So, here now is the evidence, as it appears in the Project Blue Book files. See what you think.
In the Beginning… A Brief History of Project Blue Book
Like all things in the UFO field, it is not easy to put together a simple history of Project Blue Book because it was never a single project and it was almost always wrapped in secrecy. There were forerunners to it that were also classified, and good evidence that it coexisted with other projects that were also tasked to investigate UFOs. There is even a suggestion that an official UFO investigation survived the declared end of Project Blue Book in December 1969.
The first document to relate to the beginnings of Project Blue Book was written and signed on September 23, 1947. Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, then the commander of the Air Materiel Command, suggested to the commanding general of the Army Air Forces, General Carl Spaatz, through Brigadier General George Schgulen, that "The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious." He recommended that "Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of the matter."
On December 30, 1947 (the Air Force having come into official existence on December 17, or just two weeks earlier) Major General L.C. Craigie approved the recommendation. Project Sign was created as a 2A classified project, the highest being 1A. Although the general public was aware that a project had been created, they knew it as "Project Saucer," rather than Project Sign.
Although the project did not exist in the summer of 1947, the files did include cases from that period. The first recorded sighting is from early June and from Hamburg, New York. The case is missing, but according to the Index, was a misidentification of an aircraft. The next case was from Seattle, Washington, and is also missing. It is listed as "Insufficient Data." In fact, the first several cases are listed as missing.
According to the documentation, Project Sign began its work on January 22, 1948 and the first major investigation was into the crash of a Kentucky National Guard aircraft flown by Thomas Mantell. He had been chasing an unknown object near the Godman Army Air Field when the accident took place.
By the summer of 1948, dozens of seemingly inexplicable cases had been reported to the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. It wasn't until a DC-3 was "buzzed" by a flying saucer in July 1948 that the situation began to crystallize. On the twenty-fourth, a rocket-shaped object with two rows of square windows and flames shooting from the rear flashed past the aircraft piloted by Captain Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted. At least one of the passengers also saw the object. An hour earlier, a ground maintenance crewman at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia claimed to have seen the same object.
Some of the officers at Sign, convinced they now had proof that the flying saucers were extraterrestrial, now put together what they called an estimate of the situation. They concluded that flying saucers came from other planets, wrote a report containing the best evidence they had, and shipped it up to General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then Air Force chief of staff. According to Captain Edward Ruppelt, who would eventually head up Project Blue Book, Vandenberg wasn't impressed with the evidence. He rejected the report, and ordered it declassified and destroyed.
Dr. Michael Swords, who had an opportunity to review drafts of Ruppelt's original work, made some interesting observations about the estimate of the situation. In an article published in the International UFO Reporter, Swords outlined these deletions. To illustrate what had been left out of the book as published, he used italics to show the deleted material. That text as published was printed in a normal typeface.
"In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem you write a report that is known as an 'Estimate of the Situation.' A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an Estimate of the Situation. The situation was 'UFOs; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!
"It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on legal-sized paper. Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.
"It contained the Air Force's analysis of many of the incidents I have told you about plus many similar ones. All of them had come from scientists, pilots, and other equally credible observers, and each one was an unknown.
"It concluded that 'UFOs were interplanetary. As documented proof, many unexplained sightings were quoted. The original UFO sighting by Kenneth Arnold; the series of sightings from the secret Air Force Test Center, MUROC AFB; the F-51 pilot's observation of a formation of spheres near Lake Mead; The report of an F-80 pilot who saw two round objects diving toward the ground near the Grand Canyon; and a report by the pilot of an Idaho National Guard T-6 trainer, who saw a violently maneuvering black object.
"As further documentation, the report quoted an interview with an Air Force major from Rapid City AFB (now Ellsworth AFB) who saw twelve 'UFOs flying a tight diamond formation. When he first saw them they were high but soon they went into a fantastically high-speed dive, leveled out, made a perfect formation turn, and climbed at a 30 to 40 degree angle, accelerating all the time. The 'UFOs were oval-shaped and a brilliant yellowish-white.
"Also included was one of the reports from the AEC's Los Alamos Laboratory. The incident occurred at 9:40 A.M. on September 23, 1948. A group of people were waiting for an airplane at the landing strip in Los Alamos when one of them noticed something glint in the sun. It was a flat, circular object, high in the northern sky. The appearance and relative size was the same as a dime held edgewise and slightly tipped, about 50 feet away."
"The document pointed out that the reports hadn't actually started with the Arnold Incident. Belated reports from a weather observer in Richmond, Virginia, who observed a 'silver disc' thought his theodolite telescope; an F-47 pilot and three pilots in his formation who saw a 'silvery flying wing,' and the English 'ghost airplanes' that had been picked up on radar early in 1947 proved the point. Although reports on them were not received until after the Arnold sighting, these incidents had all taken place earlier.
"When the estimate was completed, typed, and approved, it started up through channels to higher-command echelons. It drew considerable comment but no one stopped it on its way up."
General Vandenberg, at the Pentagon, eventually received the Estimate, but was apparently less than impressed. According to Ruppelt, at that point, "it was batted back down. The general wouldn't buy interplanetary vehicles. The report lacked proof."
A group of military officers and civilian technical intelligence engineers was then called to the Pentagon to defend the Estimate. According to the work done by Michael Swords, these were likely Lawrence H. Truettner, A. B. Deyarmond, and Alfred Loedding. Swords noted, parenthetically, that "Truettner and Deyarmond were the authors of the Project Sign report that contained many of these same cases and sympathies; Loedding was a frequent Pentagon liaison in 1947 and considered himself the 'civilian project leader' of Sign."
The military participants were probably the official project officer, Captain Robert Sneider, as well as Colonels Howard McCoy or William Clingerman, who would have had to sign off on the Estimate.
Swords noted that the defense was unsuccessful, but not long after the visit to the Pentagon, everyone named was reassigned. Swords writes, "So great was the carnage that only the lowest grades in the project, civilian George Towles and Lieutenant H.W. Smith, were left to write the 1949 Project Grudge document about the same cases."