Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book

Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book

Type	Program or study
Also known as	Air Force UFO projects
On the Timeline	1 event, 1972

Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book were the three successive US Air Force investigations of unidentified flying objects. All three were based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and together they ran from 1948 until the end of 1969.^[1][2] Project Sign took the reports seriously enough that, by one account, its staff concluded UFOs were interplanetary. Project Grudge set out to explain them away. Project Blue Book, the longest, collected 12,618 reports, of which 701 stayed unexplained.^[1][4] Blue Book was closed after the Condon Committee concluded that further study was unlikely to produce scientific discoveries. Its files went to the National Archives and remain a key source for the history of the subject.^[1] Critics, including the project's own scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek, said the work was understaffed and run more for public relations than for investigation.^[1][3][5]

Project Sign (1948–1949)

Air Force study of the subject began after the wave of reports that followed Kenneth Arnold's sighting in June 1947.^[1] In a memo of 23 September 1947, General Nathan Twining, head of Air Materiel Command, wrote that the phenomenon was "something real and not visionary or fictitious". He asked for a permanent project, and Sign was launched with a 2A priority, the highest being 1A.^[2][4] See Twining memo. The Wikipedia account of Blue Book puts Sign's start at the end of 1947, while its article on Sign gives 1948.^[1][2] Sign was initially called Project Saucer.^[2]

According to Edward Ruppelt, ATIC's specialists did not ask whether UFOs existed, only whether they were Soviet or interplanetary.^[4] In the late summer of 1948, he wrote, the staff produced a top-secret "Estimate of the Situation" concluding that they were interplanetary craft. The Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, rejected it for lack of proof.^[1][4] No copy has ever been produced.^[2] Officially, Sign's findings were inconclusive.^[1] An order of 11 February 1949 renamed it Grudge.^[4]

Project Grudge (1949–1952)

Ruppelt described the Grudge years as the "Dark Ages". The project's unwritten aim was to get rid of UFOs, by first explaining every report and then telling the public how they had been solved.^[4] Reports were attributed to aircraft, balloons, stars, planets, meteors, optical illusions, reflections and even "large hailstones".^[3] Grudge's only formal report, issued in August 1949, found no evidence of an advanced foreign development or threat to national security. It put reports down to misidentification, "a mild form of mass-hysteria and war nerves", hoaxes and "psychopathological persons", and recommended reducing the investigation.^[3] The Wikipedia account of Blue Book says that 23 per cent of the reports could still not be explained.^[1] Hynek, Grudge's contract astronomer, called it "less science and more of a public relations campaign".^[3][4]

On 27 December 1949 the Air Force announced that Grudge had been closed.^[3][4] UFO reports still came in, however, and in 1951 interest revived. Ruppelt took charge of a "new Project Grudge", officially established on 27 October 1951.^[4] The Wikipedia account says senior generals, including Charles P. Cabell, were so dissatisfied that they replaced Grudge with Blue Book in March 1952.^[1] So the end date of Grudge depends on the source: the end of 1949 for the original project, or March 1952 for the reorganised one.^[1][3][4]

Project Blue Book (1952–1969)

In March 1952 the project became a separate Aerial Phenomena Group and took the code name Blue Book, after the booklets used for college examinations.^[1][4] Blue Book had two goals: to determine whether UFOs threatened national security, and to analyse UFO data scientifically.^[1]

The Ruppelt era

Ruppelt promoted the neutral term "unidentified flying object". He streamlined reporting, and every Air Force base had a Blue Book officer to collect reports.^[1] He had the Battelle Memorial Institute design a standard questionnaire and computerise the data, work that led to Special Report No. 14.^[1] His team investigated the Lubbock Lights and the 1952 Washington, D.C., radar–visual sightings.^[1] Those sightings led the CIA to convene the Robertson Panel in January 1953. The panel recommended that the Air Force play down the subject and work to reduce public interest in it.^[1]

Afterwards, the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron took over the most important investigations. Air Force Regulation 200-2 allowed only solved cases to be discussed in public, and JANAP 146 made it a crime for military personnel to discuss classified reports with unauthorised people.^[1] By Ruppelt's departure in August 1953 his staff had shrunk from more than ten to himself and two others. The Wikipedia account says Blue Book became "almost solely a public relations outfit".^[1]

Later heads

• Captain Charles Hardin (from 1954). Under Hardin, the 4602nd did most of the investigating. In 1955 the goal became to minimise unidentified reports, which fell from 20–25 per cent in Ruppelt's day to under 1 per cent by late 1956.^[1]
• Captain George T. Gregory (from 1956). Gregory cut the unknowns by reclassification, turning "possible" explanations into "probable" ones and "probable" ones into certainties.^[1]
• Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Friend (from 1958). Friend tried to improve the files but lacked money and help. By 1963 he thought Blue Book useless.^[1]
• Major Hector Quintanilla (from August 1963). Under Quintanilla, Blue Book drew its sharpest criticism, including over the 1966 Portage County police chase, which it put down to a satellite and Venus.^[1]

Condon Committee and closure

As criticism grew, NICAP, with about 15,000 members, charged the government with a cover-up. After congressional hearings, the Condon Committee was set up in 1966. It concluded that there was nothing extraordinary about UFOs and that further research was unlikely to be productive.^[1] The Secretary of the Air Force, Robert Seamans, then said that further funding "cannot be justified either on the grounds of national security or in the interest of science".^[1] Blue Book's last publicly acknowledged day was 17 December 1969. The researcher Brad Sparks, citing NICAP, says activity actually ended on 30 January 1970.^[1] The earlier version of this article dated the Condon Report to 1968; the sources read here give 1966 for the committee but no date for the report.

The Air Force's summary says no UFO it evaluated was ever a threat to national security, and that there was no evidence that "unidentified" sightings were extraterrestrial or beyond present-day science.^[1] It also says the records were permanently transferred to the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives and Records Service, where they are open to the public with witnesses' names removed.^[1]

Assessment

UFO researchers often see Ruppelt's tenure as the high point of official investigation, and the scientist Michael Swords wrote that he led "the last genuine effort to analyze UFOs".^[1] Hynek, who served all three projects, later accused Air Force staff of indifference and shoddy research. He noted that critics called Blue Book "The Society for the Explanation of the Uninvestigated".^[1] In his 1972 book The UFO Experience, according to the timeline, Hynek called Blue Book a "cover up". He said the problem had been "glossed over" and suspected that the project was a "front" for a more classified investigation.^[5] On the other side, the writer Robert Sheaffer has said its 12,618 reports added nothing to knowledge of any subject. Ruppelt himself later called the subject a "Space Age Myth".^[1]

On the UAP Timeline

• Hynek's The UFO Experience (May 1972) — Blue Book adviser J. Allen Hynek writes that Blue Book was a cover-up and the problem was glossed over.

References

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