Documents / Report

Unidentified Flying Objects: Project "Grudge" (Technical Report No. 102-AC 49/15-100)

US Air Force, Air Materiel Command · 1949-08 · 413 pages · text by OCR

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.

for instance by making an artificial satellite - but this presumably is not what has been observed.

SQUARE, PART II, SECTION B.

Several unorthodox means of supporting or propelling a solid object have been considered - all are impracticable. This finding lords evidence to the tentative proposed assumption of Part II, that the objects are supported and propelled by some normal means, or also that they are not solids. In discussion of the type of Part II, Section 10, in principle, of course, be complete.

PART II, SECTION C. POSSIBLE CAUSES FOR TYE REPORTS.

CLASSIFICATION I. NATURAL TERrestrial PESTICIDES.

1) The observations may be due to some effect such as ball lightning. The writer has no suggestions on this essentially meteorological subject. 2) The objects may be some kind of animal.

Even in the celebrated case of incident 172 where the light was obsaed by a PSL for half an hour and which was reported by the pilot to be intelligently directed, we can make this remark. For consider that an intelligence capable of making so remarkable device would not be likely to play around in so idle a manner as described by the pilot.

In this connection it would be well to examine if some of the lights observed at right were not fire-flies.

3) The observed objects may be hallucinatory or psychological in origin.

3) The observed objects may be hallucinatory or psychotic. It is of prime importance to study this possibility because we can learn from it something of the character of the population; its response under attack; and also something about the reliability of visual observation.

One would like to assume that the positions held by many of the ro-

Cases discussed

About this file

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.