Project Sign or Project Saucer was an official U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) undertaken by the United States Air Force (USAF) and active for most of 1948. It was the precursor to Project Grudge.
Project Sign or Project Saucer was an official U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) undertaken by the United States Air Force (USAF) and active for most of 1948. It was the precursor to Project Grudge.
The project was established in 1948 by Air Force General Nathan Farragut Twining, head of the Air Technical Service Command, and was initially named Project SAUCER. [1] The goal of the project was to collect, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to UFO sightings, on the premise that they might represent a national security concern. [1]
On April 27, 1949, the U.S. Air Force publicly released a paper prepared by the Intelligence Division of the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio. [2] The paper stated that while some UFOs appeared to represent actual aircraft, there was not enough data to determine their origin. [3] Almost all cases were explained by ordinary causes, but the report recommended a continuation of the investigation of all sightings. [1] [2]
Project Sign was first asserted in the 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by retired Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt who later directed Project Blue Book. In this he also claimed that Sign had produced an "Estimate of the Situation" which endorsed an interplanetary explanation for UFOs, but General Hoyt Vandenberg, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, shut down Project Sign for lack of proof. [4] No copy of this document or any other corroboration of Ruppelt's claim has been produced, and Popular Mechanics called the report "probably more mythological than real". [5]
Project Sign was followed by Project Grudge after a conclusion was reached that UFO reports could be exploited by a foreign power to induce panic in the population and were therefore a military issue in the post-WW II, Cold War climate. This led Project Grudge to publicly disparage all UFO reports as the result of "a. Misidentifications of various conventional objects. b. A mild form of mass-hysteria and war nerves. c. Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetuate a hoax or to seek publicity. d. Psychopathological persons." [6] [ unreliable fringe source? ]
In May 1949, officers of Project Sign received a letter from an aeronautical company shareholder, who explained that the company had been building aircraft similar to the "flying saucers" which were then a popular topic in the press. This was during the UFO craze following Kenneth Arnold's reports of seeing UFOs over Mount Rainier and the Roswell Incident that followed. The Air Force had canvassed for reports of flying saucers, and the shareholder apparently felt that inventor Jonathan Edward Caldwell's disk-rotor might explain them.
Tracking down the leads, the team, accompanied by the Maryland Police, visited an abandoned farm in Glen Burnie, Maryland (outside Baltimore), where the damaged remains of Caldwell's disk-rotor aircraft were discovered. They also tracked down Driggers, who told them the story of the attempted flight in 1937–8. The team reported that the prototypes could not be responsible for the "flying saucer" reports that were being received from all around the country. [7]
Photographs of the broken disk-rotor machine continue to appear in UFOs books to this day. They were often described as "crashed" flying saucers in earlier works, claiming it was one more example of the USAF being in possession of such vehicles. More recently they are normally connected with the claims that the Nazis had built working flying saucers late in the war, lumped together with other disk-shaped aircraft like the Avrocar, Sack AS-6 and Vought V-173, in an effort to demonstrate that such aircraft were both possible and well-researched. [8]
An unidentified flying object (UFO), or unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP), is any perceived airborne, submerged or transmedium phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. Upon investigation, most UAPs are identified as known objects or atmospheric phenomena, while a small number remain unexplained.
UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the United States government, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlled by a non-human intelligence or built using alien technology. Such conspiracy theories usually argue that Earth governments are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrial visitors despite public disclaimers, and further that some of these theories claim that the governments are explicitly allowing alien abduction.
Project Blue Book was the code name for the systematic study of unidentified flying objects by the United States Air Force from March 1952 to its termination on December 17, 1969. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was initially directed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and followed projects of a similar nature such as Project Sign established in 1947, and Project Grudge in 1949. Project Blue Book had two goals, namely, to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.
On January 7, 1948, 25-year-old Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, died when he crashed his P-51 Mustang fighter plane near Franklin, Kentucky, United States, after being sent in pursuit of an unidentified flying object (UFO). Mantell pursued the object in a steep climb and disregarded suggestions to level his altitude. At high altitude, he blacked out from a lack of oxygen; his plane went into a downward spiral and crashed. The incident was among the most publicized of early UFO reports. Later investigation by the United States Air Force's Project Blue Book indicated that Mantell died chasing a Skyhook balloon, which, in 1948, was a top-secret project that he would not have known about.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) proposes that some unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by extraterrestrial intelligence or non-human aliens, or non-occupied alien probes from other planets visiting Earth.
