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.
nolent 140 - prin, Helt, valo - 20 July 1948 The planet Venus seems to be the culprit in this incident. Venus attained its greatest brilliance in the morning: sky on July 21, and at approximately 3400 in the morning on July 23, it was a very brilliant object slightly to the earth of east. The magnitude was -4.2, which makes it about 150 times brighter than a first magnitude star. Intermittent cloud coverage could easily explain the appearance and disappearance of the object, and as to the stated size, this can be discussed as a purely objective estimate. The evidence appears convincing to this investigator that the object observed was Venus.
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.