Kanook Tlingit Nation

June 15th, 2010

In the middle of the summer on a Saturday evening just before midnight, an air-traffic
controller at Washington National Airport (now Ronald Reagan Airport) noticed seven-objects on
his radar. Consider this that back on July 19th, 1952 some 57-years and 10-months ago the skies
above America were not jam-packed with aero-planes as they are today.
Edward Nugent noted in his log that these objects were some 15-miles south-southwest of his
radar antenna he also noted that there were no established flight paths in the area and that
previously there had been no aircraft. He caught the attention of his supervisor on duty, Harry
Barnes, and they both watched the seven objects as they tracked across the screen. Mr. Barnes
later wrote in his duty log, We knew immediately that a very strange situation existedthe
movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft. In 1952, 99.9% of
all aircraft were propeller driven, snails compared to todays sleek silver bullets tracking across
our Blue Marble.
Harry had two on-duty controllers double-check Nugents radar, whereas they determined it
was functioning properly Barnes then called National Airports other radar center, the controller
there, Howard Cocklin, informed Harry that he also had the objects on his radarscope. He added
that looking out the control tower window he could see one of the objects: a bright orange light.
I cant tell whats behind it.
Five years and 25 days after Kenneth Arnolds sighting of nine-shining disc-shaped objects
near Mount Rainier in Washington State, multiple unknown objects showed their stuff at the
Nations Capital.
A few minutes after 11:04 PM (before midnight) other objects appeared in all sectors of the
radarscopes, whereas they moved over the White House and the United States Capital.
Supervisor Barnes called Andrews Air Force Base, some 10-miles from his location at National.
His call met with no confirmation of his sightings, physically or on their radars. Shortly
thereafter an airman William Brady called back and told Barnes, that he was in the Andrews AFB
tower and that he saw, object which appeared to be like an orange ball, trailing a tailit was
unlike anything I had ever seen before.
 When airmen Brady turned to alert the crew with him in the tower, the strange object took off
at an unbelievable speed, and vanished in a split second. He then related that he has seen a 2 nd
object but it too vanished before any of his associates got a chance to see it.
At 12:30 AM on the 20th, (just after midnight), pilot S.C. Pierman from Capital Airlines was
waiting for clearance for his DC-4 to take off when he spotted what he believed to be a meteor,
on inquiry to the tower they told him that they had seen on their radarscopes unknown objects
closing on his position. Pilot Pierman later reported, he had witnessed six-objects, white, tail-
less, fast-moving lights over a 14-minute period, all through this period of time Pierman was in
direct radio-contact with Supervisor Barnes, who wrote in his duty-log that each sighting
coincided with a pip we could see near his plane. When he reported that the light streaked off at a
high-speed, it disappeared on our scope.
In the meantime at Andrews AFB control tower personnel were tracking on radar what some
believed to be unknown objects, while others suspected, and in for one instance were able to
prove, were simply stars and meteors.
Staff Sgt Charles Davenport observed an orange-red light to the south; the light would appear
to stand still, than make an abrupt change in direction and altitudethis happened several times.
At one-point both radar centers at National and the radar at Andrews AFB were tracking an
object hovering over a radio beacon, the hovering object vanished from all three screens at the
same time.
At 3 AM, just before all objects vacated the radar screens in the area, three jet fighters where on
their way from Newcastle AFB in Delaware, some 91 miles from Andrews AFB, shortly before
their arrival the objects were gone. Once the fighter planes ran low on fuel and left, the objects
returned which convinced Supervisor Barnes that they had to be monitoring radio traffic and
behaved accordingly. The objects were lasted detected on radar at 5:30 AM on the 20th of July,
1952.
A civilian radio engineer, E.W. Chambers living in Washingtons suburbs noticed that around
this time (sunrise) that five huge disks circling in a loose formation. They tilted upward and left
on a steep ascent.
In the following days Headlines across the Nation screamed, SAUCERS SWARM OVER
CAPITAL in large black type. By coincidence, USAF Captain Edward J Ruppelt, the supervisor
of the Air Force Project Blue Book investigation into the UFO mystery, was in Washington
D.C., albeit he did NOT learn about the goings-on until Tuesday the 22nd of July when he read the
headlines in a Washington-area newspaper.
 After brief conversations, and I suppose mountains of frustration knowing the chain-of-
command in D.C,, he tried for several hours to get a staff car (Hertz wasnt a entity in those days)
to investigate the sightings, he was refused as only Generals and Senior Colonels could use staff
cars. He was informed he could employ a taxi but at his own expense, after dancing around the
chain-of-command in D.C. he threw up his hands in frustration and flew back to the Headquarters
of Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio.
Before leaving he did manage to have a one-on-one with USAF Radar Specialist, Captain Roy
James, who felt that unusual weather conditions could have caused the unknown radar targets.

On Saturday evening at 8:15 PM the 26th of July a pilot and stewardess on a National Airlines
flight into Washington observed some strange objects above their plane within minutes both
radar centers at National and the one at Andrews AFB were tracking more unknown objects.
Reports and logs obtained showed these objects were gliding along at 90 to- 100 mph. A Master
Sergeant at Andrews AFB visually observed the objects, later saying, these lights did NOT have
the characteristics of shooting stars. There was no tails, and they traveled faster than any
shooting star I have ever seen.
During the above Albert M Chop, the press spokesman for Project Blue Book had arrived at
National and refused several reporters requests to photograph the radar screens, on his way to
the center to join the personnel doing their jobs. When he arrived the radars were once again
showing unknown objects in every sector, whereas at times the objects traveled slowing, and at
other times they reversed direction and moved across the radar screen at speeds calculated at
around 7,000 mph.
At 11:30 PM, two F-94 fighters arrived
over Washington D.C., the flight leader,
Capt John McHugo, was vectored toward
a set of radar pips but observed nothing,
despite straining his eyeballs. A different
story emerged concerning his wing-man
Lt William Patterson, who did see four
white glows and chased them the glows stopped reversed direction and surrounded his
fighter. Patterson in radio contact with National asked what he should do, and received back
stunned silence. The four objects broke away their contact and sped away, the F-94 had a top
speed of 640 mph, fully loaded.
 After midnight, the morning of the 27th, Major Dewey Fournet, the Project Blue Book liaison
at the Pentagon, and Lt Holcomb a USAF Radar Specialist, arrived at the Radar Center at
National. During the night, Lt Holcomb received a call from the Washington National Weather
Station whereas they told him that a slight temperature inversion was in effect, but Lt
Holcomb felt that the inversion was not nearly strong enough to explain the good and solid
returns on the Radar screens.
Major Fournet later reported that all those present in the center were convinced that the pips
on the screens were caused by solid metallic objects and there had been weather targets on
the scope also, but that this was a common occurrence and the controllers were paying no
attention them.
Two more F-94s were scrambled from Newcastle AFB that night, one pilot saw nothing
unusual, while the other pilot moved towards a white light which vanished when he was
closing in.a Capital Airlines flight leaving National spotted odd lights which remained
visible for approximately 12-minutes as on July 20th the sighting and pips on the radarscopes
ended at sunrise.
On July 29th, 1952 at 4:00 PM, in Rm 3E-869 the Pentagon Major General John Alexander
Samford, who at the time was Air Force Director of Intelligence, held a press conference to lay
out the official story of the United States Government and the unknown sighting and radar
images.
Officials present at the conference were
1) Major General Roger M Ramey, Director of Operations USAF
2) Colonel Donald L Bower, Technical Analysis Division, Air Technical Intelligence Ctr
3) Captain Roy L James, Electronic Branch, Air Technical Intelligence Center
4) Captain Edward J Ruppelt, Aerial Phenomenon Branch, Air Technical Intelligence Ctr
5) Mr Burgoyne L Griffing, Electronic Branch, Air Technical Intelligence Center
Major General Samford made the opening remarks: I think the plan is to have very brief
opening remarks and then ask for such questions as you may want to put to us for discussion and
answer. In so far as opening remarks is concerned, I just want to state our reason for concern
about this. The Air Force feels a very definite obligation to identify and analyze things that
happen in the air that may have in them menace to the United States and, because of that feeling
of obligation and our pursuit of that interest. Since 1947, we have an activity that was known one
time as Project Saucer and now, as part of another more stable and integrated organization, have
undertaken to analyze between a thousand and two thousand reports dealing with this area. And
out of that mass of reports that we've been able to take things which were originally unidentified
and dispose of them to our satisfaction in terms of bulk where we came to the conclusion that
these things were either friendly aircraft erroneously recognized or reported, hoaxes, quite a few
of those, electronic and meteorological phenomenon of one sort or another, light aberrations, and
many other things.
However, there have remained a percentage of this total, in the order of twenty percent of
the reports that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things. And because of
those things not being possible for us to move along and associated with the kind of things that
we've found can be associated with the bulk of these reports, we keep on being concerned about
them.
However, I'd like to say that the difficulty with disposing of these reports is largely based
upon the lack of any standard measurement or any ability to measure these things which have
been reported briefly by some, more elaborately by others, but with no measuring devices that
can convert the thing or the idea or the phenomenon into something that becomes manageable as
material for any kind of analysis that we know. We take some of these things and we try to get
the best professional advice, if we can, from them, about them, and we're in much the same
position of trying to bring to the good honest workmen of science a piece of material that has no
utility because it doesn't have the kind of measurements on it that he can use. And, as a
consequence, he has to reject these things and say, "Until you can bring me something more
substantial than that, I can't make any progress."
So our need, really, is to get the measurement value on these and, in the interim, lacking
sufficient measure of these thing to make them amenable to real analysis, we have to say that our
real interest in this project is not one of intellectual curiosity but is in trying to establish and
appraise the possibility of a menace to the United States. And we can say, as of now, that there
has been no pattern that reveals anything remotely like purpose or remotely like consistency that
we can in any way associate with any menace to the United States.
Now, we do want to continue in the interests of intellectual curiosity or the contributions to
be made to scientific measurements, but our main interest is going to have to continue in the
problem of seeing whether the things have possibility of hurt to the United States, and our present
dilemma of lack of measurement that can be turned to analysis and a complete lack of pattern in
any of these things which gives any clue to possible purpose or possible use, leaves us in some
dilemma as to what we can do about this remaining twenty per cent of unidentified phenomena.
The volume of reporting is related to many things. We know that reports of this kind go
back to Biblical times. There have been flurries of them in various centuries. 1846 seems to have
had a time when there was quite a flurry of reporting of this kind. Our current series of reports
goes back, generally, to 1946 in which things of this kind were reported in Sweden.
There are many reasons why this volume goes up and down, but we can't help but believe
that, currently, one of the reasons for volume is that man is doing a great deal more. There's more
man-made activity in the air now than there was, certainly, in Biblical times or in 1846. In
addition to that, our opportunities to observe have been enhanced greatly.
The difficult part of it, as far as advancing the program is concerned, is that our ability to
measure doesn't seem to have advanced in any way as well as our opportunity to observe and the
greater recurrence of more disturbing things of this sort that are actually in existence from man-
made air participation that we know about.
So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with the best of our ability,
giving to it the attention that we feel it very definitely warrants in terms of identifying adequately
the growing or possible or disappearing, if it turns out to be that, menace to the United States to
give it adequate attention but not frantic attention.
Now, I think with those opening remarks I could invite questions.

