Ruppelt's account of the Estimate of the Situation

Ruppelt's account of the Estimate of the Situation

Date	February 1956
Topics	Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	Edward Ruppelt, Michael Swords
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 56
Year	1956 in UFO history
Timeline	1956 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	10

Ruppelt's account of the Estimate of the Situation is the passage in Edward J. Ruppelt's 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects that first told the public about a top-secret 1948 Air Force intelligence study. In that study, the staff of Project Sign concluded that UFOs were "interplanetary".^[1][5] According to Ruppelt, the document rose through the chain of command to the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, who rejected it for lack of proof. A team from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base went to the Pentagon to argue for it and failed. Months later the estimate was declassified and burned, although a few copies survived. Ruppelt saw one of them.^[1][9] No copy has ever been produced, and Air Force officials later denied that it existed.^[2][5] The story became one of the most argued-over episodes in early UFO history. The researcher Michael Swords reconstructed it from other records and concluded that the Estimate was real.^[4] See also Estimate of the Situation.

Ruppelt's account

• The trigger. Ruppelt tied the Estimate to the Chiles–Whitted encounter. At about 2:45 a.m. on 24 July 1948, the pilots of an Eastern Airlines DC-3, Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted, saw a light closing fast about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama.^[1]
  • Chiles swung the airliner into a tight left turn. The object flashed by about 700 feet to the right and pulled up in a steep climb.^[1]
  • The pilots described something like a B-29 fuselage with a "deep blue glow" underneath, "two rows of windows from which bright lights glowed", and a "50-foot trail of orange-red flame".^[1]
  • A crew chief at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia reported a very bright light passing overhead minutes later.^[1]
  • According to "the old timers at ATIC", this report "shook them worse than the Mantell Incident". It was the first time two reliable witnesses had been close enough to a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it.^[1]
• The document. "A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed," Ruppelt wrote, the people at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) decided it was time for an "Estimate of the Situation", the standard intelligence report on a vital problem. "The situation was the UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!"^[1]
  • He described it as "a rather thick document with a black cover", printed on legal-sized paper and stamped TOP SECRET.^[1]
  • It analysed many incidents reported by scientists, pilots and other credible observers, "and each one was an unknown".^[1]
  • It argued that the reports had not begun with Kenneth Arnold's sighting of June 1947. As examples it cited a weather observer in Richmond, Virginia, who saw a "silver disk" through a theodolite telescope; an F-47 pilot and three others in his formation who saw a "silver flying wing"; and English "ghost airplanes" picked up on radar early in 1947.^[1]
• Up the chain. Once completed and approved, the Estimate went up through channels and "drew considerable comment but no one stopped it on its way up". It was sent a matter of days before the Gorman "dogfight" over Fargo, North Dakota, on 1 October 1948.^[1]
• Rejection. While Project Sign was studying the Gorman case, the Estimate reached General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then Air Force Chief of Staff, "before it was batted back down". "The general wouldn't buy interplanetary vehicles. The report lacked proof." A group from ATIC went to the Pentagon to defend it but "had no luck".^[1][9]
• Destruction. "The estimate died a quick death," Ruppelt wrote. "Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator. A few copies, one of which I saw, were kept as mementos of the golden days of the UFO's."^[1]
• Aftermath, in Ruppelt's telling.
  • The "kickback" on the Estimate dampened enthusiasm at Sign, and the project's staff had to be prodded to investigate sightings.^[1]
  • Later he argued that the project had tried one answer, the Estimate that "proved" UFOs were real. When it was "kicked back", the staff switched to the hypothesis that UFOs don't exist, because it was "easier to prove and it got recognition".^[1]
  • He called the Project Grudge period that followed "the dark ages". He said charter members of Sign who refused to change their opinions were "purged".^[1][5]
• When Ruppelt saw it. Shellenberger's 2024 timeline says Ruppelt saw the Estimate in 1951, while directing Project Grudge at Wright-Patterson. It says Vandenberg ordered the document destroyed and that no declassified copy has ever been given to Congress or the public.^[10] Swords says Ruppelt and the Pentagon's UFO officer Dewey Fournet both saw it in 1952.^[4] Ruppelt's own text says only that he saw one of the surviving copies.^[1]

