Project Sign

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Project Sign, officially known as Special Project HT-304 by the United States Air Force, began investigations into reported sightings of “flying discs” after a wave of sightings known as the Saucer Flap Of 1947. The project was established on December 30th 1947.

Following recommendations from a Lieutenant-General Nathan F. Twinning who was the head of Air Materiel Command (AMC) at the time, the AMCs Technical Intelligence Division who were based at Write Field in Dayton Ohio began work on January 22nd 1948.

1 Memos
2 Project
3 Aftermath
4 See also
5 External links

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Memos

The Real SCHULGEN MEMO

The Faked Memo This memo surfaced June, 1987 and is known to be a fake.

The Twinning Letter This letter was sent out to Air Material Commands (AMC) in response to General Schulgen's Collection Memorandum. Gen. Twining requested that investigations be conducted that might shed some light on the recent rash of Flying Saucer sightings.

Some people have viewed this letter to be proof that the Air Force had known that extraterrestrial (ET) Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) existed. The closest that this letter comes to considering alien origin is the opinion that [there is] "The possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge." However, some have stated that people have tended to ignore, or dismiss as an "obvious lie" dictated by the Super Secret Roswell Conspiracy, the instruction that his commanders should consider: "The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these subjects."

Lt Col Walker This memo was sent by Lt Walker out to his field commands in response to the Letter from Gen Twining. This order for a discreet investigation eventually reached the Berlin office of the Army's S-2 (Intelligence) branch. The Berlin Office was able to track down and report on the war-time and post war activities of the Horton brothers, who worked with Messerschmidt during WWII to develop the Flying Wing.

Flyingwing As a result of Gen. Twining's Letter, Lt Col Walker, at the Air Material Command, asked his operatives in the field to discretely track down the Horton brothers. He also wanted them to ascertain whether their radical "Flying Wing" designs--developed during WWII--might be responsible for the rash of Flying Saucer sightings in 1947.

Intell Report A report to the director of intelligence USAF to the joint intelligence committee on unidentified aerial objects. The Air Force Intelligence Report is the result of a thorough internal study of the UFO excitement, and the activities of Project "SIGN" and Project "GRUDGE".

Summery Report This is the summary report from the AFI Report above.

The consensus among the researchers of Project Sign seemed to have been that flying disks (UFOs) were real. They thought that they were some types of advanced Soviet aircraft that were possibly German prototypes that had been reportedly captured at the end of World War II.

A secret document that was apparently entitled ‘Estimate of the situation’, had apparently reached U.S.A.F. Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenburg in early October 1948, and this reportedly began to sway the opinions of the researchers. In this document it was suggested that extraterrestrial hypothesis was the best solution to the mystery behind the flying disks. Vandenburg had apparently rejected this conclusion, the said document was declassified a few months later and all known copies of it were said to have been burned. The destruction of the papers became public knowledge in the mid-1950’s and there was a disgusted outcry by people believing that the government was orchestrating a cover-up as to the nature of UFO’s. Subsequent denials by the Air Force that the Estimate document had ever existed only further exacerbated the situation. Following Vandenburg's rejection of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, supporters of this view at Sign were gradually reassigned to other duties until skeptics became the majority. In its final report, Project Sign expressed itself guardedly on the extraterrestrial issue:

"It is hard to believe that any technically accomplished race would come here, flaunt its ability in mysterious ways and then simply go away ... Only one motive can be assigned; that the spacemen are "feeling out" our defences without wanting to be belligerent. If so, they must have been satisfied long ago that we can't catch them.... Although visits from outer space are believed to be possible, they are believed to be very improbable. In particular, the actions attributed to the "flying objects" reported during 1947 and 1948 seem inconsistent with the requirements for space travel".

On Feb. 11, 1949, Project Sign was disbanded and gave way to its successor, Project Grudge.

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Project

Although the project was classified as restricted the general existence was known by the general public, they often called it “Project Saucer”. However, UFO historian Wendy Connors was said to have established, through an interview with a surviving Sign secretary, that "Project Saucer" was the project's original informal name and had started a year earlier in late 1946. If this was the case, then the Army Air Force had already begun investigation of UFOs well before the Kenneth Arnold sighting that launched the first flood of UFO reports of June-July 1947 in the United States.

Studies were apparently undertaken by Air Intelligence at the Air Force base nearest to any particular UFO report, though some cases were studied directly by Air Materiel Command. Allen Hynek, then teaching astronomy at Ohio State University. He was hired as a consultant to help identify the UFO reports that could be to help weed out UFO that could be misidentified meteors, stars and the like.

The first noted major undertaking for the project researchers was the study of a widely publicized UFO encounter known as the Mantell Incident. On 07 January 1948, Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell who was in pursuit of an unidentified object that he described as: "a metallic object ... it is of tremendous size." died when his airplane crashed near Franklin, Kentucky. Project Sign investigators had apparently determined that Mantell had been chasing the planet Venus. This conclusion was met by widespread disbelief.

According to later Project Blue Book director Edward J. Ruppelt, he stated that the project researchers were less skeptical about the Chiles-Whitted sighting that happened over Montgomery, Alabama on 24 July 1948. In this case, two airline pilots reported that a rocket-shaped UFO, glowing blue and seeming to emit reddish flames, approached them on a near-collision course. Pilot’s Chiles and Whitted reported the object appeared to show a double row of ports or windows emitting an intense bluish-white light. (A similar object with a double row of windows was also seen over The Hague, Netherlands a few days earlier and was independently reported to Project Sign.) It has been said that some of the Sign researchers had been deeply impressed by the close UFO sighting from two highly credible pilot-witnesses. The reports of "windows" had suggested to them that the objects could have possibly been occupied.

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Aftermath

By late 1948, Project Sign was discontinued in name and replaced by a much more negatively oriented Project Grudge.

Ruppelt had often referred to Project Grudge as the "Dark Ages" of official Air Force UFO investigations. But by the late 1940’s many UFO sightings had remained classified as "unknown" by Project Grudge. By late 1951, according to Ruppelt, some highly influential Pentagon generals had become so disenchanted with Grudge's debunking that Grudge itself was said to have been dismantled and replaced by Project Blue Book, with Ruppelt being in charge.

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