Project Blue Book, or How UFOs Took over American Culture

Project Blue Book, or How UFOs Took over American Culture

Government, the Military, and the CIA, Too

It Started with a Sign

The United States government and military were naturally disposed to be curious about such things as the Arnold sighting and the Roswell crash. The September 1947 Twining memorandum (discussed in chapter eight) noted the peculiar avionics of unidentified flying objects, and acknowledged that not every question about them would be resolved easily.

General Twining’s thoughts circulated in the middle of a rash of “saucer” sightings that followed close on the heels of Arnold and Roswell. Throughout 1948, representatives of the military and academia (including Ohio State University astronomy professor J. Allen Hynek) studied the UFO phenomenon, looking at the Swedish “ghost rocket” reports of 1946 (see chapter 5), and particularly incidents from 1947–48, some of which occurred very near to U.S. military bases in California (Muroc Army Air Base—later renamed Edwards AFB—in the Southern California desert near Lancaster, was one). Eyewitness reports from technicians, pilots, and other ostensibly credible witnesses suggested circular or disc-shaped machines with propulsion and avionics sufficient to reach speeds and execute aerial maneuvers beyond the capabilities of known aircraft—as well as beyond the capability of the human body to withstand.

America’s official UFO investigative body received a name, Project Sign, on January 22, 1948, and was attached to Wright-Patterson AFB, near Dayton, Ohio. Gen. Nathan Twining, commander of the Twentieth Air Force during World War II, and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assumed duties as Sign’s chief. Project members included security-cleared military personnel and civilians with expertise in missiles, nuclear energy, and aeronautics. One participant, Alfred Loedding, had already done work on disc-shaped aircraft, and wings with a low aspect ratio (the ratio of the length of wings to their width).

Loedding’s interest in flying discs was an obvious asset; likewise his wing studies, because short wings allowed greater maneuverability than what is possible with longer-winged aircraft. Nazi Germany’s Horten Ho 229 “flying wing” light bomber first flew, in prototype form, in the spring of 1944; although prototypes test-flew into 1945, this advanced jet-powered wing never went into production. If it had, its design might have afforded aeronautic advantages similar to those exhibited by flying discs.

project-blue-book-or-how-ufos-took-over-american-culture
Project Sign collected UFO data, interviewed witnesses, and tried to explain discrete sightings. Above Montgomery, Alabama, on July 24, 1948, Eastern Airlines DC-3 pilots Clarence Chiles and John Whitted encountered a cylindrical UFO. First Officer Whitted made this drawing for Sign investigators two days later, indicating a finless craft about a hundred feet long, emitting a forty-foot “orange & red flame” exhaust. A simultaneous sketch by Captain Chiles also depicted the rocket-type shape and dramatic exhaust

America’s own “flying wing,” the prop-driven Northrop YB-35 experimental heavy bomber, flew in 1946. Its jet-powered follow-on, the YB-49, arrived in 1947. Given the very recent reports of apparently wingless, unidentified aircraft, General Twining and other leaders of Sign grew concerned that the Soviet Union had achieved startling advances in wing ratio technology, and conventional or atomic propulsion. (The atomic angle carries weight because the concern arose even before the Soviets test-exploded—and later revealed—their first atomic bomb in late August 1949.) Even if such advances had been made by Great Britain or another friendly nation, the world balance of power would change, to America’s detriment.

Sign realized that Alfred Loedding’s work with flying-wing design became a particular asset just six months after the project’s official startup. At five thousand feet outside Montgomery, Alabama, on July 24, 1948, Eastern Airlines DC-3 pilots Clarence Chiles and John Whitted got a good startle when a wingless cylinder with a taper to its leading edge approached head-on and streaked past their starboard wing, vanishing after executing a sudden ninety- degree ascent. Chiles and Whitted later estimated the craft’s length at a hundred feet, with a diameter “twice B-29” (the wingspan of a B-29 Superfortress is 141 feet). The craft’s fuselage exhibited rows of lights, which both pilots interpreted as illuminated windows or ports. At least one other professional pilot had encountered a rocket-shaped craft in the recent past (C-47; Tampa, Florida; August 1, 1946); that sighting gave additional credence to the Chiles-Whitted account, but here is the kicker: less than an hour before Chiles and Whitted’s encounter over Alabama, a rocket-shaped object streaked across the sky above Robins AFB, located sixteen miles south of Macon, Georgia. It was observed there by Air Force ground personnel. The craft that came at the DC-3 shortly afterward was headed west (Chiles and Whitted were flying east, from Houston to Atlanta). The UFO sighted over Robins traveled west-southwest. Montgomery is 185 miles southwest of Macon.
Visitors had come to America’s southeast.

