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Project Sign was an official U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects undertaken by the United States Air Force in late 1947.

Sign was instigated following a recommendation from Lt. General Nathan F. Twining, then the head of Air Materiel Command. Just before this, Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, of the Army Air Forces air intelligence division, had completed a preliminary review of the many UFO reports--then called “flying discs” by military authorities--which had received considerable publicity following the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. Schulgen's study, completed in late July 1947, concluded that the flying discs were real craft. Schulgen then asked Twining and his command, which included the intelligence and engineering divisions located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (then Wright Field), to carry out a more exhaustive review of the data.

In his formal letter to Schulgen on September 23, 1947, 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". However, UFO historian Wendy Connors established through an interview with a surviving Sign secretary, that "Project Saucer" was actually 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. (See, e.g., WWII foo fighter UFOs)

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.

According to later Project Blue Book director Edward J. Ruppelt, a more influential case to Project Sign thinking was the Chiles-Whitted sighting over Montgomery, Alabama on July 24 1948. Two airline pilots reported a rocket-shaped UFO glowing blue and seeming to emit reddish flames, that approached them on a near-collision course. Pilots Chiles and Whitted also reported the object seemed to have a double row of ports or windows emitting an intense bluish-white light. A very similar object with a double row of windows was also seen over The Hague, Netherlands a few days earlier and independently reported to Sign. Some Sign personnel were deeply impressed by the close sighting from two high quality witnesses. The reports of "windows" were also suggestive that the objects were possibly occupied.

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, and cases like Chiles-Whitted came along, a rift developed among Sign’s staff between those who thought that UFO’s might be extraterrestrial (see the extraterrestrial hypothesis or ETH), 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.

Ruppelt was to report in his book that The Estimate was sent up through the Pentagon chain of command and eventually rejected by Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg, who cited a lack of physical evidence to support the extraterrestrial conclusion.

With Vandenberg's rejection of The Estimate, Ruppelt said it was clear to Sign personnel who favored the ETH that there was no support at the top; the faction which rejected the ETH eventually came to dominate Project Sign. By late 1948, Project Sign was discontinued in name and replaced by the much more negatively orientated Project Grudge.

Ruppelt referred to the following era of Project Grudge as the "Dark Ages" of official Air Force UFO investigations. Still, by late 1949, some 20 percent of UFO sightings remained classified as “unknown” by Grudge. By late 1951, according to Ruppelt, some highly influential Pentagon generals had become so disenchanted with Grudge's debunking, that Grudge itself was dismantled and replaced by Project Blue Book, with Ruppelt in charge.

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
• Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Doubleday & Co., 1956 online