In a typical fashion, the Major General put it in a nutshell, that is, unless we can satisfactorily
measure the report, we (being the government) will continue to make any reporting agency,
private or public, to look like an idiot who just escaped from an asylumend of story.
When the question was raised on how much money the USAF spent each year on UFOs, the
answer was in reality - zip! The Major did say though that outside of normal taking of reports
it was nil. Whereas he stated that sixty-odd percent of the reports came from the civilian
population, another 8 percent from civil airline pilots and that if you really made a case out of it
maybe another 25% from military pilots.
One reply when asked if the fighters had had any airborne contact with their radar equipment,
Major General Ramey said it appeared that the two fighters who were deployed had locked on to
each other!
Another conversation bent by the responders moved the press corps to believe that most of the
observed radar images were caused by temperature inversion, whereas a stationary object on the
ground would be reflected into the radars sweep via the ice crystals in the atmosphere,
When asked if the objects could have been guided missiles, Major General Samford answered,
Well, if you could select out of this mass any particular one or two and start working on them
and say, "What is the possibility of them being these things?" Then you come to the point and say
this one is reported to have done things which require for it to do those things either one of two
conditions, absolute maximum power or no mass. If this is a thing in terms of a guided missile, it
does these things that have been measured and reported. It can do those things if there is
theoretically no limit to the power involved and there is theoretically no mass involved. That's one
of the conditions that would say, well, if someone solved one of those problems, this could then
be explained as one of those things. You find another one and it has it just develops into no
other purpose or no other pattern that could be associated with them, a missile. Those which
we might identify as being missiles will be tracked. They'll have a track to develop something
that people can put a measurement to. I don't know whether that answers the question. It satisfies
some of it, but maybe not all of it. Yes?
More than one-time the stupid press, in the eyes of the Major Generals and the technical giants
in the room, in trying to drag a definitive reply from the group where shuttled time and time again
into the temperature inversion with a few flocks of birds thrown in.
At one time the Press asked: You had two experts over there last Saturday night, Major
Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who described themselves as radar technicians and intelligence
officers. What was their opinion?
MAJOR GENERAL SAMFORD: May I try to make another answer and ask for support or
negation, on the quality of the radar operator. I personally don't feel that is necessarily associated
with quality of radar operators because radar operators of great quality are going to be confused
by the things which now appear and may appear on a radar screen. The ability to use the radar for
the thing it was designed for is, I believe, dependent upon the thing that they see doing a normal
act. If it does a normal act, then it becomes identified as the thing that they thought it was and
then it pulls itself along through this mass of indication and they say, "That one has normal
processes." I think that a description of a GCA landing has some bearing on that in which to get
associated with the GCA you have to make a certain number of queries and do a certain number
of things and then you become identified through the fact that you obey. Other things that are in
there don't obey. If you obey, then you have an identity and you can then be followed with
precision. So I wouldn't like to say that this is a function of inadequate radar operations. I think
it's a thing that can happen to any radar operator. If he sees something in there and says, 'That one
is neither behaving nor any other normal pattern." What is it? Curiosity stimulus, any other kind
of stimulus can result in overemphasis at any particular time on any radar scope. These recently
appear to have been much more solid returns than are ordinarily classifiable by the arguments that
I have just given. Would you address yourself to what I've just said?
His double-talk that day was a work of art one might say majestic.
In others he had no answer to the quality of the responses the expert radar technicians originally
responded too as far back as 1952 the United States government officials were majestically
toeing the line of denial when it came to UFOs one wonders if it was a upstairs to downstairs
decision, or simply a knee-jerk response to a difficult situation and the people, in particular
officers in charge of our nations security in order to not appear baffled to slam any report
coming across their desk.
When hammered again what the experts believed, the reply was reluctantly they saw good
returns. In other words, temperature inversions, flocks of birds were ruled out!
Samford at one time, the hair on the back of his neck sticking straight up said, I think that the
highest probability is that these are phenomena associated with the intellectual and scientific
interests that we are on the road to learn more about but that there is nothing in them that is
associated with material or vehicles or missiles that are directed against the United States.
So it all boiled down to the possibility that he might lose his job letting these unknown things
dart above and around the nations capital chasing them with out-classed jet airplanes, and radar
technology that couldnt provide a good answer to their makeup he was stumbling through the
dark and he knew it and he was trembling in his shorts just knowing that sometime in the near
future Major General John Alexander Samford1 was going by the way side.
Almost from the moment of General Samfords press conference were released, eyewitnesses,
UFO researches and USAF personnel came forward to criticize the temperature
inversion/mirage explanations. Captain Ruppelt noted that Major Fournet and Lt Holcomb, who
disagreed with the Air Forces explanation were absent from the press conference. Ruppelt
later reported later based on documents obtained from the National Weather Service that hardly
a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasnt a temperature inversion in
Washington D.C., yet the slow-moving, solid radar targets appeared only on a few nights? In
addition, reports filtering out of the United States Weather Bureau that their experts also
disagreed with the temperature inversion process.
Later, when he did get a chance, Ruppelt had a series of one-on-ones with the staff at the
Washington National Airport, not a single person agreed with the Air Force explanation. In 1966
when Michael Wertheimer, a researcher under the government-funded Condon Report
investigated the case, he still found 14-years later that radar witnesses still disputed the Air
Force explanation. Yet, if today you happened to get your hands on the Official Explanation it
reads as an official description of temperature inversion and its effects on radars of the period.
Ruppelt also reported that on the 27th of July the control tower at National had called the control
tower at Andrews AFB and notified them that their radar had an unknown object just south of the

