxiliary of the Air Force. The first of the sightings was reported at 11:45 (CST) in the morning and the second at 2:30 (CST) in the afternoon. Both were made on July 7, 1947.
The government files about this sighting said, “Saucer descended vertically edgewise through clouds, stopped at 4000’ and assumed horizontal position and proceeded in horizontal flight from a horizontal position for 15 seconds covering 25 miles, again stopped, and disappeared.”
Both these cases, which were reported by military and civilians, including pilots, were marked “Insufficient information for proper analysis.” This begs the question of what Garrett thought was so important about them that he included them in his analysis, or what information Garrett may have had in 1947 that was left out of the government files. It wouldn’t be the first time that information in the government files had been altered.
Following his theory of who might make the best witnesses, the next case involved an Army Air Corps National Guard pilot flying near Mt. Baldy, California on July 8, 1947. The flat object, reflecting light, was about the size of a fighter. The pilot said that he gave chase, attempting to keep the object in sight but was unable to do so.
A police officer, among others, in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, reported an egg-shaped object with a barrel-like leading edge about thirty minutes before midnight on July 9, 1947, in the next case reported by Garrett. There were four objects that had a phosphorescent glow.
Next on the list there was a series of sightings in Newfoundland, which happened the following day. In his report, Garrett included the sighting that took place about four in the afternoon, and was seen by a “TWA Representative and a PAA Representative [who was identified as a Mr. Leidy] on the ground. The object was “circular in shape, like a wagon wheel,” and was bluish-black with a fifteen foot long trail. The object “seemed to cut clouds open as it passed thru [sic]. Trail was like beam seen after a high-powered landing light is switched off.”
The case took on added importance because there were color photographs of the disk as it cut through the clouds. Dr. Michael Swords reported in the Journal of UFO Studies:
The bluish-black trail seems to indicate ordinary combustion from a turbo-jet engine, athodyd [ramjet] motor, or some combination of these types of power plants. The absence of noise and apparent dissolving of the clouds to form a clear path indicates a relatively large mass flow of a rectangular cross section containing a considerable amount of heat.
A Cessna 182, part of the Civil Air Patrol, is shown here with a U.S. Air Force fighter jet. The Civil Air Patrol serves as a non-combat auxiliary to the Air Force.
In the original analysis, T-2, part of the intelligence function at Wright-Patterson, excluded meteors or fireballs as a possible explanation. Later, as Blue Book officers became more interested in solutions than facts, the case was written off as a meteor sighting.
This was an important case and provides a hint as to what Garrett and the others thought in 1947. They believed that the answer rested in terrestrial technology, or in other words, this was something of Soviet manufacture. While the sighting itself is interesting because of the photographs, it was important because it seemed to point to the Soviets rather than aliens.
The final case Garrett cited in his report was from Elmendorf Field in Anchorage, Alaska. On July 12, 1947, a major in the Army Air Forces said that he observed an object that resembled a grayish balloon as it followed the contours of the mountains, some five miles away. The major said that the object paralleled the course of a C-47 that was landing on the airfield.
Garrett’s report comprised of the sixteen reports discussed above and two that were added later. It is likely that he drew on these specific cases because he, along with Schulgen, believed they most accurately described the objects seen, the maneuvers they performed, and would most likely lead to the conclusion that these sightings were of a classified project in development at that time. They expected that they would be asked to quit because of the classified nature of the project. The answer they received from Air Materiel Command and Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining was not at all what they had expected.
On September 24, 1947, Schulgen, Garrett, and the others received the written response from Twining’s staff, whose analysis of the situation was based wholly on the information supplied by Garrett, through Schulgen.
It appears that Twining’s staff did not duplicate the reports used by Garrett. Instead, they reached their conclusions based on information supplied directly to them. The reports Twining’s staff used, for the most part, came from pilots, both military and civilian, including airline pilots. They came from scientists, police, and aviation personnel who should have been able to recognize aircraft in the air. The reports were selected because they were from multiple witnesses; one in particular was likely selected because it included photographs. These were some of the best reports that had been received, beginning with the May reports that did not make it into the Project Blue Book files.
