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.
ported observers guaranteed their observations. Unfortunately there were many reports of curious phenomena by pilots during the war - the incident of the fireball flight comes to mind. Further, mariners have been reporting sea-merports for hundreds of years yet no one has yet produced a photograph. It would be interesting to tabulate the responses to see how reliable were the reports on the Japanese balloons during the war. There to had a phenomenon proven to be real. It is interesting that the reports swiftly reach a maximum frequency during the end of June 1947 and their slowly lower off. We can assume that this is actually an indication of how many objections were actually about, or, quite differently, we can take this frequency curve as indicating something about mass psychology. This point can be tested. Suppose the population is momentarily ex- oited; how does the frequency of reports vary with time? A study of oranic letters received after the recent publicity given to the satellite program should give the required frequency distribution. It is probably necessary but certainly not sufficient that the unidentified object curve and the ornate-letter curve should be similar in order for the flying disks to be classed as illuminations. A large scale experiment was made at the time of Oraon Wallace's "Martian" broadcast. Some records of this most perilist in newspaper files. CLARIFICATION II. MAX-NADE TERRESTIAL PTXBORETA. 1) The objects may be Russian aircraft. If this were so, then the cor- siderations of Sections a and B indicate that we would have plenty to worry about. It is the author's opinion that only an accidental discovery
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.