Swords's reconstruction

• The paper. In "Project Sign and the Estimate of the Situation", published in the Journal of UFO Studies in 2000, Swords used Project Blue Book records, Ruppelt's unpublished papers and other documents to rebuild the story.^[4] He concluded that Sign investigated for seven months, decided the extraterrestrial hypothesis best explained the phenomenon, and sent an Estimate to the Pentagon. Its rejection led to the breakup of the Sign team and the destruction of all copies of the document, "with perhaps one exception".^[4]
• Authorship and date. Swords differs from Ruppelt on timing.
  • He says project officer Captain Robert Sneider decided to write the Estimate in September 1948, after hearing of the Robins ground witness. Sneider built it around Chiles–Whitted and cases from summer 1947 onward.^[4]
  • The latest case known to have been used dates from 23 September 1948 at Los Alamos.^[4]
  • Sneider would have been the main author. Swords thinks Albert Deyarmond, Alfred Loedding and Lawrence Truettner almost certainly helped write it, with the approval of higher officers including the intelligence director, Colonel Howard McCoy.^[4]
• More cases. Ruppelt's unedited manuscript, held in his papers, lists more of the cases the Estimate cited than the book does.^[4]
  • Among them were Arnold's sighting; a series of sightings at Muroc Air Force Base; an F-51 pilot's formation of spheres near Lake Mead; an F-80 pilot's two round objects diving near the Grand Canyon; and an Idaho National Guard T-6 pilot's violently manoeuvring black object.^[4]
  • It also cited an Air Force major at Rapid City who watched twelve oval objects in tight diamond formation dive, turn and climb. Another was a flat, circular object seen from the Los Alamos landing strip at 9:40 a.m. on 23 September 1948.^[4]
• Through Cabell to Vandenberg. Swords believes the Estimate was addressed to Vandenberg but really meant for the Director of Intelligence, General Charles Cabell. He thinks it was sent near the end of September.^[4]
  • Cabell, faced with a pro-extraterrestrial Wright-Patterson and a hostile Pentagon office, passed it up to Vandenberg rather than decide himself.^[4]
  • Vandenberg sent it back quickly as unacceptable.^[4]
  • Swords notes that Cabell later revived a serious UFO project in 1951. In the 1960s he still told the CIA photo analyst Art Lundahl that the subject deserved serious investigation.^[4]
• The showdown. In Swords's account, opponents in the Pentagon's Air Intelligence branch, notably Major Aaron J. Boggs and Colonel E. H. Porter, worked with the Office of Naval Intelligence against the extraterrestrial view.^[4]
  • On 3 November 1948 Cabell wrote to Wright-Patterson, in effect asking for another estimate.^[4]
  • McCoy replied on 8 November in a letter drafted by Deyarmond that Swords calls "overtly submissive but covertly rebellious".^[4]
  • A confrontational meeting followed around 12 November at the National Bureau of Standards. Swords takes this to be the Pentagon visit Ruppelt described. Boggs is known to have been there.^[4]
  • Afterwards outside scientists and Pentagon offices were brought in to oversee Sign's work. Deyarmond and Truettner wrote a "sanitized" final Sign report.^[4]
• The "Ghost" and the "Assassin". On 10 December 1948 the Pentagon's Air Intelligence division and Naval Intelligence issued their own top-secret study, Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79, Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S.^[4]
  • It treated UFOs as probably real but stressed the possibility that they were Soviet.^[4]
  • Sign's Estimate was ordered destroyed. Six days later the code word Sign was changed to Grudge.^[4]
  • Some researchers call this study "the Ghost of the Estimate". Swords thinks the name fits better Sneider's own five-page report on Chiles–Whitted of 20 December 1948, and calls the December 10 study "the Assassin of the Estimate".^[4]
  • The researcher Jan Aldrich has argued that the 10 December study and the Estimate, "if the EOTS exists at all, probably have no connection", as quoted in a discussion on Kevin Randle's blog.^[8]
• Unintended revenge. Swords argues that the Pentagon's mild "Project Saucer" press release of 1949, which read "like a sanitized Estimate", persuaded the writer Donald Keyhoe to investigate seriously. That made Keyhoe "the Ultimate 'Revenge of the Estimate'".^[4]