The rocket shape that figures in the Montgomery and Macon sightings suggested human technology. Although “flying saucer” had already entered the popular lexicon, Washington was more concerned with the possibility of foreign (read: Communist) aircraft sporting heretofore unknown technology. An alternative possibility—that the saucers were experimental, super-secret aircraft designed and tested by the United States—was hardly less a concern than the Soviet one. Not every staff-level officer in every branch would necessarily know about such craft, and the general civilian population was not to know at all.

For a brief period, the possibility of extraterrestrial origin was not part of the official discussion—though many early U.S. investigators privately believed that otherworldly origins were not merely possible but likely.

Realpolitik

After seven months of investigative work, Project Sign startled the Pentagon (and perhaps itself, as well) by concluding that flying saucers were best explained by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. A number of persons and events helped cement that belief. Perhaps foremost was Capt. Thomas Mantell, who died over Kentucky on January 7, 1948, while flying in pursuit of a UFO.

Although Mantell’s propeller-driven P-51 could not keep pace with the airborne object Mantell pursued, the captain got close enough to radio that the thing “looks metallic and of tremendous size.” Although some involved with Sign (particularly those more attuned to the Pentagon than to the USAF) remained wedded to the Soviet-aircraft theory (craft presumably engineered with assistance from German scientists captured after the war), others within Sign were not so sure.

The Soviet theory might have had more juice if Sign operated in a vacuum, ignorant of scientific, military, and political developments beyond the borders of Washington. But America had fielded assets sufficient to help win World War II.

Of all of that conflict’s many belligerents, the USA was the only one to come out of the war stronger than when it had gone in. Europe and the Soviet Union had been flattened, their infrastructures and economies badly mauled. The Japanese Imperial Empire had been destroyed, and Japan itself had suffered horrific physical and economic payback. An entire generation of Soviet and German young men had been lost. Millions of refugees and other dispossessed roamed the landscapes of vanquished and victors alike. Postwar, and particularly before the Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in 1949, America bestrode the world like a colossus. The requirements of war had allowed it to become an economic powerhouse, and although the U.S. military was quickly drawn down after 1945, its tactical and strategic capabilities remained enormous. Further, a thriving, expanding intelligence community—although admittedly in the dark about the efficacy of Soviet spy activity—had a sharp sense of other nations’ technologic capabilities. Even the Soviet atomic bomb, though ominous, had not been unexpected; Washington had realized that such a breakthrough was inevitable.

Conversely, Washington had a sense of high-tech that did not exist. If the USA had no flying saucers, the likelihood of the USSR or anyone else having them was very slight. America had gotten its hands on the cream of the German rocket scientists and avionics personnel. The identities and capabilities of German scientists spirited to the Soviet Union were well known to Washington. As a group, they were capable, but not more capable than those at work in the United States. Other relative issues, including access to natural resources, and economic and manufacturing capabilities (including the issue of an available workforce), favored America, and led some in U.S. intelligence to conclude—rightly, as things turned out—that the Soviets labored at tech levels inferior to levels achieved by the USA. Despite an ability to mount occasional surprises (such as the Bomb and the later Sputnik satellite), the Soviets were stuck in a perpetual game of catch-up. If no one in the Washington of 1947–48 predicted that the Soviets would one day spend too much and bankrupt themselves out of existence, some particularly canny American intelligence experts may have perceived the early indicators.

Then, too, came the issue of the wide geographic spread of saucer sightings.

Objects spotted over Europe and the USA might be rationalized as Soviet on grounds of proximity and strategic interest, but what about sightings in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other remote corners of the globe? Why would the USSR spend its treasure to do faraway tests in areas of limited strategic and intelligence value? How would they send saucers over such great distances?

For all these reasons, many in Sign felt convinced that “flying saucers” were neither Soviet nor earthly.