This response, then, from Twining’s AMC staff was telling Garrett and his team that the phenomenon was “something real and not visionary or fictitious.” Not only that, Twining was telling them that his command didn’t know what the flying disks were and that they needed to be investigated.
If the flying disks were a U.S. project, then the last thing anyone at the higher levels of the chain of command would have wanted would be an official investigation. Any investigation would be a threat to the security of the project. To end such an investigation, one of those on the inside of the secret would have to drop a hint to someone on the outside. If, for example, it was such a secret project that General Twining and the AMC were outside the loop, then another general, on the inside, could call Twining to tell him to drop the investigation. He wouldn’t have to spill any details of the secret project, only tell Twining that it was something he didn’t need to worry about and that the answer did not involve the Soviets or anything else that could threaten national security. Twining would then end his inquiries, secure in the knowledge that the solution to the mystery was already known to someone inside the U.S. military and the government.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Twining suggested that a priority project, with a rating of 2a, be created to investigate the flying saucers. He wanted information found and reported to his office. The priority level of the new project also suggested that Twining wanted his answers quickly because he was under pressure from above to end the panic.
At that point it seems that the gathering of intelligence data by the Army Air Forces, as conducted by the military in 1947, was disorganized, inefficient, and confused. A review of the documents available in the government files showed that interviews conducted with key witnesses, such as Kenneth Arnold, were not completed until weeks after their sightings, and even then, not all the questions were asked. To make things worse, the critical corroboration of the Arnold sighting by Fred Johnson was probably overlooked. Later, when Air Force policy changed, some of these sightings, thought of as so mysterious in 1947, would be labeled with some sort of possible explanation and then forgotten.
Swords, commenting on this, wrote, “What explains this confident display of mediocrity? Although we are apparently not dealing with genius here, neither should we assume complete stupidity. This report was not put together with any greater intensity because the authors did not feel that it was necessary. They did not think that UFOs were any great mystery. It was obvious to them that UFOs were mechanical, aerial devices. Who owned the devices was still up in the air (so to speak), but the indications were fairly clear: despite assurances to the contrary, they must be our own. ‘Lack of topside inquiries’ [meaning, of course, those higher up in the chain of command] made this the only reasonable conclusion in their eyes.”
These men, who hadn’t exactly shined during their investigation, had no burning passion to find the answers because they were convinced the answers already existed at the very top. Their estimate, according to Swords, was little more than a plea to those higher up in the chain of command asking, “Can we please quit this nonsense.”
At this point, Alfred Loedding, a civilian engineer and scientist who had been assigned to T-2, and who had an interest in the flying saucers, got involved with the investigation. Given the structure of the organization, and according to both government files and the research conducted by Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, it seems that Colonel Howard McCoy, with Loedding’s assistance, drafted the Twining memo for the general’s review. They suggest that Loedding, along with Dr. Charles Carroll, a math and missile expert, were “laying the ground work for an official investigation.”
This was the beginning of Project Sign, the first step on the path that would lead to the fabled, full-blown Estimate of the Situation. According to Ed Ruppelt, the 2A priority was the second highest possible. Only the top people at ATIC were assigned to the new project. This was a serious project, designed to obtain specific answers to specific questions, and do so in a fairly quick manner.
The mission of Project Sign was to determine the nature of the flying saucers. According to Ruppelt, there were two schools of thought. One believed that the Soviets, using their captured German scientists, had developed the flying disks. ATIC technical analysts searched for data on the German projects in captured documents, both in the United States and in Germany.
It was clear that the second school of thought—that is, that the UFOs were not manufactured on Earth—began to take hold. No evidence was found that the Soviets had made some sort of technological breakthrough. Even if they had, it seemed unlikely that they would be flying their new craft over the United States. If one crashed, the Soviets would have just handed their breakthrough to the U.S. government. This is probably the inspiration for the paragraph that laments the lack of crash-recovered debris, which is a reference to the lack of this sort of information in the material provided by Garrett.
