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 Aaident g71 -- Las Vegas, Nerada -- 8 or 9 Octotar 1547. [Superiores interiz report of 2/1/40] In everything except the course shown, the description given here answers to that of a fireball. The course indicated in this incident, however, appears almost fatal to such a hypothesis. Do fireball on record, to this investigator's knowledge, has been known to turn back or itself. Laytime fireballs have been observed, however, that were invisible save for a marked white cloudlike trail. Most fireballs pursue essentially straight courses, and, in fact, apparent deviations are often caused by illusions of perspective and of a spherical sky. Real deviations are caused by effects of the meteor's encounter with the atmosphere. To execute a curved trajectory would require highly extraordinary circumstances indeed, and a meteorio explanation for this incident must be regarded as most improbable. It is more likely that some sort of aircraft was under observation.
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.