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Revision as of 00:25, 18 August 2005 by 207.69.138.199 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Project Sign was a study of unidentified flying objects undertaken by the United States Air Force in 1947.
Sign was instigated following a recommendation from Lt. General Nathan F. Twining, then the head of Air Materiel Command. On September 23, 1947 Twining had been asked to undertake a brief, preliminary review of the many UFO reports--then called “flying discs” by military authorities--which had received considerable publicity following the Kenneth Arnold sighting.
In his formal letter to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen of the Army Air Forces, Twining concluded that “The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious ... it is recommended that ... Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and code name for detailed study of this matter.” (Clark, 489) Though conducted by the Army Air Force, the study’s information and conclusions would be made available to all the armed services, and to scientific agencies with formal government ties.
Twining’s suggestion was approved on December 30, and on January 22, 1948, Project Sign formally began its work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, under the direction of Captain Robert R. Sneider. Though it was classified “restricted”, the study’s existence was known to the general public, and was often called ‘’’Project Saucer’’’.
Studies were undertaken by Air Intelligence personnel at the Air Force base nearest to any particular UFO report, though some cases were studied directly by Air Materiel Command personnel. In order to sort out cases where witnesses had simply misidentified stars, clouds, planets, or meteors, astronomer J. Allen Hynek of Ohio State University was hired as a consultant, initally to help weed out cases where a witness had misidentified a mundane aerial phenemenon.
Sign’s first major undertaking was the study of the so-called Mantell Incident, a widely publicized case where Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell died when his airplane crashed near Franklin, Kentucky following the pursuit of an aerial artifact Mantell reportedly described as “a metallic object ... it is if tremendous size.” (Clark, 352) Sign personnel determined that Mantell had been chasing the planet Venus--a conclusion which met with widespread incredulity.
An early hypothesis favored by many Sign personnel was that UFO’s were actually new weapons or aircraft developed by the Soviet Union. But when Sign’s investigations found no evidence to support this idea, a rift developed among Sign’s staff between those who thought that UFO’s might be extraterrestrial (see the extraterrestrial hypothesis), and those who rejected this notion in favor of more prosaic ideas. The Estimate of the Situation was reportedly drafted by some Sign personnel--including director Sneider--explaining their reasons for accepting the idea that UFO’s had decidedly non-earthly origins.
The faction which rejected the ETH eventually came to dominate Project Sign, but by 1949, some 20 percent of UFO sightings were classified as “unknown”.
Historian David Michael Jacobs argues that, when taken overall, Project Sign’s personnel did an admirable job; however, “Its main problem was that the staff was too inexperienced to discriminate between which sightings to investigate thoroughly. Because of unfamiliarity with the phenomenon, the staff spent inordinate amounts of time on sightings that were obviously aircraft, meteors or hoaxes.” (Jacobs, 47)
Sources
- Jerome Clark; The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial; Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1578590299
- David Michael Jacobs; The UFO Controversy In America; Indiana University Press, 1975; ISBN 0253190061