1
In November 1956 Major General Samford was appointed director of the National Security Agency and
promoted to lieutenant general, he held this post until his retirement on November 23, 1960.
Andrews AFB control tower, directly over the range station. When Ruppelt interviewed the
tower personnel several days later, they insisted that they had been mistaken and had merely
seen a bright star.additional investigation by Ruppelt showed that there had been NO bright
stars over the station that night, and he found out that the staff had been persuaded a bit to say
they saw a bright star. A bit, means youll lose your job unless you fly right here cowboy.
And there was on Joseph Gigandet, an Army artillery officer who said that on the night of the
19th of July at 9:30 PM he saw a red cigar-shaped object which sailed slowing over his house in
Alexandria, Virginia just across the Potomac River from D.C.
He estimated its size to that of a
DC-7 airplane and at about 10,000
feet in altitude, he also claimed that
the object had a series of lights
very closely set together on its
sides. It eventually flew back over
his house a 2nd time, which led
Gigandet to assume that it was circling the area. When the object flew over the 2nd time it turned
a deeper red color and moved over the city of Washington; this occurred less than two-hours
before Edward Nugent 1st spotted the unknown object on his radar at Washington National.
Gigandet also claimed that his neighbor, an FBI agent also saw the object.
Dr James E McDonald, a physicist at the University of Arizona and a prominent UFO
investigator of the time interviewed four pilots, and five radar personnel. He also argued that the
Air Force explanation was pure bunk or physically impossible.
National Radar Center supervisor Harry Barnes told McDonald that the radar targets, were not
shapeless blobs such as one gets from ground returns under anomalous propagation, and that he
was certain the unknown radar blips were solid targets. Howard Cocklin agreed with his boss.
Needless to say, the extremely high-numbers of UFO reports in 1952 shook up the USAF and
the CIA both groups wearing their tightly wrapped hats of superior paranoia, felt deep down
inside their subjective reasoning that an enemy nation could deliberately flood the U.S. with
false UFO reports, thereby causing a mass panic allowing the enemy nation to launch a sneak
attack. On Sept 24th, 1952 the CIAs Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) issued a
memorandum to Walter B Smith, the CIAs director that said, the flying saucer situationhave
national security implicationsin the publics concern with the phenomenalies the potential
for touching-off mass hysteria and panic.
 One result of the memorandum was the creation in January 1953 of the Robertson Panel,
which was chaired by Physicist Howard Percy Robertson, and had on its panel prominent
scientists who spend a entire four-days examining the best UFO cases collected by Project
Blue Book.
Albeit their results were immediately classified top secret it declassification later revealed
that they agreed to a person, that UFOs were NOT a direct threat to National Security, but
could pose an indirect threat by overwhelming standard military communications due to the
public interest in the subject. Most UFO reports, they concluded, could be explained as
misidentification or mundane aerial objects, and the remaining minority could, in all likelihood,
be similarly explained with further study.
Their recommendations to the establishment was a massive (yet led quietly) public relations
campaign that would concentrate on debunking UFOs and reduce public interest in the
subject, and that civilian UFO groups should be monitored the Robertson Panel succeeded in
making UFO studies a disreputable field of Study.
Other than Paul Robertson, other panel members included:
1) Luis Alvarez, physicist, radar expert and later Nobel Prize recipient
2) Frederick C Durant, Missile Expert
3) Samuel A Goudsmit, Brookhaven National Laboratories, nuclear physicist
4) Thornton Page, astro-physicist, radar expert, deputy director Johns Hopkins ORO
5) Lloyd Berkner, physicist and
6) J Allen Hynek, astronomer were associate panel members
The panel first met on January 14th, 1953 under the direction of our Mr. Robertson, also a
physicist and an influential CIA employee and the Director of the Defense Department Weapons
Evaluation Group his instructions were very clear, clean this mess up and get this UFO thing
off our screens. He did!
In four-days the panel dismissed nearly all of the UFO cases it examined as not representing
anything unusual or threatening to National Security it its controversial estimate the Air Force
and Project Blue Book needed to spend less time analyzing and studying UFO reports and
concentrate on debunking them. The panel recommended that the USAF and Project Blue
Book strip the Unidentified Flying Object of the special status they have been give and the aura
of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.
Following the Panels suggestions to the letter, Project Blue Book would rarely publicize any
UFO case that it had NOT labeled as solved unsolved cases were rarely mentioned by the
USAF.
 From Wednesday the 14th through Saturday the 18th, in January 1953 the United States
government took it upon themselves to convince the world that UFOs were the stuff of wild
imaginations and the product of disoriented minds, and UFO societies and their members were
branded as misguided individuals out to destroy the social fabric of our civilization.
Four days in 1953 that changed forever the field of Unidentified Flying Objects, whereas
legitimate encounters were not reported by people in their daily functions on the planet, and drew
reports from the wild and imaginative obscure sections of our society that no self-respecting
media outlet would print or broadcast through the ether. The Robertson Panel eventually caused
the demise of Project Blue Book and any serious investigation of unknown objects or events.
Four days, were in actuality the panel only met for a total of 12-hours, and examined 12-cases
out of 2,331 USAF cases on record, in this based on less than 1% of the cases they published a
report that slammed the rest, without examination and put UFO investigators as the drunks lying
in alleys around the world.
Albeit USAF Captain Edward J Ruppelt later wrote that the Panel studied their best cases, Dr
J Allen Hynek a panel member later commented that the panel in fact seemed to have neither the
time nor the desire to study the more puzzling ones whereas he noted that the radar experts on
the panel, Luis Alvarez and Thornton Page, showed little interest in reports of radar UFO cases,
which they both dismissed as anxiety over fast radar tracks by the Air Defense Command.
Of all the Panel members, Capt Ruppelt would write in his private papers that Samuel
Abraham Goudsmit (nuclear physicist) was exceptionally hostile to the subject: Goudsmit was
probably the most violent anti-saucer man at the Panel meetings. Everything was a big joke to
him which brought down the wrath of the other Panel members on numerous occasions. It was
Goudsmit who later said with fury that reporters of UFOs were as dangerous to society as drug
addicts.
Luis Alvarez was another skeptic, but a bit more professional in his conduct Thornton Page at
times was very hostile, whereas at one meeting he said that the UFOs were nonsense which
brought a reprimand from Robertson. Albeit Capt Ruppelt felt that Page was more open-minded,
and although he obviously did not know squat about UFOs, he noticed that Page was more likely
to line up with Dr. Josef Allen Hynek against Alvarez and Goudsmit in their absolute refusal to
acknowledge the existence of UFOs.
In contrast Lloyd Viel Berkner, Frederick C Durant and Howard Percy Robertson seemed to
have a personal interest in the subject, this being noted in a CIA memo although Berkner was not
keen to the participate, he felt strongly that the saucer problem should be thoroughly
investigated from a scientific point of view. Another CIA memo made after the completion of
the Panels study indicated that Durant, despite the Panels negative conclusions, thought the
materials of flying saucers should continue to be maintained by a major division of OSI, such as
Physics and Electronics.
On the 1st day the panel met they viewed two amateur motion pictures of UFOs, the first one
being the Mariana UFO Incident, a film shot by Nick Mariana the general manager of the Great
Falls minor-league baseball team the Electrics (Farm-Team for Brooklyn Dodgers). At 11:23
AM on August 5th or 15th, 1950, he along with his 19-year-old secretary Virginia Raunig were
inspecting the empty Legion Stadium baseball field before a game. A bright flash caught Nicks
eye and according to his report, he witnessed to bright rotating silvery objects, flying over Great
Falls at a speed he estimated at roughly 200 to 400 mph. He believe there were about 50 feet
wide and 150 feet apart, he ran to his car and retrieved his 16mm movie camera and filmed the
UFOs for 16-seconds in color, with no sound. The day he showed the footage to the local Great
Falls Tribune, described his sighting and the film in an article which was picked up by other
media outlets for several weeks he showed his film to the local community groups.
The 2nd film shown was the 1952 Utah UFO Film, taken by Navy Chief Petty Officer Delbert C
Newhouse, a graduate from a Naval photographic school with 16-years-service as a Warrant
Officer, who had more that 1000 hours on aerial photography missions, and 2200 hours as chief
photographer, and had no implication in UFO research before this experience. His report noted
that evaluation of distances was impossible from the film because no reference point could be
filmed together with the objects.
On July 2nd, 1952 at 11:00 AM, a bright and clear morning, Newhouse and his family, (wife and
two children ages 12 & 14) were driving along the open highway about 6-miles from Tremonton,
in Northern Utah whereas his wife noticed a group of objects in the sky that she could not
identify and asked her husband to stop the car to look at them. In his report it states that there
was a group of ten or twelve objects that bore no relation to anything he had ever seen before
that were milling around in a rough formation and proceeding in a westerly direction. He
retrieved his professional Bell and Howell 16mm camera from the trunk of the car, and loading it
he exposed approximately 35-feet of film. As mentioned there was no reference point in the sky
making it impossible for him to make estimate of speed, size, altitude or distance.
Two Navy photograph and film analysts, (Lt R.S. Neasham and Harry Woo) spent over 1,000
man-hours pouring over the two films , utilizing they 1000s of hours of experience and drew
conclusions that the objects were of no known aircraft known to them, including weather
phenomena or other disturbances. After they were finished Capt Ruppelt began his summary of
Air Force efforts to interpret the films on the 2nd day he finished his presentation, and when he
finished Hynek then discussed the Battelle Study, which albeit wasnt complete yet still had
information regarding what had been gathered previously, the study was commissioned in
December -1951 and later gave the following under the title, Project Blue Book Special Report
No 14, which was a massive statistical analysis of Blue Book cases to date over 3200 cases by
the time the report was completed in 1954.
Today this single report represents the largest ever study undertaken on the UFO phenomena,
whereas the group employed four scientific analysts who sought to divide the cases into,
1) Knowns
2) Unknowns
3) Insufficient Information
They also broke down the categories of knowns and unknowns into four other categories
ranging from excellent to- poor, whereas excellent might involve experience witnesses such as
airline pilots, trained military personnel, multiple witnesses, corroborating evidence (radar
contact/photographs).
In order for a case to be classified as known, only two of the four analysts had to
independently agree on a solution. And if a case was to be classified as an unknown all four
analysts had to agree thereby the criterion for an unknown was a stiff one.
In addition, sightings were broken down into six (6) different characteristics
1) Color
2) Number
3) Duration of observation
4) Brightness
5) Shape
6) Speed
And then these characteristics were compared between knowns and unknowns to see if there
was a statistically significant difference. Results:
1) 69% were judged as known or identified
a. 38% were considered conclusively identified
b. 31% were considered doubtfully
c. 9% fell into the insufficient information
2) 22% were deemed unknown down 6% of an earlier 28% of the USAF studies
3) 86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations
4) 1.5% of all cases were judged crackpot cases
5) 8% in the miscellaneous category included possible hoaxes
6) 35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknown whereas only 28% of the poorest
cases, this finding was the exact opposite predicted by skeptics, who usually argued
unknowns of poorer quality involved un-reliable witnesses that could have been solved if
only better information was available.
7) In all six studied sighting characteristics, the unknowns were different from the knowns
at a highly statistically significant level:
 8) In five of the six measures the odds of knows differing from unknowns by chance was
only 1%
9) When all six characteristics were considered together, the possibility of a match between
knowns and unknowns were less than 1 in a billion.