The "Maury Island incident" refers to claims made by Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl of falling debris and threats by men in black following sightings of unidentified flying objects in the sky over Maury Island in Puget Sound. The pair would later claim the events had occurred on June 21, 1947.
The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe, was a book that investigated reports of UFOs by United States Air Force fighters, personnel, and other aircraft, between 1947 and 1950.
The Robertson Panel was a scientific committee which met in January 1953 headed by Howard P. Robertson. The Panel arose from a recommendation to the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC) in December 1952 from a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) review of the U.S. Air Force investigation into unidentified flying objects, Project Blue Book. The CIA review itself was in response to widespread reports of unidentified flying objects, especially in the Washington, D.C. area during the summer of 1952.
Green fireballs are a type of unidentified flying object (UFO) that has been reported since the early 1950s. Early sightings primarily occurred in the southwestern United States, particularly in New Mexico. Although some ufologists and ufology organizations consider green fireballs to be of artificial extraterrestrial origin, mainstream, non-pseudoscientific explanations have been provided, including natural bolides.
Edward James Ruppelt was a United States Air Force officer probably best known for his involvement in Project Blue Book, a formal governmental study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). He is generally credited with coining the term "unidentified flying object", to replace the terms "flying saucer" and "flying disk" – which had become widely known – because the military thought them to be "misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO for short."
Project Grudge was a short-lived project by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Grudge succeeded Project Sign in February, 1949, and was then followed by Project Blue Book. The project formally ended in December 1949, but continued in a minimal capacity until late 1999.
The Mariana UFO incident occurred in August 1950 in Great Falls, Montana. The film footage of the sighting is believed to be among the first ever taken of what came to be called an unidentified flying object. The footage was investigated by the U.S. Air Force, and initially found to be reflections from two F-94 jet fighters, which was later retracted.
The Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter occurred at approximately 2:45 AM on July 24, 1948, in the skies near Montgomery, Alabama, United States. Two commercial pilots, Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted, claimed to have observed a "glowing object" pass by their plane before it appeared to pull up into a cloud and travel out of sight.
From July 12 to 29, 1952, a series of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings were reported in Washington, D.C., and later became known as the Washington flap, the Washington National Airport Sightings, or the Invasion of Washington. The most publicized sightings took place on consecutive weekends, July 19–20 and July 26–27. UFO historian Curtis Peebles called the incident "the climax of the 1952 (UFO) flap" - "Never before or after did Project Blue Book and the Air Force undergo such a tidal wave of (UFO) reports."
Jonathan Edward Caldwell was a Canadian-American self-taught aeronautical engineer who designed a series of bizarre aircraft and started public companies in order to finance their construction. None of these was ever successful, and after his last known attempt in the later 1930s he disappeared, apparently to avoid securities fraud charges. His name was later connected with mythical German flying saucers, and he remains a fixture of the UFO genre.
The Gorman dogfight was a widely publicized UFO incident which took place on October 1, 1948, in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota, United States. United States Air Force (USAF) Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in his bestselling and influential The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects that the "dogfight" was one of three "classic" UFO incidents in 1948 that "proved to [Air Force] intelligence specialists that UFOs were real," along with the Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter and the Mantell UFO incident. In 1949, the official explanation made by the USAF was that the Gorman dogfight had been caused by a lighted weather balloon.
The Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour (1,932 km/h). This was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that garnered nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings, including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold's description of the objects also led to the press quickly coining the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs.
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects is a 1956 book by then-retired Air Force UFO investigator Edward J. Ruppelt, detailing his experience running Project Bluebook. The book was noted for its suggestion that a few UFO sightings might be linked to spikes of atomic radiation. Contemporary media summarized four topics discussed in the book:
"Have We Visitors From Space?" was an article on Flying Saucers by H. B. Darrach Jr. and Robert Ginna that appeared in the April 7, 1952 edition of Life magazine. The piece was strongly sympathetic to the hypothesis that UFOs might be the product of extraterrestrials. Publicity surrounding the piece is believed to have contributed to the 1952 UFO flap, a subsequent wave of reports that summer.
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