The ploy to end the investigations didn’t work. It resulted in the creation of Project Sign, with funding that would allow the investigations to continue. It meant that those at the top were interested in answers and they didn’t have them. It meant that things would continue.
Project Sign began, semi-officially, with the beginning of the New Year, 1948. On January 7, 1948, Captain Thomas Mantell, leading a flight of F-51 fighters, encountered a UFO over Kentucky. Their original mission had been simply to move the aircraft from one airfield to another, but as they approached Fort Knox, Kentucky, they were asked to investigate a strange object that had been sighted overhead. Three of the aircraft turned toward the UFO, but the fourth, low on fuel, requested permission to land.
One of the most famous UFO encounters came in 1948, when Captain Thomas Mantell, leading a squadron of F-51s, saw one over the state of Kentucky. His wingmen witnessed the object, too.
Mantell and his wingmen saw the object and began climbing toward it. Mantell was convinced that it was huge, metallic, and moving away from him at about half his speed. He told his wingmen that he would climb to 25,000 feet, circle for ten minutes, and if he got no closer to the object, he would break off pursuit. He trimmed his aircraft to climb and then apparently lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen at such high altitude. The plane continued to climb, finally stalled and fell into a power dive. At about 19,000 feet, the aircraft began to break up because of the external stresses. Mantell was killed in the crash.
The Air Force had a dilemma. One of its pilots, a National Guard pilot to be sure, but an Air Force pilot nonetheless, had been killed chasing a UFO. Not only that, there were literally dozens of witnesses who had seen the UFO as it drifted over southern Kentucky, including high-ranking officers who were in the airfield control tower and who provided detailed descriptions of the object. They had to act.
The Air Force decided that Mantell and the others had been fooled by Venus. They explained that Venus is bright enough to be seen in the daylight if you know where to look. It wasn’t a very good explanation, but it was one that didn’t involve an alien spacecraft. Michael Hall and Wendy Connors wrote, “The Sign team used Venus as a cover to explain away what at the time was an extensively publicized and long-investigated incident. Project Sign team members thought they might be forced to admit a far more shocking conclusion, but not before they had time to develop the ETH.”
Much later, according to the government files, the Mantell sighting was identified as a Skyhook balloon. Given the information in the files and the descriptions by those who saw it, this seems to be a solid solution. But the important point here is that in 1948, those at Project Sign believed it was an alien craft and that Mantell had died chasing it. They wished to study the phenomenon quietly and carefully so they allowed the wrong solution to be publicized until they had a chance to understand what was happening.
An artist’s depiction of Mantell’s UFO encounter.
The real problem came on July 24, 1948, when two pilots, Clarence Chiles and John B. Whitted reported that a cigar-shaped craft had buzzed their aircraft. They were flying a commercial DC-3 at about 5,000 feet, on a bright, cloudless, and star-filled night. Twenty miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, they spotted, slightly above and to the right of their craft, what they thought was one of the new jet aircraft. Within seconds the object was close enough that they could see its torpedo-shape and a double row of square windows.
Chiles called the attention of his co-pilot to the object saying, “Look, here comes a new Army jet job.” The object approached in a slight dive, deflected a little to the left and passed the plane on the right, almost level to the flight path, according to the report in the government files. After passing, it pulled up sharply and disappeared into a cloud.
Questioned within hours of the event by Air Force investigators, both men said that they believed the object was about a hundred feet long. Whitted said, “The fuselage appeared to be about three times the circumference of a B-29 fuselage. The windows were very large and seemed square. They were white with light which seemed to be caused by some type of combustion. I estimate we watched the object for at least five seconds and not more than ten seconds. We heard no noise nor did we feel any turbulence from the object. It seemed to be at about 5500 feet.”
Chiles, in a statement dated August 3, 1948, wrote, “It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power shooting flame from the rear some fifty feet … Underneath the ship there was a blue glow of light.”
Apparently all the passengers were asleep (or on the wrong side of the aircraft) with the exception of Clarence L. McKelvie. Chiles wrote, “After talking to the only passenger awake at the time, he saw only the trail of fire as it passed and pulled into the clouds.”