I can image the discussion between Dr. Josef Allen Hynek and Samuel Abraham Goudsmit,
whereas Hynek stating that all aspects must be considered, while Goudsmit yelling its all BS and
lets get the hell out here I have another Nuclear Warhead to develop.
On the 3rd day, Air Force Major Dewey J Fournet spoke to the panel, he was a supporter of the
extraterrestrial hypothesis, as the best explanation for a great number of UFO reports, which I
imagine did not sit to well with some of the Robertson Panel but needless to say what little
minutes there are available it appears the rest of the 3rd day was spent discussing how they should
compose their final report. Remember, of a possible 32-hours of time, they only spent 12-hours
in actual Panel meetings. Hell, most panels of any government agency spend days, if not weeks
writing a document on the correct way for a GI to scrub out a latrine.
On the 4th and final day they rewrote the preliminary report that had been composed on the 3rd
day, and finalized their final report.
The report that effectively destroyed the reporting of UFO and scientific study of the
phenomena hit the top desks of the leaders of the free world, with Top Secret plastered on its
cover with strict instructions on its handling. Two days before Dwight David Eisenhower our
34th President of the United States of American took office, the science of Unidentified Flying
Objects was shelved in the backrooms of our government.
In summary the Panels official report said that 90% of UFO sighting could be readily
identified by such mundane things as bright stars, clouds, aircraft, weather balloons and kites.
Albeit NONE of the panel were formally trained in motion picture or photographic analyses, they
all rejected (after screening the 1950 Montana UFO file, and the 1952 Utah UFO film a few
times) the films, whereas they stated flat out that the bright objects in the Montana film were the
reflections of two jet fighters, and in the Utah film the objects were seagulls these individuals
had proclaimed themselves as the experts of the age, and were telling the real experts in their
employ as downright stupid and incompetent, along with competent witnesses and their families
all being either stupid or on drugs.
The Panels report suggested that the Air Force should begin debunking all reports to
reduce the public gullibility and to demystify UFO reports, partly through a massive public
relations campaign, using psychiatrists, astronomers and assorted celebrities to significantly
reduce public interest in UFOs they recommended the Walt Disney Corporation for this project,
their primary reason for all this debunking in their myopic minds was that the Soviets might
try to mask an actual invasion of the USA by causing a wave of false UFO reports swamping
the Pentagon and other military agencies with un-necessary communications, thereby blinding the
US Government to the impending Communist invasion.
Their formal written recommendation said, That the national security agencies take
immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been
given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.
They also formally singled out two UFO groups for close monitoring, the Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization (APRO) and Civilian Saucer Investigations (CSI), the Panels
recommendations also prompted the implementation of a series of special military regulations,
one such regulation issued in the Joint-Army-Navy-Air Force Publication 147 (JANAP 146)
of December 1953 made the reprinting of any UFO sighting to the public a crime under the
Espionage Act, with fines up to $10,000 and imprisonment ranging from one to ten-years.
The act was considered binding to all who knew of the acts existence including
commercial airline pilots. A 1954 revision of Air Force Regulation 200-2 (AFR 200-2) made
all sighting reports submitted to the USAF classified material and prohibited the release of any
information about UFO sighting unless the sightings was able to be positively identified. In
February 1958 another revision of AFR 200-2 was released allowing the military to give the FBI
the names of people who were illegally or deceptively bringing the subject of UFOs to public
attention. As mentioned previously, the Panels subsequent decisions drastically changed the
scope of Project Blue Book, eventually causing it to be ineffective and its eventual death.
In 1956 retired Marine Major Donald Edward Keyhoe founded the National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) a UFO investigations organization by 1969
Keyhoe focused on the involvement of the CIA as the primary source of the UFO cover up,
NICAPs board under the leadership of Colonel Joseph J Bryan III forced Edward Keyho to retire
as NICAP chief- Under Bryans leadership the NICAP disbanded its local and state affiliated
groups and in 1973 closed its doors. Colonel Bryan III was in truth a former covert CIA agent
having served the agency as the head of its Psychological Warfare Division, this being reveled in
1977.
It is now apparent that the Panels report had an enormous impact throughout the U.S.
Government, whereas the CIA abandoned a major high-level UFO investigation, one that had
been worked in conjunction with the National Security Council, UFO research projects within
various groups in the Pentagon were quashed, Project Blue Book was downgraded in status and
stripped of most responsibility fro investigating serious well-attested UFO cases, which were
shuttled to a newly-formed division of the Air Defense Command labeled Top Secret, the new
division had a mandate to reduce the percentage of unknowns.
Thirteen years after the Panel met, its far-reaching conclusions manifested in a show in 1966 on
CBS called UFOs: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy? narrated by Walter Cronkite, whereas its
information was classified by extraterrestrial personnel as inaccurate and full of misleading
information. Michael D. Swords, a biochemist pawing through the archives in the Smithsonian
discovered a letter written by Dr Thornton Page that he helped organize the CBS TV show
strictly around the Robertson Panel conclusions. The letter shows that the Robertson Panel was
still putting a negative spin on UFO news.
In addition to NICAP being infiltrated by the CIA, evidence surfaced via FBI documents that
the noted engineer Walter J H "Papa" Riedel was pressured to resign from CSI, and in a short
period of time the group disbanded Robertson wrote to Dr H. Marshall Chadwell saying, that
ought to fix the Forteans, which was a reference to the followers of American Writed Charles
Fort whose books argued in favor of the reality of extraterrestrial life on earth. A later internal
CIA memo from 1976, tells how the agency is still having to keep in touch with reporting
channels in UFOLOGY (in other words the spying on UFO groups.) Really, the CIA which is
NOT supposed to spy on U.S. Citizens within the boundaries of America, had a plant in one
organization and in their own words acknowledged the fact spying on other groups, interesting if
not illegal.
Some individuals in academia and research have suggested that the Robertson Panels true goal
was to justify a CIA domestic propaganda-and-surveillance campaign on the citizens of the
United States of America, rather than to investigate UFOs such as Howard Blum said, that is
difficult to accept any argument that the Robertson Panel was ever intended as a serious
scientific analysis. He bases his statement on the immediate rejection of the US Navys detailed
examination of the UFO films which concluded it was impossible to identify the objects seen in
the films yet the Panel offered off-the-wall scenarios and marched on.
Similarly, Michael D Swords has argued that the Panel seems to have been designed as an
elaborate theater exercise instead of a serious attempt to get to the bottom of the UFO issue,
whereas albeit the Panel put on a show of evaluating some UFO evidence, its scientific analysis
was cursory and that its conclusions based on a strong cold war politically platform were pre-
ordained.
Another aspect ignored was highly-classified information from the military, whereas they only
examined information in the public domain. Later, David R Saunders, a psychologist from the
University of Colorado drew the same conclusions whereas he added that Robertson having
worked as a high-level scientific-intelligence officer during WWII, would have been familiar
with the workings of establishing a fact-based report and not one constructed by a 5th grader in
Middle America.
In more than just some circles of our society it is maintained that the Robertson Panel not only
slammed the doors on legitimate investigation, it locked them.

