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.
Inadant w24 -- welser. Lenso -- 12 Jh. 1917 There is nothing in the description of this leident that is fatal to the hypotheses that the objects observed were parts of a "double fireball," but any such identification must remain uncertain. The most convincing element favoring the unberlio hypothesis is the persistent train. Fireballs occasionally leave trains that persist for over an hour. As far as trajectory is concerned, this is in agreement with that to be expected from a meteor on its way out from the sun (it having gone toward the sun several weeks previously and now being on its return journey toward outer space). Such a fireball would be travelling; relatively slowly, and could appear to "shoot out from the sun" and to travel in a southeasterly direction. The absence of bright flare and of noise is not unusual, since reported daylight meteors are frequently not luminous (but do leave a tyrall), and often no noise is heard. or is the fact that there were two such objects fatal to the hypothesis. The object could easily have been single and hard traced in two, either in its journey around the sun or upon entering the earth's atmosphere. There have been several cases of comets that were single on their trip toward the sun and double on the way out. Sirao comets and meteors are closely related as far as structure is concerned, the double feature is entirely possible. UNCLASSIFIED
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.