Garrett Weighs In

In July 1947, six months before the establishment of Project Sign, the intelligence office of the Army Air Forces (shortly to become the U.S. Air Force) requested that other military services and the FBI contribute to a better understanding of the so-called flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects. The request came to Lt. Col. George Garrett, a USMC officer attached to the Pentagon. Garrett developed an interest in the Chiles-Whitted DC-3 account, and three that predated Kenneth Arnold: a May 19, 1947, account from Manitou Springs, Colorado, where three witnesses witnessed a hovering, motionless silver object before it finally streaked away; May 22, 1947, Oklahoma City, a ground sighting by a single witness; and June 22, 1947, Greenfield, Massachusetts, a small, silver-white sphere seen from the ground by one man, who estimated the object’s altitude at one thousand feet. (The problematic aspect of the last account is not the sphere itself, but the witness’s claims about the object’s size and altitude, neither of which could have been anything other than a baseless guess.) In all, Garrett worked from eighteen accounts (sixteen plus two added later)— some of which were Swedish “ghost rocket” sightings from 1946–47.

Garrett’s July 30, 1947, report to General Twining at Air Materiel Command concluded that the mysterious flying discs existed. That judgment may sound like a bombshell, but Garrett offered it honestly and easily, believing that the Pentagon and President Truman already knew that the discs were real. The real issue was the discs’ origin, and to Garrett, the evidence gave “more than ordinary weight to the possibility that this is a domestic project, about which the President, etc. know.” Garrett had been encouraged in his “earthly” opinion by Gen. George Schulgen, who agreed that 1) the discs existed, 2) insiders already knew it, and 3) the best course was to say so, and let higher-ups decide whether to shut the door on further inquiry.

General Twining’s office conducted independent research simultaneous with Garrett’s. The Twining team relied more heavily on pilot accounts, feeling that the credibility of such witnesses was difficult to dispute. Although pilots frequently misidentify objects encountered in flight, the Twining team’s response to the Garrett report nevertheless agreed that the flying discs existed.

But unlike Garrett, the Twining people admitted to having no clue as to the objects’ origins. It is from this uncertainty that Project Sign developed.

“Estimate of the Situation”

The U.S. Air Force’s Air Materiel Command (AMC) activated Project Sign on January 22, 1948, at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson AFB) in Dayton, Ohio.

Project director Robert R. Sneider worked closely with Air Force intelligence, as Sign investigated UFO reports from 1947 to September 1948. Sign investigators evaluated reports, flagging those of potential importance. Witness interviews, when deemed necessary, were conducted by AMC personnel. Witnesses filled out a standard questionnaire and gave verbal accounts of what they had seen.

In May 1948, Ohio State astronomer J. Allen Hynek came on board at Sign as a consultant, tasked mainly with looking at reports and determining which ones described meteorites, weather anomalies, and other things readily explained by science. However, some at Sign (Sneider included) leaned toward an extraterrestrial explanation, and were encouraged by the aforementioned Chiles- Whitted DC-3 encounter of July 1948. Two or three months later, Capt. Sneider completed an elaborate report—the Top Secret Estimate of the Situation—to explain Sign’s work, conclusions, and advisements. (The report is best known as the Estimate of the Situation.) Colonels attached to Sign gave approval for the report’s slow march up the Air Force ranks, beginning with the chief of intelligence, Gen. Charles Cabell. The paper finally reached Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, who was alarmed by the report’s conclusion: the best available evidence suggested an extraterrestrial origin for unidentified flying objects that could not be readily explained.

Even as Vandenberg struggled to absorb this, a contrarian document (pushed by Maj. Aaron Boggs) circulated at high levels. The Boggs report asserted that flying discs were not extraterrestrial. Vandenberg turned again to the Estimate of the Situation, which he finally regarded as informed guesswork. His interests and inclinations lay with things seen, felt, and documented. Because the Estimate cited no physical evidence in support of its ET theory, Vandenberg dismissed the paper and ordered all copies destroyed.

The Estimate’s ET-centric orientation doomed it; the Air Force desired something more easily digestible. In the years since, the Estimate of the Situation has achieved near-mythic status in UFO circles. For decades, the report’s complete physical destruction seemed a certainty. Even the barest description of it—a thick sheaf of legal-sized paper bound beneath black covers stamped TOP SECRET—comes to us only from a claim by Edward Ruppelt, a heavily decorated flier attached in 1948 to Wright Field’s Air Technical Intelligence Center. (As we will see, Captain Ruppelt later headed a follow-on to Sign, Project Blue Book.) The general public had no knowledge of the Estimate until Ruppelt mentioned it in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. More recently, pages that apparently survived have been quoted, and posted to the Internet. Not unexpectedly, these pages provoke considerable debate. In the end, there seems no way to determine authenticity or fakery.