A little History on our exploration into UFOs

Shortly thereafter Kenneth Arnold saw the flying discs over Mount Rainer in Washington State
on June 24th, 1947, the US Government commissioned a study into the extraterrestrial impact on
our society.
Project Sign was instigated following a recommendation of Lt General Natthan F Twining, then
the big boss of Air Material Command whereas shortly before he did, Brig Gen George F
Schulgen, of the Army Air Forces air intelligence division, had completed a preliminary review
of the many UFO reports then called flying discs after Arnolds description. Schulgens study
completed in July-1947, concluded that flying discs were real craft Schulgen then asked
Twining and his command, which included the intelligence and engineering divisions at Wright-
Patterson AFB (Wright Field in those days) to carry out a more exhaustive review of the available
data.
In a formal letter to Schulgen dated September 23rd, 1947, Twining responded:

SUBJECT: AMC Opinion Concerning "Flying Discs" 23 September 1947

TO: Commanding General

Army Air Forces
Washington 25, D. C.
ATTENTION: Brig. General George Schulgen
AC/AS-2

1. As requested by AC/AS-2 there is presented below the considered opinion of this command
concerning the so-called "Flying Discs." This opinion is based on interrogation report data
furnished by AC/AS-2 and preliminary studied by personnel of T-2 and Aircraft Laboratory,
Engineer- ng Division T-3. This opinion was arrived at in a conference between personnel from
the Air Institute of Technology, Intelligence T-2, Office, Chief of Engineering Division, and the
Aircraft, Power Plant and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3.

2. It is the opinion that:

a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.

 b. There are objects probably approximately the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as
to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft.

c. There is the possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena,
such as meteors.

d. 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 air- craft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled
either manually, automatically or remotely.

e. The apparent common description of the objects is as follows:

(1) Metallic or light reflecting surface.

(2) Absence of trail, except in a few instances when the object apparently was operating
under high performance conditions.

(3) Circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top.

(4) Several reports of well kept formation flights varying from three to nine objects.

(5) Normally no associated sound, except in three instances a substantial rumbling roar
was noted.

(6) Level flight speeds normally about 300 knots are estimated.

f. It is possible within the present U.S. knowledge--provided extensive detailed

development is undertaken--to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the
object in sub-paragraph (e) above which would be capable of an approximate range of 700 miles
at subsonic speeds.

g. Any devlopments in this country along the lines indicated would be extremely expensive,
time consuming and at the considerable expense of current projects and therefore, if directed,
should be set up independently of existing projects.

h. Due consideration must be given the following: -

(1) The possibility that these objects are of domestic origin - the product of some high
security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this Command.

(2) The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would
undeniably prove the existence of these objects.

(3) The possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear,
which is outside of our domestic knowledge.

3. It is recommended that:

a. Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security

classification and Code Name for a detailed study of this matter to include the preparation of
complete sets of all available and pertinent data which will then be made available to the Army,
Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, NACA, and
the RAND and NEPA projects for comments and recommendations, with a preliminary report to
be forwarded within 15 days of receipt of the data and a detailed report thereafter every 30 days
as the investigation develops. A complete interchange of data should be effected.

4. Awaiting a specific directive AMC will continue the investigation within its current
resources in order to more closely define the nature of the phenomenon. Detailed Essential
Elements of Information will be formulated immediately for transmittal thru channels.

