The air force followed their advice. In January 1948, Project Sign was established at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Its mission was to evaluate all information concerning flying saucer sightings that might pose a risk to U.S. national security. To emphasize the gravity of the matter, anything Project Sign produced was to be classified as “Secret.”
If there was ever a moment the U.S. military thought flying saucers should be studied objectively, this was it.
Meanwhile, the ATIC had no shortage of incidents to investigate. Reports of flying saucer sightings continued to pour in.
Hundreds were seen across the United States in 1948. But three incidents were particularly noteworthy, with one being particularly tragic.
On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, Kentucky State Police received reports of a large circular object flying over the city of Maysville. This same object was also spotted by control tower personnel at Godman Air Force Base, which is located near Fort Knox.
Captain Thomas Mantell, a pilot in the Kentucky Air National Guard, was leading a flight of four F-51 Mustangs that happened to be passing through the area at the time of the sighting. Godman’s control tower asked the fighter pilots to check out the strange object. Low fuel forced one of the Mustangs to drop out, but Mantell and the two other remaining F-51s climbed to investigate.
Again, as quoted in the Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, when Mantell reached 15,000 feet, he told Godman tower: “The object is directly above me now. It appears to be a metallic object… and it is of tremendous size… I’m still climbing… I’m trying to close in for a better look.”
Mustangs are propeller-driven craft not generally equipped with the oxygen gear pilots need for flying at high altitudes. Passing up through 22,000 feet, and close to surpassing their safe altitude limit, the two other pilots turned back.
But Mantell kept climbing…
A couple of hours later, Mantell’s plane was found on a farm near Franklin, Kentucky, crumpled and burning. The pilot was still strapped inside, headless. His watch had stopped at 3:18 P.M., the moment his plane hit the ground.
Why an experienced pilot like Mantell would so foolishly climb above a safe altitude remains a mystery. His last words leave no doubt, though, that he was mesmerized by whatever he was chasing.
His death was highly publicized, generating rumors that he’d been shot down by a UFO. This in turn fostered the idea that maybe the earth’s mysterious visitors weren’t so friendly.
Six months later, on the night of July 24, 1948, an Eastern Airlines DC-3 was en route from Houston to Atlanta with Captain Clarence Chiles and copilot John Whitted at the controls. Flying over the city of Montgomery, Alabama, a dull red glowing object suddenly appeared in front of them. Both pilots described the object as being about the size of a B-29 bomber, but with no wings or tail.
The pilots were shocked when the object headed right at them. Before they could react, it streaked by their starboard side, barely missing a midair collision. As it went by, the pilots saw that the wingless craft had a row of windows running down its side. The UFO then climbed quickly and disappeared.
As it turned out, people at Robbins Air Force Base, located near Macon, Georgia, also saw an unknown object about thirty minutes before the DC-3’s encounter. The witnesses’ description matched that of Chiles and Whitted. It was later determined no other planes were in the area of the sighting.
The third perplexing UFO incident of 1948 happened a few months later. Lieutenant George Gorman of the North Dakota Air National Guard was piloting an F-51, the same kind of aircraft as the late Captain Mantell, on a routine night-training mission. Gorman was approaching his airfield when the control tower asked him to check out an unidentified object that had been detected flying in the vicinity of the base.
Gorman did as asked and soon found himself within 1,000 feet of a brightly-lit disk-shaped object. But as he tried to get closer, the UFO started heading for him. Diving out of the way to avoid a collision, Gorman turned, only to see that the UFO had turned as well and was once again heading right for him. Gorman did not veer off until the last moment, but then found himself climbing with the object, straight up to 14,000 feet. That’s when Gorman’s F-51 began to falter. But as he leveled out, the UFO leveled out about a half mile above him. They each made a series of tight maneuvers, but suddenly the UFO came right at him for a third time. This time, though, the UFO broke off, went straight up and disappeared into the night at high speed.
Gorman finally gave up the chase and landed.
In UFO lore, this incident is commonly referred to as “the dogfight with a flying saucer.”
But just like the previous two stories, it has never been explained.
In September 1948, the ATIC prepared a second, lengthier study on flying saucers. It was sent to General Hoyt Vandenberg, then air force chief of staff.
Following up on its preliminary report, which had stated that flying saucers did “exist,” the ATIC investigators had now studied whether the saucers were something man-made — by the Soviet Union, or even perhaps by the U.S. military itself. However, they concluded this was not the case.
Which left only one other explanation: Those flying saucer episodes that could not be explained must have some kind of extraterrestrial origin.
This had to be an exciting time for the ATIC researchers as, by their own words, they, specifically, and the world as a whole, were on the verge of investigating something whose implications for the human race were enormous.
Unfortunately, the air force didn’t see it that way.
While officially General Vandenberg returned the report to ATIC under the pretext of wanting more “proof,” unofficially, as pointed out by many UFO researchers, Vandenberg was essentially letting the ATIC know that they’d told him something he didn’t want to hear. Either the U.S. military didn’t want to admit that it didn’t understand UFOs and therefore couldn’t protect the country against them, or they knew what they were but had decided to keep the news from the public — that was the big question. But there was one thing they weren’t going to do: They would not go on record as saying flying saucers were from outer space.
This was the moment when the door that was opened with Project Sign suddenly began to close again. Looking back on it, a total of six months of study had been done on what might have been one of the most momentous discoveries of all time.
More time went by, during which flying saucer reports continued almost unabated. In December 1949, the U.S. Air Force’s UFO project, now known as “Project Grudge,” released yet another report.
Despite what would seem to be mountains of evidence to the contrary, the report stated that no conclusive evidence had been found that could prove or disprove the existence of these unidentified flying objects.
This is what the air force wanted to hear.
The report went on to say, in effect, that all UFO sightings fell into two categories: one being instances that could be explained away, such as mistaken astronomical phenomena or aircraft or balloons, and the other, hoaxes, hallucinations, delusions or reports made by crackpots.
Or as reported in Major Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space, one air force colonel famously put it: “Behind nearly every UFO report stands a crackpot, a religious crank, a publicity hound or a malicious joke.”
And with that, the U.S. Air Force shut down the project, eager to get out of the business of investigating flying saucers. It is there that many researchers believe the U.S. military’s cover-up of UFOs began — something many claim remains in place today.