In the meanwhile, generals Cabell and Vandenberg coolly suggested that Project Sign try again. A subsequent paper handed in near the close of 1948 tiptoed around the extraterrestrial notion but did not abandon it. With that, Project Sign was suspended. Investigation of UFOs would continue—but then again, it wouldn’t. Vandenberg realized that sharp observers in the press and scientific community might notice the sudden absence of an investigatory body looking into UFOs. Another was established early in 1949, but Vandenberg and people in USAF intelligence were clear that the investigation was to be theater, and nothing more. On February 11, the revived program received a code name calculated to suggest Air Force antipathy: Project Grudge. Although official USAF accounts deny that the word “Grudge” had any special significance, Edward Ruppelt was on the mark when he referred to Grudge as “the Dark Ages” of UFO investigation.

Politics and PR

Hobbled from the outset by the politics of disclosure and public relations, and “expected” to avoid the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Project Grudge ostensibly carried on with study of the saucer phenomenon. It relied heavily on astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who had consulted on Sign. Hynek was not “opposed” to the idea of unidentified flying objects, and he did not assume that witnesses had prevaricated. But he felt obligated to give weight to many witnesses’ lack of scientific training, and the possibility of mistaken judgments even by pilots and other seemingly credible observers. Hynek examined various UFO cases objectively, making natural use of his expertise and training. His mindset did not allow for wishful thinking or leaps of logic. In his role as consultant to Grudge, he concluded, rather mildly, that many flying-disc reports had roots in explainable, everyday causes.

He looked with particular interest at the Mantell P-51 crash, and suggested that the pilot probably chased the planet Venus. (Hynek later regretted his explanation: Venus was indeed in the sky when Mantell died, but, as Hynek realized, would not have been bright enough for the pilot to see.) In all, Hynek reviewed nearly 250 cases, and prepared a six- hundred-page report. He noted that although about a quarter of accounts appeared challenging, most of those could be explained by what Hynek called “psychological explanations.” Of the other 75 percent, “there is no evidence that objects reported upon are the result of an advanced scientific foreign development; and therefore, they constitute no threat to the national security.” “Venus” and “no evidence” were just the sort of conclusions desired by military personnel eager to put the whole flying saucer business to rest.

The subsequent Grudge Report recommended that the project files be made public via a standard press release. Why? The USAF and America’s intelligence community wanted the public to believe that the American military had exhausted its interest in UFOs. Naturally enough, the unrestricted press release came to the attention of Moscow almost immediately—just as the Air Force and Grudge had planned. (The press release began with “Project Saucer Discontinued”; Project Saucer was the Air Force’s public name for projects Sign and Grudge.) In the spring of 1949, consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post carried a two-part article by Sidney Shallet. The journalist had been vetted by the Air Force, and allowed limited access to USAF saucer files. Probably because “Sign” was making the transition to “Grudge,” Shallet’s article referred to the Air Force investigatory body as “Project Saucer.” The articles are essentially puff pieces—fluff that let the magazine run a flying saucer piece with an “official” imprimatur. In return for access, the Air Force insisted on final approval. Although the article notes a few intriguing, unsolved UFO cases, it is likely that the Air Force liaison was comfortable with the inclusion of such tidbits.

Grudge issued just one report (coded as Technical Report No. 102-AC-49/15- 100), dated December 27, 1949. Although acknowledging that nearly a quarter of investigated sightings could not be explained, “Unidentified Flying Objects— Project Grudge” recommended that USAF investigation of UFOs be greatly curtailed. The report elaborated by suggesting that no further investigatory effort be put forth on sightings lacking “realistic technical applications.” That phrase suggests that the Air Force had returned to the man-made/Soviet UFO mindset; the time and expense of scrutiny would henceforth be expended on sightings suggestive of real-world tech uses and consequences—which was one way of saying “military applications” and “foreign threats.” Sightings with even a whiff of the fanciful seemed destined to be ignored and forgotten.

Key members of Grudge were not inclined to let go of all investigations. This was revealed long after the fact, in a declassified June 1968 report from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP; established in 1956 by a UFO enthusiast named Thomas Townsend Brown and shortly led by a retired USMC major, Donald Keyhoe). Publicly, Grudge had been declared finished; in reality, the project’s work was, as the 1968 report put it, “permitted to exist in a kind of limbo of skepticism.” What the 1968 NICAP papers describe as “several significant sightings in September 1951” were sufficient for Grudge’s release from limbo just a month later. In March 1952, Grudge was officially resurrected, and with a new name, too: Project Blue Book.