Within hours of the sighting, the pilots were interviewed on radio station WCON in Atlanta, Georgia. They were also interviewed by William Key, a newspaper reporter. At some point during the interviews, someone suggested they had been startled by a meteor, but both men rejected the idea. They had seen many meteors during their night flights and were aware of what they looked like and how they performed.
There were, at the time, some other observations. In the newspaper article written by Albert Riley, he quoted the pilots as saying, “It’s prop-wash or jet-wash rocked our DC-3.”
In another newspaper article that is part of the Blue Book government files, Chiles was again quoted as saying, “… both reported they could feel the UFO’s backwash rock their DC-3.”
But a search of the government files that are part of Blue Book reveals that Chiles said, in a statement he signed on August 3, 1948, “There was no prop wash or rough air felt as it passed.”
In a statement taken by military officers and available in the government files in the days that followed the sighting, Whitted said, “We heard no noise nor did we feel any turbulence from the object.”
Clarence Chiles (left) and John B. Whitted reported a cigar-shaped UFO that flew very close to the DC-3 they were flying near Montgomery, Alabama.
Dr. J Allen Hynek, the scientific consultant to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book at the time, was asked for his assessment of the case. He could find no “astronomical explanation” if the case was accepted at face value. In other words, Hynek was saying that if the testimony of Chiles and Whitted was accepted, and there was some sort of prop wash or turbulence associated with the event, then it couldn’t be explained. He wrote, “[The] sheer improbability of the facts as stated … makes it necessary to see whether any other explanation, even though far-fetched, can be considered.”
That, of course, was not the end of it. There was a ground-based witness near Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, who had spotted an object an hour earlier. According to Captain Robert Sneider, the object was heading in the direction of Montgomery. Sneider was convinced that these objects, such as that seen by Chiles and Whitted, were from outer space. With that, he decided it was time to write an Estimate of the Situation.
Hall and Connors reported that Loedding was one of the advocates of this idea, and despite encountering some resistance, the entire Sign team was beginning to push their theories in Washington, D.C. The document was prepared in Dayton, Ohio, using the government files and resources available and sent forward through the chain of command.
Ed Ruppelt and Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon’s UFO resource, both said they had seen the document and that it was rather thick, printed on legal-sized paper and had a black cover. Stamped across the front were the words, “Top Secret.”
According to Ruppelt, in his original manuscript, “It [the Estimate of the Situation] concluded that UFO’s were interplanetary. As documented proof, many unexplained sightings were quoted.”
There isn’t much available about the contents in the government files today. A partial list of cases has been deduced from the information available from those who saw it. The Arnold sighting was used again. Another sighting detailed in the report came from the Lake Meade area. The government file said:
On 14 July 1947, 1st Lt Eric B Armstrong, O-2059709, 170th AAF Base Unit, Ferry Division, Brooks Field, San Antonio, Texas was interviewed and the following information was obtained: Lt. Armstrong departed Williams Field, Arizona at 1400 CST on 28 June in a P-51 for Portland, Oregon, by way of Medford, Oregon. At approximately 1515 CST on a course of 300 degrees, and a ground speed of 285, altitude 10,000 feet, approximately thirty miles northwest of Lake Meade, Nevada Lt. Armstrong sighting five or six white, circular objects at four o’clock, altitude approximately 6,000 feet, courses approximately 120 degrees and an estimated speed of 285 MPH. Lt. Armstrong said the objects were flying very smoothly and in a close formation. The estimated size of the white objects were approximately 36 inches in diameter. Lt. Armstrong stated that he is sure the white objects were not birds, since the rate of closure was very fast. Lt. Armstrong was certain that the white objects were not jets or conventional type aircraft since he has flown both types.
