Preface to Modern UFO Cases
The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. . . . There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft. . . . The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled manually, automatically, or remotely.
LETTER TO THE COMMANDING GENERAL OF THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES, SEPTEMBER 23, 1947, FROM GENERAL NATHAN TWINING, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
The above quote was the original, unfiltered assessment of the evidence gathered from the first official air force investigation into the UFO phenomenon.
Though I am going to present five major, very public cases, including the Roswell incident, in the next chapters, it is with reservations that I include a brief overview of the U.S. government’s activities and positions regarding the history of the UFO phenomena in America.
It all began, innocently enough, when a UFO suddenly appeared in the skies over Los Angeles during World War II. The case has become known as the Battle over Los Angeles. Though it has barely received any attention, compared with Roswell, it is actually far more important (in my opinion).
No modern UFO event has been more thoroughly documented. It involved many tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, included a concerted artillery assault, was responded to by the police and fire departments, and appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times the next day.
(This case is presented in detail in the next chapter.)
What is of note at this point is the fact that the U.S. military could not and did not deny that it had fired on a UFO. The assault occurred over a half-hour period of time, and it produced a rain of spent shell casings and shrapnel that covered some of the nearby beaches.
This incident, which happened not quite three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was soon forgotten as the United States engaged the enemy in battle and the country became focused on winning the war. At that point in time, the U.S. military had no official position regarding UFOs, and the phenomenon was not a general mass media or public concern.
That would change radically soon after the war ended.
Not long after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, UFOs began appearing over the skies of New Mexico. It just so happens that the atomic bomb was developed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and tested at the White Sands Proving Ground, located at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The sudden appearance of UFOs over New Mexico in the postwar era does not seem like a mere coincidence. The Roswell incident represents the point where and when the U.S. military started to define a policy based on disinformation and denial.
Do not mistake the above assertion as being the first signal that I am about to launch into an antigovernment conspiracy rant. Neither I nor anyone else (except for the highest governmental officials involved) is privy to all the information that went into that decision.
Unfortunately, whether it was a correct call or not, it has produced a UFO history that has often bordered on the absurd. The American public has been told that even trained pilots did not witness a real UFO but had merely mistaken swamp gas for one.
In a long parade of succeeding cases, the mass media have been the conduit for such explanations as the following: a fighter pilot crashed and died because he chased a balloon he mistakenly thought was a UFO; credible observers had actually seen Venus and not a UFO; a combination of Venus and a weather balloon and even swamp gas had been mistaken for a UFO . . . and the list goes on, ad absurdum.
At times, the U.S. military has looked downright silly by changing their cover stories back and forth. Nonetheless, all of these maneuvers may be justified by national security concerns. Who can deny that possibility?
While that may be true in particular cases, I and most other independent investigators into the subject would argue that the U.S. government has the obligation to inform its citizens of the general truth. We shall see how other governments have handled this issue in later chapters.
After several waves of post–World War II UFO sightings were reported in the press, under public pressure a UFO study was launched by the air force.
The initial air force investigations into UFOs began on a small-scale under Project Sign at the end of 1947, following a host of highly publicized UFO sightings and the Roswell flap. Project Sign was launched specifically at the request of General Nathan Twining, chief of the Air Force Materiel Command at what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Wright-Patterson was to become the home of Project Sign and all subsequent official U.S. Air Force public investigations. Ironically, this base was intimately involved in the Roswell case.
Sign’s final report was inconclusive regarding the cause of the sightings. However, according to U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt (who would become the first director of the subsequent Project Blue Book), Sign’s initial intelligence estimate (the so-called Estimate of the Situation), written in the late summer of 1948, concluded that “flying saucers [UFOs] were real craft; were not made by either the Russians or the US; and were likely extraterrestrial in origin.”
This estimate was forwarded to the Pentagon but subsequently ordered destroyed by General Hoyt Vandenberg, U.S. Air Force chief of staff, citing a lack of physical proof. Vandenberg subsequently dismantled Project Sign.
It was terminated at the end of 1948 but quickly reincarnated as Project Grudge, which was widely criticized as having a debunking mandate from the start. Ruppelt referred to the era of Project Grudge as the “dark ages” of early air force UFO investigation in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1956.
Grudge concluded that all UFOs were natural phenomena or other misperceptions, although contradictorily enough, it also stated that 23 percent of the reports could not be explained.
By the end of 1951, several high-ranking U.S. Air Force generals were so dissatisfied with the state of air force UFO investigations that they dismantled Project Grudge. It was turned into Project Blue Book in early 1952. One of the generals was William Garland, who was convinced that the UFO question deserved serious scrutiny because he had witnessed a UFO himself.
As noted above, Ruppelt was the first head of the project. He was a veteran and had been decorated for his service with the Army Air Corps during World War II. Ruppelt officially coined the term unidentified flying object to replace the many terms (flying saucer, flying disk, and so on) the military had previously used.
J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer, was the scientific consultant to the project, as he had been with Projects Sign and Grudge. He worked for Project Blue Book until the project was terminated in 1969.
The astronomer was an avowed skeptic when he signed on, but later said that his feelings changed to a more wavering skepticism; as the research progressed, he reviewed a number of UFO reports that he considered to be unexplainable (such as the Socorro, New Mexico, incident, which will be covered in chapter 13).
The project evaluated more than twelve thousand cases, most of which were readily dismissed for one reason or another. However, not all were, and this is an important fact.
Ruppelt resigned from the air force in the mid-1950s and wrote his book, which described the study of UFOs by the U.S. Air Force from 1947 to 1955.
Project Blue Book caused two very important developments: (1) Hynek became so convinced that there was a kernel of truth to the UFO phenomena that he launched an independent organization to study it (the Center for UFO Studies), which is still in operation, and (2) Ruppelt’s work, which convinced his American readers that there was something to the UFO phenomenon that the air force was ignoring or lying to the public about.
However, as far as the air force was concerned, the UFO case was closed when Project Blue Book was terminated. The final conclusions:
Case closed?
More than forty years after the termination of Project Blue Book, air force personnel were still being told what to do in the event they observed a UFO. According to a recent Huffington Post article:
As recently as early September [2011], Air Force members who came across anything they didn’t recognize were told to note “altitude, direction of travel, speed, description of flight path and maneuvers, what first called attention to the object, how long was the object visible and how did the object disappear?”1
The journalist who was investigating the situation, Lee Speigel, queried the air force about the UFO directives in light of the Project Blue Book conclusions made decades earlier. He was told that an interview would be arranged with an appropriate officer to go over the situation.
However, as he noted in his article, “but before the interview was set up, the 111-page instruction manual was revised on Sept. 6, and the UFO instructions were deleted, as were other portions of the document, now shortened to 40 pages.”2
This is why I began this preface by stating that I was reluctant to go over the history of UFOs in the United States. One soon finds oneself peering down a hall of mirrors and having a hard time distinguishing what is real from what is false.
Nonetheless, the most important UFO cases in the world have occurred in the United States. That fact makes it incumbent on any researcher to dig and dig deep, and to discern “spin” on any layer and get to the underlying facts.