N. F. TWINING
Lieutenant General, U. S. A.
Commanding.

What I find interesting is the fact that before the political crowd got their hooks into the UFO
situation, the military who had some level headed leaders left over from WWII seemed to have a
partial handle on the phenomena, at least to the point of conducting legitimate investigations.
Following the suggestions of Twining a study was commissioned that was to be conducted by
the Army Air Force this suggestion was approved on Dec 30 th, 1947 by Major General
Laurence C Craigie, the Director of Research and Development under the Deputy Chief of Staff
for Material at Headquarters USAF. According to Craigies directive, it would be the role of
Project Sign to, collect, collate, evaluate and distribute to interested government agencies and
contractors all information concerning sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere which can be
constructed to be a concern of the National Security.
Jan 22nd, 1948 saw Project Sign to formally begin its task as a branch of Air Technical
Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base under the direction of Captain
Robert R Sneider.
USAF Captain Edward J Ruppelt later wrote that Project Sign, was given a 2A priority, 1A
being the highest priority an Air Force project could have. Albeit the project was designated
restricted its existence quickly became known and the public called it Project Saucer,
whereas still later Wendy Conners wrote that Project Saucer was the projects original informal
name and had actually got its start in 1946 in establishing this be true, if so, it meant that the
Army Air Force had already begun investigations of UFOs well before Arnold observed a group
in June-1947.
When an object was observed, the investigations by the Air Intelligence usually took place
from a location at the nearest Air Force base to the reported incident, albeit some cases were
examined directly by Air Material Command, who had hired Dr. Josef Allen Hynek as a
consultant to assist in weeding out UFO reports which could be misidentified meteors, stars, and
such. Hynek was mentioned by name in Project Sign reports as early as May-1948, and was
formally involved as a consultant a few months later. In 1985, Dr Hynek admitted that I was
quite negative in most of my evaluations. I stretched far to give something a natural explanation,
sometimes when it may not have really had it. In other words, he was known for pissing on the
parade of extraterrestrials at least 5-6 years before he was named to be on the Robertson Panel.
As we see early on in the modern UFO era, it was taken for granted by the USAF that flying
saucers existed, whereas Capt Ruppelt wrote:
ATIC's intelligence specialists were confident that within a few months or a year they would
have the answer to the question, "What are UFO's?" The question, "Do UFO's exist?" was never
mentioned. The only problem that confronted the people at ATIC was, "Were the UFO's of
Russian or interplanetary origin?" Either case called for a serious, secrecy-shrouded project. Only
top people at ATIC were assigned to Project Sign.
Dr Michael D Swords wrote, The core personnel for the project were probably the most
talented group to work on UFOs, until the UASF ended its investigation in 1969. Aiding chief
officer Capt Robert R Sneider, were two outstanding aeronautical engineers Alfred C. Loedding2
and Col. Albert B. Deyarmond3completing the group was nuclear and missile expert Lawrence
Truettnerthe quality of these people indicates the seriousness with which the Army Air Force
considered the flying disk problem.
The projects first major undertaking was the study of a widely publicized UFO encounter
known as the Mantell Incident. The Mantell Incident was the 1st time that the pubic and
government stopped treating UFO reports with tongue-in-cheek attention and shifted to a
level whereas the announcement began to gain credibility and not just some silly news.
On Jan 7th, 1948, 25-year-old Captain Thomas F Mantell a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot
was killed in pursuit of a UFO.
Mantell was an experienced pilot who had over 2,167 hours of flight time he participated in
the Battle of Normandy (WWII) and was honored for his service. On the 7th, he was stationed at
Godman Army Airfield at Fort Knox, Kentucky when it received a report from the Kentucky
State Patrol of an unusual aerial object near Maysville, Kentucky. The report told of a westbound
2
Due to his expertise in low-aspect aircraft designsimilar to the "flying disk" or "flying saucer" shape of
many reported UFOsLoedding became the focus of early informal Air Force UFO reports, serving as
liaison between The Pentagon and Air Force officers Howard M. McCoy and William R. Clingerman.
3
Albert Deyarmond was an "old hand" with the UFO's, in on the first of Project Sign. From the old memos
signed by him it could be determined that he was once a firm believer, along with Alfred Loedding, John
"Red" Honaker and the rest of the veterans or Project Sign. But by the time Ruppelt got into the picture
Deyarmond, at least on the surface, was lined up with the scoffers. Ruppelt had said that, "once, when I
began to knock the UFO's, he raised the devil and chewed me out for not keeping an 'open mind'." Ruppelt
had called him a "scoffer" because he was a "disciple" of Col. Watson's. Deyarmond later became chief of
structures at Ryan Aircraft Company.
circular object, some 250 to 300 feet in diameter, the report coming from the two offices in
Owensboro, Kentucky and Irvington, Kentucky.
At approximately 1:45 PM Sgt Qunton Blackwell observed an object from his position in the
control tower at Fort Knox two other people in the tower reported a white object in the
distance. Base commander Col Guy Hix reported an object he said was very white, and about
one-fourth the size of a full moon. Observers using binoculars said it appeared to have a red
border at the bottom.it remained stationary, seemingly, for one and a half hours. Observers at
Clinton County Army Air Field in Ohio described the object as having the appearance of a
flaming red cone trailing a gaseous green mist and observed the object for at least 35-minutes.
Another observer at Lockbourne Army Sir Field in Ohio noted, Just before leaving it came to
very near the ground, staying down for about ten-seconds, than climbed at a very fast rate back to
its original altitude, 10,000 feet, leveling off and disappearing into the overcast heading 120
degrees. Its speed was greater than 500 mph in level flight.
Four P-51 Mustangs (top average speed 487
mph) of C Flight, 165th Fighter Squadron
Kentucky Air National Guard were already in the
air, one piloted by Captain Thomas F Mantell,
were told to approach the object while Sgt
Blackwell in the tower, maintained constant radio
communications with the four P-51s.
One Mustang low on fuel returned to the air
field, Capt Ruppelt noted that there was some disagreement amongst the air traffic controllers as
to what they heard Mantell say at one time, whereas some said Mantell said in describing the
object, which looks metallic and of tremendous size, others disputed whether or not Mantell
actually said this.
The two remaining pilots followed Mantell in steep pursuit of the object, they later reported
they saw an object, but described it as so small and indistinct they could not identify it they did
report they told Mantell to level his altitude to get a better look at the object, he ignored their
suggestion.
All three pilots being on Oxygen, Lt Albert Clemmons said his Oxygen supply was low and
discontinued the pursuit as did Lt Hammond at 22,500 feet and they both headed for the air field.
Mantell continued to climb and according to the Army Air Force once he passed 25,000 feet he
blacked out for lack of Oxygen and his plane spiraled into the ground at 3:18 PM, on a farm south
of Franklin, Kentucky on the Tennessee-Kentucky state line.
 The incident was picked up by the national news services and splashed across the country
followed as usual by sensational rumors that usually tag along with such news, one such rumor
being his aircraft had been shot down by the UFO, and that the Army Air Force was not telling
the citizens of the USA the truth in admitting that it was true. Another rumor circulating was that
Mantells body was riddle with strange holes and like most rumors nothing ever surfaced to
support them. The one thing that did happen was that the Mantell case would help define the
UFO phenomenon being experienced on USA turf, in some way pushing the US Government Air
Force specialists to believe finally that the UFOs were a real physical phenomenon.
The Project Sign group after investigating the Mantell Incident never came to a conclusion,
while others Army Air Force personnel suggested that the four P-51s were chasing Venus
which was soon changed when it was determined the day was too bright and Venus would not
have been visible.
Dr J.Allen Hynek, as Project Signs consultant suggested that Mantell and his group had
misidentified a US Navy Skyhook weather balloon, other than it would have been sighted across
three states and just a plain stupid suggestion others stepped to the plate and gently took the
good Doctor and threw him of the cliff of stupidity in telling him no weather balloons had been in
the air that day, which goes to show you that all Doctors do not necessarily have much more
upstairs than their patients. Albeit further research showed that some top secret Skyhook
balloons which were made of reflective aluminum and about 100 feet in diameter had been
launched on the 7th of January (that day) in Clinton County, Ohio some 150 miles northeast of
Fort Know - Philip Julian Klass, journalist and well known UFO skeptic pointed to the fact that
the winds were correct and that a weather balloon could have been the object everyone witnessed
and maintained that if a weather balloon had been involved in the incident that the Air Force
would have been loath to admit the presence of the balloon for more than reasons of security,
since it would also admit that a DoD program killed a Kentucky National Guard pilot. In 1983
Klass published in the Saucer Smear:
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF PHILIP J. KLASS
To ufologists who publicly criticize me, ... or who even think unkind thoughts about me in
private, I do hereby leave and bequeath:
THE UFO CURSE:
No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today.
You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will
never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know
 today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today.
And you will remember this curse.
The Mantell Incident sits today on the books of the Government as one of those unknowns.
But, according the Capt Ruppelt (Project Blue Book-Director) Project Sign investigators were
less skeptical about the Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter over Montgomery, Alabama on July 24th
1948 before this happened four night previous a curious report came in across the wires from
the Netherlands, whereas several persons witnessed seeing a UFO through high broken clouds
over The Hague objects that were rocket shaped, with two rows of windows along the side. It
was a poor report being very sketchy and incomplete and was headed towards the round-file
except that four nights later in the early morning hours of April 24th, 1948 Pilot Clarence
Chiles and his co-pilot John Whitted were flying
an Eastern Airlines Douglas DC-3 from Mobile,
Alabama to Montgomery at about 5,000 feet at the
average cruise speed of about 150 mph.
Approximately at 2:45 AM, Chiles spotted a hazy
red cloud, somewhat similar to aircraft exhaust it
was slightly above them, and to the front of their
plane by about a half-a-mile.
Chiles was able to make out an aircraft and turning to his co-pilot said, Look, here comes a
new Army jet job. As soon as his words rolled off his lips they both realized that the Army jet
job was unlike any plane they had ever seen and that it was moving towards them at a very high-
rate of speed.
Within a matter of seconds the UFO was now almost on top of them, Chiles banked the DC-3
into a tight left bank, just as the UFO flashed by about 700 feet to the right, the DC-3 went flying
through the turbulent air. Co-pilot Whittled looked back just as the UFO pulled up in a steep
climb, both pilots had gotten a good look at the UFO and were able to give a good description to
the Air Force intelligence people.
In the short time span (15-seconds or so) both men described the object as a cigar-or-torpedo
shaped, approximately 100 feet long and about 3 times the diameter of a B-29 bomber, its
fuselage was entirely smooth, with no wings, projections or fins. A bright red-orange exhaust
was coming from the rear of the object, and was more orange at the outer edges of the exhaust
and grew redder as it climbed into the night sky. They also mentioned that the exhaust extended
about 30 to 50 feet behind the object, and that they heard NO sound as the object sped past the
DC-3.
 In addition they remarked that the object had two rows of rectangular windows, a few weeks
after the sighting, Pilot Chiles wrote down, there were two rows of windows, which indicated an
upper and lower deck, from inside these windows a very bright light was glowing. Underneath
the ship there was a blue glow of light. Both men commented at the initial interview that the
light from the object was so bright that they were blinded by its intensity for a few seconds.
There were a couple of differences in the two pilots testimony, whereas Chiles thought he
observed a conical shape on the objects nose that was somewhat similar to a radar pole, and he