Doubts and denials

• No copy. No copy of the Estimate, or any other confirmation of Ruppelt's claim, has been produced.^[2][5]
  • After the book appeared, top Air Force officials denied that the Estimate had ever existed.^[5]
  • On 18 January 1966, in a congressional hearing, Representative L. Mendel Rivers asserted that no such estimate had existed.^[2]
  • Popular Mechanics later called it "probably more mythological than real".^[2][5]
  • The folklore historian Curtis Peebles described it as "the most controversial document in the early history of the flying saucer myth".^[5]
• Randle's view of the cases. The researcher Kevin Randle, writing in 2012, said that some cases known to have been in the Estimate were weak, often single-witness reports with no corroboration.^[8]
  • In discussion on his blog, Randle said he thought Chiles–Whitted itself was probably a fireball.^[8]
  • He also said a Blue Book document of 9 September 1948 had concluded the object was "probably meteoric in nature".^[8]
  • Other commenters disputed the meteor explanation. One noted that the Battelle study behind Blue Book Special Report No. 14 had listed Chiles–Whitted among its good unknowns.^[8]
• Contemporary press confusion. Some 1956 press summaries of Ruppelt's book reported that the Estimate had been rejected by a panel of scientists meeting in January 1953. That conflates it with the later Robertson Panel. Ruppelt's text says Vandenberg rejected it in 1948.^[1][5]
• Ruppelt's later view. In a 1960 second edition of his book, Ruppelt said he was "positive" that UFOs did not exist and called them a "space age myth".^[5]

Significance

• First disclosures. Ruppelt's book was the first to reveal publicly that Project Sign had existed, and with it the claim that its staff had favoured an extraterrestrial explanation.^[5]
• Context. Project Sign had been set up at Wright-Patterson in 1948 at the request of General Nathan Twining.^[2][6]
  • Its public report, released on 27 April 1949, said some UFOs seemed to be real aircraft but that there was too little data to determine their origin.^[2]
  • Project Grudge replaced it in early 1949 and concluded that reports came from misidentifications, mild "mass-hysteria and war nerves", hoaxes and "psychopathological persons".^[2][3]
• The debate. The Estimate remains central to the question of whether Air Force intelligence once privately favoured the extraterrestrial hypothesis.^[4][6]
  • Swords treats it as a real document whose suppression "set the tone" for Air Force handling of UFOs until 1969.^[4]
  • Sceptics point to the lack of any copy and to the official denials.^[2][5]
  The earlier version of this article said "many researchers accept that something like it was written". Among the sources read here, Swords treats it as real, and Randle discusses it as a document described by Ruppelt, Fournet and other records, while Aldrich is quoted as doubting it existed.^[4][8]

People and topics

• Edward Ruppelt — Head of Project Blue Book in 1952–53 and author of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
• Estimate of the Situation — A 1948 Project Sign report said to have favoured an interplanetary explanation.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects — Edward Ruppelt's 1956 book.
• Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.
• Project Sign — The Air Force's first formal UFO study (1948), whose staff reportedly favoured an interplanetary explanation.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Chiles–Whitted UFO encounter — The 1948 sighting of a cigar-shaped craft by two Eastern Air Lines pilots.
• Vandenberg Space Force Base — The California missile and space launch base.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Project Grudge — The Air Force's skeptical UFO project of 1949–51 that replaced Project Sign.
• Michael Swords — Historian of the Air Force UFO projects.
• Extraterrestrial hypothesis — The idea that UFOs are spacecraft from other planets.

On the Timeline

• Afghanistan saucer reports (1956) (24 January 1956) — Wright-Patterson monitors a reported saucer landing in Afghanistan and plans an overflight.
• Electrogravitics Systems report (1956) (25 February 1956) — A study of electrogravitics, the link between electricity and gravity, is delivered to Wright-Patterson.

See every 1956 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Project Sign”, “Project Grudge”, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects”, “Project Blue Book”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.