Another sighting was reported by a pilot of an F-80 flying near the Grand Canyon on June 30, 1947. According to the government files, he saw two round objects falling straight down at an inconceivable speed. One followed the other by seconds. The pilot, William McGinty, said the objects were circular. He thought they were a light gray in color, eight feet in diameter, and that they should have hit the ground some twenty-five miles south of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The case is interesting because it suggests that something may have hit the ground, but there was no local search and no evidence that anything hit the ground. Sometime after the Estimate was created, the Air Force wrote the case off as a meteor sighting. The description, at least partially, sounds as if “Astro, meteor” would make sense, but in 1947 that wasn’t the conclusion. The real question is why there was no attempt to find the object.
A clue about the kinds of cases and the witnesses to the objects used in the EOTS came from a series of sightings at and around Muroc Air Force Base beginning on July 7 and ending the next day. Major J. C. Wise, a test pilot, reported:
On 7 July 1947, at approximately 10:10, while running up the XP-84 on the ground, I noticed everyone looking up in the air. Off to the north about 10,000 to 12,000 feet altitude was an object I assumed at first to be a weather balloon, but after looking at it for a while I noticed that it was oscillating in a forward whirling movement without losing altitude. It was travelling about 200 to 225 MPH, and heading from west to east.
The object was yellowish-white in color and I would estimate that it was a sphere about 5 to 10 feet in diameter.
The next day there were several additional sightings in the area. Just before ten, four witnesses, “… all observed two silver disc like or spherical objects. All the witnesses estimated the altitude at about 8000 feet, and the speed between 300 and 400 MPH.”
According to calculations in the government files, the objects were in sight for about thirty minutes. The witnesses had enough time to get a good look at them, but even with that, the Air Materiel Command eventually claimed they had been research balloons.
Then, at 11:50 A.M. on July 8, Captain John Paul Strepp said that he saw a single object for about 90 seconds. He said that it was silver and resembled a parachute canopy and then “assumed a more ovular shape.” He thought it had two projections on the upper surface that might have been fins. They crossed one another, suggesting to Strepp that the object might have been rotating. It was moving slower than an airplane and he thought it was about fifty feet in diameter.
About noon, the same day, the commanding officer at Muroc, Colonel Gilkey, saw a single object that he thought might be paper blowing in the wind. He didn’t report anything to the base intelligence officer, Captain Harry D. Black until August 11.
About the same time, Major Richard R. Shoop saw what he thought was a thin, metallic object some five to eight miles from his position on the ground. It was aluminum colored and had what was described as an “unconventional shape.” He watched it for eight minutes as “The object moved from an intermediate altitude in an oscillating fashion, almost to the surface of the ground and then started climbing again.”
Other, similar sightings from around the United States were mentioned, such as a sighting on September 23, 1948, at the AEC’s Los Alamos Laboratory. There were a number of witnesses who saw a flat, circular object, high in the sky. It was little more than a speck seen in the distance.
The common thread in all these cases was that there were often multiple witnesses, all of whom were technically trained, including pilots, technicians, or scientists. They were familiar with the aircraft in the Air Force inventory, had worked or tested experimental aircraft, or had experience as fighter pilots, which meant they had been trained to make snap judgments.
An aerial view of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a facility that conducts research on nuclear weapons and other technology of relevance to national security. In 1948 several witnesses there observed a flat, circular object in the sky.
Those at Sign in Dayton, putting together the Estimate, had decided among themselves that the most likely solution was that these objects were evidence of alien visitation. They accepted, at face value, the testimony of the witnesses, believed them to be accurate in their estimations of distance, size, and speed, and that each report seemed to substantiate all the others. They believed that, in the aggregate, it added up to something extraterrestrial, though their thinking was more interplanetary than interstellar.
With their work completed, EOTS began to work its way up the chain of command. Swords suggested, “Still, with the pro-ETH Wright-Patterson intelligence group on the one side, an anti-ETH Pentagon Intelligence Requirements Office on the other, and open-minded collections officers and the powerful Research and Development chief (General Donald Putt) in between, Cabell didn’t want to decide this on his own. He handed the Estimate further upstairs to Vandenberg himself.”