described a glassy window at the objects front that was somewhat similar to a cockpit window.
His co-pilot thought the object was slightly further away than Chiles described, and he did not see
the cockpit-like windshield or the radar pole at the objects nose. Chiles recalled the exhaust as
being less intense and was not flaring out as much as Whitted observed.
Being early in the morning with most of the passengers asleep there was one Clarence L
McKelvie that later offered corroborative eyewitness testimony saying that he did see an
extraordinary bright light from his window seat describing it as being like lighting. He also told
investigators that the light seemed to have moved parallel to the plane, but at a higher altitude.
Within seconds of the encounter, being a pilot who almost had his plane smacked into, raised
Eastern Airlines flight controllers on the radio and asked if any known experimental aircraft were
being flown in the region there were none.
The Project Sign group was impressed by the close UFO sighting of two highly credible pilot-
witnesses, in addition to speculating that the windows in the object, suggested the objects were
possibly occupied.
The flight landed at Birmingham a little before 4:00 AM, the pilots went to a hotel only to learn
that their sighting had already generated some interest within hours they were interviewed at
radio station WCON and by newspaper reported William Key in short order the UFO report had
earned National Press attention.
Many people suggested that the object had been a meteor both pilots with many flying hours
between them flatly rejected this concept, both had seen many meteors in their well established
careers. In response to this suggestion they adamantly said the flying fuselage theyd observed
was a man-made thing. It was within days the Project Sign investigators interviewed
eyewitnesses Chiles, Whitted and McKelvie.
As it turned out there were several eyewitnesses, who seemed to have seen the same object
Chiles and Whitted observed, one being Walter Massey, a ground-crew chief at Robins Air Force
Base in Georgia, about 150 miles from Montgomery, his claim was similar in that hed seen an
object about an hour before Chiles and Whitted had almost smacked into one. Like the pilots,
he said it was a cylindrical object that seemed to be two or three times larger that a B-29 with a
long stream of fire coming out of the tail endI noticed a faint glow on the belly of the wingless
object. He like the pilot swore it was not a meteor.
A few days later another report from the
night of July 24th came in, whereas a
pilot flying near the Virginia/North
Carolina state-line reported that he had
seen a bright shooting star in the
direction of Montgomery, Alabama, at
about the exact time the Eastern Airlines
DC-3 was buzzed.
The Pentagon fell back on the old saw
that the pilots had seen a weather balloon, but this was quickly withdrawn when the old codgers
found their secretaries shutting off the well, if you know what I mean. Within days, an Army Air
Force spokesman admitted the sighting was credible, further stating, this country has no plane
resembling a double-decked jet-propelled, wingless transport shooting a 40-foot flame out of its
back end.
Naturally Dr J Allen Hynek argued that if the pilots had reported accurately what theyd seen,
that there was no astronomical explanation even remotely plausible however he offered, with
a sly grin, that the pilots had seen a extraordinary meteor, in other words one that defined the
law of gravity and repelled away from earth as it rose into the atmosphere.
According to Capt Ruppelt (Project Blue Book), the old timers at ATIC, this report shook
them worse than the Mantell Incident. This was the first time two reliable sources had been
really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it.
It had been 3 months and 17 days previous that Mantell had died in pursuit.
Project Signs personnel knew that rockets could fly, but to date there was no known
technology that could account for a rocket being as maneuverable as the pilots described they
pored through obscure technical journals, including those of German engineer Ludwig Prandt,
and eventually concluded that a flying fuselage was maybe feasible if the object had a power
source based on nuclear energy.
Based on this case, Project Sign personnel began to favor the extraterrestrial hypothesis albeit
there was no direct physical evidence, they believed that there was no Earthly technology that
could account for some UFO sightings.
 The crew of Project Sign is supposed to have wrote what is consider a legendary document
called the Estimate of the Situation which is said by some to have been completed in Sept 1948
or early Oct-1948 approved by Colonels William Clingman and Howar McCoy, who then
submitted the report to the office of General Charles Cabell chief of Army Air Force
Intelligence, and forwarded to the highest authorities in the Army Air Force, it was rejected,
primarily because of lack of proof, which was later disputed, when in 1980 researcher Kevin D
Randle said he had spoken to a un-named colonel who said that General Hoyt Sanford
Vandenberg, who at the time was Chief-of-Staff U.S. Air Force read the working draft of the
Estimate of the Situation that he ordered the removal of paragraphs giving physical evidence
of metal recovered in New Mexico from the report. After doing so, General Vandenberg rejected
the report based on the fact it had NO physical evidence.
The Estimate of the Situation is said to have been destroyed and that no copies are known to
survive subsequently the Project Sign group were ordered to drag their minds away from the
extraterrestrial hypothesis, this primarily due to the hard line codgers in the Pentagon protecting
the albeit well-earned positions, refusing to accept anything else but something build here on
earth and getting ready to attack the United States of America. The crew at Project Sign refused,
but not in so many words, but you and I know that within any operation run by the government
that there is some curtain climber looking for a way to advance, and he or she must have
forwarded a message up-front that spoke to the crews attitudes consequently Project Sign was
dismantled and replace with Project Grudge, which conducted little to NO research and spent
99.9% of their time debunking any UFO reports.
By the way, Dr. Josef Allen Hyneks extraordinary meteor explanation became and is the
official Army Air Force explanation for the Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter history is
complicated!
I have mentioned more than a time or two Project Blue Book one that most of you have either
read about or if old enough heard referenced a time or two on your living room television. Project
Blue Book was the longest legitimate investigation of UFO run by the U.S. Government and got
its beginning when the debunkers at Project Grudge got a little out-of-hand in their debunking
methods and lack of research into events surrounding UFO incidents.
In April 1951 Bob Ginna of Life magazine visited Wright-Patterson Air Force Base whereas
in investigating Project Grudge he had uncovered what could be described as the projects
manifest shortcomings, in response to the Bob Ginna investigation some of the anti-UFO
personnel at Wright-Patterson were reassigned. By mid-1951, Project Grudge consisted only
of Lt Gerry Cummings whereas according to Capt Ruppelt, Cummings took his job seriously,
but found little help or success in his efforts to reverse several years of apathy or dubious
research.
On September 10th, 1951, there was a radar/visual UFO encounter near Fort Monmouth in New
Jersey and at 3:04 PM on the 12th a teletype machine at Wright-Patterson AFB began to chatter
out a message 36 inches of paper rolled out of the machine before the operator ripped off the
copy, stamped in Operational Immediate, and gave it to a special messenger to deliver to the
ATIC. Lt Cummings got the message, a report that was from the Army Signal Corps radar center
at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey and it was red-hot.
It seemed that two day previous, Sept 10th, when a student operator was giving a demonstration
to a group of visiting brass at the radar school, he had demonstrated the set under manual
operation for a bit, picking up local traffic they he told the brass the he would demonstrate the
automatic tracking of the unit, he zeroed on a blip about 12,000 yards, 6.81 miles southeast of the
station, flying low towards the north the automatic setting permitted the radar to track an object
without a human interface. He attempted to engage the auto-tracking at least three times, failing
he turned red-faced to the big shots and said, Its going too fast for the set, this means its going
faster than a jet! I imagine that a lot of brass raised their eyebrows looking at each other
wondering what went faster than a jet?
The operator and the brass saw that the blip was in range for a full three minutes and yet the
operator trying again and again could not get the auto-tracking to engage his discomfort with
this manifested itself in his obvious red-face.
Other radar technicians on-site double check the
weather conditions there was not any indication
of an inversion layer.
Twenty-five minutes later the pilot Lt William
F. Rogers of a T-33 jet trainer, carrying an Air
Force major passenger, Major Edward Ballard
were flying at 20,000 feet over Point Pleasant,
New Jersey spotted a dull silver, disk-like object far below him. He described it as 30 to 50 foot
in diameter and as descending toward Sandy Hook from an altitude from a mile or so. He banked
the T-33 over and started down after the object. As he descended down, he reported, the object
stopped its descent, hovered, then sped south, making a 120-degree turn, and vanished out to sea.
Immediately following the original incident at Fort Monmouth, the group got a frantic call from
headquarters to pick up a target high and to the north which was the first faster-than-a-jet
object had vanished they did so in quick step time and soon got a fix on it and reported that it
was traveling slowly at 93,000 feet or about 17.5 plus miles above earth. Going outside they
visually made contact with it and observed a small silver speck. The same bozos who paraded
their stuff in the Pentagon asked the question, what flies 18-miles above Earth?
The next morning two radar sets picked up another target that could not be tracked
automatically it would climb, level off, climb again, and go into a dive and when it climbed it
went almost straight up. The two-day session ended that afternoon when the radar tracked
another unidentified slow-moving object and tracked if for several minutes.
Some big-wigs in the Government order an investigation. Lt Gerry Cummings and Lt Colonel
N.R. Rosegarten spent most of the day on Sept 13th, 1951 interviewing witnesses and gathering
available documents at Fort Monmouth they were then called on the carpet to present their
evidence directly to General Charles P. Cabell head of Army Air Force intelligence for the
Pentagon. When the pair arrived they found a meeting already in progress and a lot of grim and
tense faces sitting around the table in particular General Cabell. As they joined in it became
apparent that the General was upset that his outlined program of debunking had gone sideways
simply because of the lackadaisical attitude of the Project Grudge members and was ranting
and raving about the incompetence of the players and their failure to address the UFO matter as
he had demanded get it off the screens and minds of the American public.
Lts Cummings and Rosegarten presented their conclusions of the Fort Monmouth incident,
which spun around one item, they agreed with the Monmouth personnel who had judged that the
fast moving objects sighted were intelligently controlled.
Lt Gerry Cummings asked permission to speak freely which the General granted, records
available demonstrate that he in a phrase, cut loose! He told the meeting participants that in
every UFO report submitted to the Grudge group was taken as a huge joke, and that the
members of Grudge group had become all but moribund.
The General who had been sitting forward in his chair listening to Cummings going on and on,
jumped from his chair, his face a deep crimson and lambasted the group in a word he was
upset! The Fort Monmouth only served to highlight what critics saw as Air Material
Commands sloppy debunking efforts, through his furor the General managed to spit out, I want
an open mind; in fact, I order an open mind! Anyone who doesnt keep an open mind can get
out now!...Why do I have to stir up the action? Anyone can see that we do not have a satisfactory
answer to the saucer question. Ive been lied to, and lied to, and lied to. I want it to stop. I want
the answer to the saucers and I want a good answer.
Lt Col N.R. Rosegarten asked Ruppelt to take over as the Grudge projects leader in late 1951,
mostly because Ruppelt had a reputation as a good organizer. While the General wanted Grudge
reactivated, he did NOT want the general public to know that he and some others in the military
took the issue of UFOs seriously, and order the new project to keep a low profile. His goal being
two-fold:
1) If the saucer phenomenon was groundless, then the military could NOT be accused of
sensationalism.
2) If the phenomenon proved to have some basis in fact, then the military could produce some
serious studies on the subject.
In any instance over-all the General did NOT want the military to be perceived as belittling
civilians who had reported UFOs. Project Grudge became Project Blue Book, officially in early
1952 under the orders of General Charles P Cabell, with Captain Edward J. Ruppelt at the helm.

