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.
Inoldest 94 - 42° 0.3° J, 114° 21.2° a - 30 December 1947 This Liquid and Inclined 20, VC, and V7, which describe the same object, clearly refer to a thoroughly authenticated fireball. These sightings can be dismissed with finality by the following: observation from Popular Astronomy, October, 1963: ## Fireball of 1947 - Lee. 30 Jenny S. Haber On this date at 7:30 p.m., 757 a brilliant fireball appeared travellio; westward over southern vregon. ... Iref. J. in J. frueft gathered numerous reports from observors in Oregon, California, and Nevada, and from these made an appropriate solution for the path. We sent both his solution and all the 67 reports to the Flower Observatory where another solution was independently made. Our agreed closely in all requests with that of frueft except for the heights. The meteor was most generally reported to be bluish green in color. It appeared to explode twice, lightning up the countryside to close observers. The sound phenomena were limited to 0 out of the 47 observers. From the height at which the meteor exploded it is doubtful whether any fragments reached the ground. It is clear from the general agreement with this of ordinance given in incidents 194-97 inclusive that this firehall was the object being described.
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.