Vandenberg, then, according to Ruppelt “batted it back down.” It appears that Vandenberg was not impressed with the quality of the evidence for alien visitation or the leap of logic contained in the documentation presented to him.
A review of the material presented to Vandenberg, combined with the information supplied by Ruppelt and Fournet about what cases were reviewed, and a search of the government records, shows that the evidence was indeed thin. Without some sort of physical evidence, the only conclusion that could be drawn was that the case was unproven, and Vandenberg found the Estimate unacceptable.
As Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Vandenberg, was the highest ranking Air Force officer at that time. He had just told his subordinates that he did not want to see anything that suggested these unidentified objects were extraterrestrial. His attitude and response was clear to those at Wright-Patterson and at Project Sign.
Loedding, with two others from Sign, traveled to Washington to argue the case for the extraterrestrial. They made no headway. In fact, Loedding, who had once been at the top of his game, was suddenly crippled in his career. He was out at Sign, and he was reduced to working on other projects. It appeared that he was being phased out at Wright-Patterson. According to Hall and Connors, while all of Loedding’s evaluations until 1948 had been excellent, after the rejection of the Estimate, his evaluations began to decline. He finally resigned in early 1951.
Ruppelt, who wrote his book about all of this a few years later, wrote in a chapter titled “The Dark Ages,” that the name of the project, Sign, was changed to “Grudge.” The mandate to investigate UFOs was still in place, with the assumption that standard intelligence procedures would be used to complete the task. However, Ruppelt noted that everything was subsequently evaluated on the premise that UFOs couldn’t exist as alien spacecraft. He wrote:
New people took over Project Grudge. ATIC’s top intelligence specialists, who had been so eager to work on Project Sign, were no longer working on Project Grudge. Some of them had drastically and hurriedly changed their minds about UFO’s when they thought that the Pentagon was no longer sympathetic to the UFO cause.… Other members of Project Sign had been “purged.”….
With the new name and the new personnel came the new objective, get rid of the UFO’s. It was never specified this in writing but it didn’t take much effort to see that this was the goal of Project Grudge. This unwritten goal was reflected in every memo, report and directive.
Reviewing the government files today, that attitude is evident. If a witness said the object looked like a balloon, then suddenly it was a balloon. If it might have been a natural phenomenon, then it became that phenomenon. Although there is no written evidence reflecting this approach, the government files reveal that it existed. In April 1962, for example, Colonel Edward H. Wynn, the Deputy for Science and Components wrote, “Probable causes for sightings based on limited information should be accepted.”
The real damage of the Estimate put together by those who favored the extraterrestrial was that it turned everything around. When word came from the highest uniformed authority in the Air Force that UFOs were not alien spacecraft, only those who were not worried about their careers or who were too naive to interpret the direction of the investigation failed to understand what was happening. From that point on, with the exception of a short period when Ruppelt was the chief of Blue Book, there was an investigation in name only. The Air Force wanted out of the UFO business and although it would take another twenty years, the process had been started. UFOs became the third rail.
Ruppelt, in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, wrote, “The Estimate died a quick death. Some months later it was declassified and relegated to the incinerator. A few copies, one of which I saw, were kept as mementos of the golden days of UFO’s.”
The implication here is that the document was ordered declassified and then ordered to be burned. If that is the case, it makes no sense. Once a document is declassified, there is no need to burn it. There should be nothing in such a document that it would harm national security; there is no classified information in it, so why burn it?
Could it be that Vandenberg thought that by declassifying the Estimate before ordering the destruction would mean that it would make its way into the public arena? If the document was as weak as the cases seem to indicate, then the best thing for the Air Force would have been for it to show up in the hands of a reporter or two and let the public learn the true nature of the evidence. It would ensure that they would quickly tire of UFOs.
If that had been his plan, it failed. There were no real leaks about what was in the Estimate until Ruppelt wrote about it in the mid-1950s. As late as 1960, the Air Force was denying that it had ever existed. Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Tacker, the official spokesman on UFOs at that time, said that the document only existed in the imagination of “avid saucer believers.” He failed to mention the Air Force officers who also believed it had existed.