According to available records the complete dissatisfaction of high-ranking individuals within

the Army Air Force gave birth to Project Blue Book and it was with the addition of one more
individual to the associated organization that pushed the idea forward, a certain General William
M Garland who believed the UFO question deserved serious scrutiny because he had witnessed a
UFO. Later, Sept-1952, General Garland was named chief of the Air Technical Intelligence
Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson AFB.
The name Project Blue Book was selected referring to the blue booklets used for testing at
some colleges and universities whereas some felt that the UFO question was an important as a
college final exam.
It was Ruppelt who officially coined the term Unidentified Flying Object mainly to replace
the term Flying Saucer, whereas he felt the new term was more neutral and accurate term. He
was also responsible for stream-lining the process on how UFOs were reported to and by
military officials, in part his hope being to alleviate the stigma and ridicule associated with
UFO witnesses along with this he developed a standard questionnaire for UFO witnesses,
hoping to accumulate uncovered data which could be compared and subject to systematic
analysis. It was Ruppelt who commissioned the Project Blue Book Special Report No 14, done
by the Battelle Memorial Institute, which is referred to in the beginning of this article.
Understanding the factionalism that had harmed the progress of Project Sign, he did his best
to avoid the kinds of open-ended speculation that had led to Project Signs personnel being split
among advocates and critics of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, it is said that Ruppelt not only
took his job seriously but expected his staff to do so as well. If anyone under him either became
too skeptical or too convinced of one particular theory, they soon found themselves off the
project. Ruppelt fired three personnel very early in the project for being too pro or too con
on one hypothesis or another.
He constantly sought the advice of many scientists and experts, issued regular press releases
and monthly classified reports to military intelligence. He created the function of having at
each USAF AFB a Blue Book officer to collect UFO reports and forward them on to him
during his short term at the helm, he and his team were authorized to interview any and all
military personnel who witnessed UFOs, and were NOT required to toe the line with respect to
the chain of command. This early unprecedented authority underscored the seriousness of Project
Blue Books investigation too bad it came apart early in the investigation.
Under his leadership Blue Book investigated a number of well-known UFO cases, one being
the Lubbock Lights, which over the years was and is regarded as one of the 1st great UFO cases in
the United States.
The Lubbock Lights were 1st brought to the attention of the US citizens after a sighting of the
lights occurred during a Saturday evening on Aug 25th, 1951 around 9:10 PM, whereas three
professors from Texas Technological College
(now Texas Tech University) Dr. Oberg, Prof.
Ducker, and Dr. Robinson, shown on the left
here having a discussion Dr. E. L. George,
were sitting in the backyard of Dr W.I.
Robinsons when they witnessed the lights fly
overhead. They saw a total of 20-30 lights, as
bright as stars but larger in size watching
them as they moved across the clear and dark night sky in a matter of seconds. The three men
immediately ruled out meteors as a possible sighting, and during their discussion a 2 nd similar
group of lights flew overhead. Being educated men, hopefully after-all they were professors, in
those days this meant something with the 2nd group they were able to estimate that the lights
moved through 30 degrees of arc in a second.
Checking with the Air Force it was determine that there were no planes in the immediate area at
the questioned time.
This apparently was just the beginning one of the Professors in the yard that evening,
Professor Ducker witnessed 12-flights of luminous objects between August and November of
1951 and hundreds of non-scientific persons in the vicinity around Lubbock have seen as many
as three flights of the mysterious crescents in one-night.
 On the night of August 30th, (Thursday) a series of photographs were taken by 18-year-old Carl
Hart Jr using a Kodak 35mm camera the f-stop at 3.5 and its speed at 1/10 th of a second. He
managed to get five exposures the exposures showed 18 luminous objects, which were more
intense than the planet Venus, and arranged in one or a pair of crescents.

In several photographs off to one side of the main flight, a large luminosity is visible sorta
like a mother craft hovering near its aerial brood.
After the original publication of the Aug 25th flyover in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal three
women in Lubbock reported that they had observed peculiar flashing lights in the sky on
Saturday evening, the 25th. Dr Carl Hemminger, a German language professor at Texas Tech also
reported seeing the objects as did the head of the colleges journalism department.
On Sept 5th, 1951 the same three professors plus two other professors from Texas Tech were
sitting in the front-yard of Dr Robinsons when the lights flew overhead, Dr Grayson Mead said,
that they appeared to be about the size of a dinner plate and they were greenish-blue, slightly
fluorescent in color they were smaller than the full moon at the horizon. There were about a
dozen to fifteen of these lightsthey were absolutely circularit gave all of usan extremely
eerie feeling. He also remarked that they could NOT have been birds, along with admitting that
the lights went over so fastthat we wished we could have had a better look. Based on their
calculations with reference to a thin cloud layer at about 2,000 feet the group of learned men
said the lights were moving along at approximately plus 600 mph.
In late September Ruppelt went to Lubbock and interview the professors and Gary Hart along
with others who claimed to witness the lights. His conclusion at the time was that the professors
had seen a type of bird called a plover, whereas the city of Lubbock had installed new vapor
street lights, and at the time the plovers flying over in their annual migration, were reflecting the
light from the new vapor lights.
 One local yokel, T.E. Snider a farmer who on Aug 31 st had observed some birds flying over a
drive-in theater, supported Ruppelts intial conclusion saying he saw the lights from the drive-in
reflected off the birds. Another local Texas inhabitant also backed the bird theory, a Mr Joe
Bryant who had been sitting outside his home with his wife on Aug 25 th and that him and wife
saw the lights, but that they also witnessed a 3rd set fly over and then began circling his home, and
that it was then that his wife noticed that they objects were plovers and could hear them as well.
Dr J Allen Hynek, again a consultant to this time Project Blue Book contacted one of the Texas
Tech professors in 1959 and learned the professor, after careful research, had conclude that he
had actually been observing the plovers.
But wait, William Hams, the chief photographer for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal took
several nighttime photos of birds flying over Lubbocks vapor street lights and found he could
NOT duplicate Harts photos the images were too dim to be developed.
Dr J.C. Clark the head of Texas Techs biology department, ruled of the possibility that birds
could have caused the sightings and a game warden Ruppelt interviewed felt that the sightings
could NOT have been caused by plovers, due to their slow flying speed (avg 50 mph) and their
tendency to fly in groups much smaller than the number of objects reported by eyewitnesses,
albeit the warden did admit that an unusually large number of plovers had been seen in the fall of
1951.
Dr Mead, who had seen the lights, strongly disputed the plover explanation: These objects
were too large for any birdI have had enough experience hunting and I dont know of any bird
that could go as fast we would not be able to hearto have gone as fast as this, to be birds, they
would have to have been exceedingly low to disappear quite so quickly. Ruppelt, in 1956, wrote
he finally rejected the plover hypothesis, but refrained from explaining what the lights in fact
were but he did say, They werent birds, they werent refracted light, but they werent
spaceships. The lightshave been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily
explainable natural phenomenon It is very unfortunate that I cant divulge . The way the
answer was found.I promised the identity of the scientist who finally hit upon the answer
complete anonymity.
The official explanation was:
The observations have been too numerous and too similar to be doubted. In addition
the Air Force, after the closest examination, has found nothing fraudulent about Hart's
pictures. The lights are much too bright to be reflections, and therefore bodies
containing sources of light. Since Professors Ducker, Oberg, and Robinson could not
measure the size and distance of the formations, they could form no precise estimate of
their speed. However they calculated that if the lights were flying at an altitude of 5,000
feet they must then have been traveling about 1,800 mph. The professors, along with
other scientists, agree that in order to explain the silence of the objects, it must be
assumed that they were at 50,000 feet in the air; in which case they were going not 1,800
but 18,000 mph.
Captain Edward J. Ruppelt left Project Blue Book in February 1953 on a temporary assignment,
returning a few months later he found his staff reduced from more than ten, to two. Frustrated, he
suggested that an Air Defense Command unit, the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron be
charged with UFO investigation. The upstairs boys paid no attention to his suggestion.
A couple of months later Ruppelt requested reassignment and got it leaving in August 1953, his
temporary replacement was a non-commissioned officer and after, those who succeeded him were
mostly openly hostile towards UFOs, or were hampered by a lack of funding and any official
support.
UFO investigations regard Mr Edward J Ruppelt brief tenure at Project Blue Book as the high-
water mark of any government investigations in the UFO arena, whereas he treated all UFO
investigation impartially and un-biased in either direction, after he departed albeit it Project Blue
Book had a few bright spots it mostly it dipped into what is known in UFO circles as the Dark
Ages and as shown those four-days in January in 1953 forever darken the UFO phenomenon and
made the phenomenon a disreputable field of Study.