Documents / Report
This August 1949 technical report from the US Air Force Air Materiel Command presents Project Grudge's investigation of unidentified flying objects through January 1949. Drawing on consultants including Dr. J. A. Hynek, Rand Corporation, the Air Weather Service and Dr. P. M. Fitts, it explains most of 244 incidents as balloons, aircraft, astronomical phenomena, hoaxes or psychological errors. It concludes the objects pose no direct threat to national security and recommends reducing the investigation in scope.
## UNCLASSIFIED Inclined p66 -- burton Field, Newfoundland -- 23 July 1947 If proper allowance is made for the reporting of untrained observers, it is possible that the objects observed in this incident were a since meteor shower. The "radish flashes of light" and "abrupt darts" would tend to this interpretation. The hypothesis hinges, however, on the statement that "a smaller of intermittent flashes were observed for three minutes." If this means independent flashes, it leads support to the meteorite interpretation. If it means that the same object flashed intermittently for three minutes, that theory is ruled out. It sounds more probable in view of the statement about "abrupt darts of light" that the former meaning is correct. There is somewhat more evidence in this 1906 than in 1907 (which is similar, and occurred just three days earlier) favoring meteors, but probably the events of these two 1906s are related, and it is very unlikely that meteors could explain both of them. According to the report of the U. S. Weather Bureau on ball lightning, it would appear that this phenomenon sometimes takes the form of luminous darts and can be red. Perhaps this could offer an alternate explanation for the incident.
Report, from the classic collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 413 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.