UFOs - Leslie Kean [53]
In fact, our government has a policy—a stated position of inaction crafted over fifty years ago—underlying its current approach to UFOs. Certain pivotal events set us on the unfortunate course we find ourselves on today. It all began in the late 1940s, when officials were faced with a sudden influx of UFO sightings in the skies over America, many of which were reported by highly credible observers such as military and airline pilots. Popular interest in UFOs (called “flying saucers” at the time, because of their frequently described flattened-disc shape) was growing as a result of national media coverage and the fact that nobody knew what they were or how to handle them. Initially, the authorities attempted to determine if the objects were either secret foreign aircraft, such as superior technology from the Soviet Union, or possibly some kind of newly discovered atmospheric or meteorological phenomena.
By 1947, things were becoming uncomfortably clear behind the scenes. Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, a major command of the U.S. Air Force, sent a secret memo concerning “Flying Discs” to the commanding general of the Army Air Forces at the Pentagon. The considered opinion, based on data furnished by numerous Air Force branches, he stated, was that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious … The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.” Twining described the objects as metallic or light-reflecting, circular or elliptical with a flat bottom and domed top, sometimes with “well kept formation lights varying from three to nine objects,” and normally silent. He proposed that the Army Air Forces set up a detailed study of UFOs, assigning a security classification and code name to it.1
As a result, such a project was set up within the Air Materiel Command, and given the code name “Sign.”2 The new agency began its operations in early 1948 at Wright Field (now called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) with the mandate to collect information, evaluate it, and assess whether the phenomenon was a threat to national security. As Project Sign became more convinced that the objects were not Russian, divisions grew between those who thought they were “interplanetary”—the term used at the time, when much less was known about our solar system—and those who were determined to find a more conventional explanation. Later that year, some Project Sign staff wrote a top-secret report, an “Estimate of the Situation,” providing data on convincing cases and concluding that, based on the evidence, UFOs were most likely extraterrestrial. The document eventually landed on the desk of General Hoyt Vanderbeng, Air Force Chief of Staff, who rejected it as unacceptable because he wanted proof, and responded by returning it to its authors at Project Sign. From then on, the proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis lost ground, and because of the clear message from Vandenberg and others, the safer position that UFOs must have conventional explanations was adopted by the majority of the project’s investigators. It appears they were under pressure to shift their focus. The “Estimate of the Situation” was reportedly destroyed, and no copies have ever been found despite repeated