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.
Inolident 150 - Fiora, Montana - 17 May 1945 If the report is to be taken as true value, then no astronomical explanation of this inference is possible. However, in seeking even a remote logical explanation for the incident, the present investigator is impressed with the fact that on this very night, July 17, Venus was at its greatest brilliancy, with a magnitude of -4.2, or about 100 times brighter than a first magnitude star. It would have appeared that night as an intensely bright light in the northeast.
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.