UFO, page 8
The entire incident was observed by both the pilot and passenger aboard the Piper Cub, as well as air traffic controllers at the airfield. The Piper pilot, a local doctor, said, “The object was moving very swiftly, much faster than the 51,” and the controllers, tracing the dogfight through binoculars, said they saw “an object or a light traveling at a high rate of speed, apparently on a southwest heading. The F-51 was some distance behind and the object was traveling fast enough to increase the spacing between itself and the fighter. The object appeared to be only a round light, perfectly formed, with no fuzzy edges or rays leaving its body. The edges were clear cut. No other shape was observed. The main identifying characteristic was the high rate of speed at which it was apparently traveling.”
After he was on the ground, Gorman met with commanders and investigators and told them unequivocally that he’d interacted with something that was driven with “thought or reason”: “I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve.”
The Gorman sighting—known to the air force as “Incident 172”—made national headlines and further stoked interest in flying saucers. Meanwhile, Project Sign investigators pieced together a theory: the weather service had released a lighted weather balloon by Fargo around 8:50 p.m. that night, which would have been visible in the area near Gorman and the Piper Club by around 9 p.m., when the “dogfight” began. The fast maneuvering of the balloon, investigators believed, was actually just Gorman’s misperception and visual illusion as he maneuvered his plane quickly around the object at increasingly fast speeds. Later, as the balloon continued to ascend and move away from Fargo, Gorman must have confused the weather balloon’s receding light with the planet Jupiter and raced south after the planet in the sky. The investigators also noted that while the other observers—the Piper Cub pilot and the air traffic controllers—had reported seeing a fast-moving light, those “other witnesses of the incident did not observe the complex tactics reported by Lieutenant Gorman.” The fancy turns were, perhaps, Gorman just being confused by his own fancy turns.
The pilot remained unconvinced; that December, he wrote Kenneth Arnold—the original flying saucer spotter had written Gorman asking for more details on the dogfight—that he was prohibited from speaking about the incident because it had been classified. “I have a normal amount of curiosity and I have a lot of questions to ask. But then I had a lot of them answered that nite. The rest of that I have will have to wait until they get ready to answer them,” he said.
In the weeks following Gorman’s incident, news spread of other oddities, including a case involving a F-61 Black Widow pilot who had tried to chase a suspicious object that appeared on its radar over Japan. That pilot watched his radarscope as the object evaded six separate interception efforts, each time accelerating away as the fighter plane drew near, and the pilot could only vaguely make out a silhouette he described as like a “rifle bullet.” Then a landmark report from Germany arrived: on November 23, two F-80 “Shooting Star” pilots had spotted something that appeared to be a “reddish star,” moving south over Munich. A radar operator had reported the contact at twenty-seven thousand feet, traveling about nine hundred miles per hour, and followed up, minutes later, that, according to the radar, it had risen to fifty thousand feet. No known aircraft could perform anything like such a maneuver, let alone hit that speed, and it was the first time a suspicious flying object had been both visually identified and captured on radar.
It was an exciting development, but not one that Project Sign could make too much of—radar was not, after all, proof of a flying saucer. And they needed proof if they were to make any progress. By 1948 it had collected 167 reports deemed ultimately reliable, but the Pentagon’s rejection had left the program troubled, and led, gradually, to a rebalancing of its estimates.
In February 1949, after barely a year in existence, Project Sign issued its final report on “Unidentified Aerial Objects,” a forty-five-page compendium of work, process, sightings, and conclusions based on a study of a total of 243 domestic and 30 foreign incidents. To start, the report noted that sightings tended to group into four categories:
Flying disks, i.e., very low aspect ratio aircraft.
Torpedo or cigar-shaped bodies with no wings or fins visible in flight.
Spherical or balloon-shaped objects.
Balls of light.
All of the first three categories were at least “readily conceivable by aeronautical designers,” even though some of the apparent control features would be more speculative. Sign’s in-depth engineering studies had largely convinced its analysts that few of the flying objects made much sense aerodynamically, and that it wasn’t even clear “these configurations would develop much speed and allow a sufficient duration of flight and adequate range to be of practical use as aircraft.” (For instance, wind-tunnel tests had never shown “flying disk”–style aircraft to be particularly efficient at lift and the idea of using such shapes for long-range travel was all but unthinkable based on earthly propulsion systems; similarly, the fuel-hungry engines of a jet-propelled cigar-shaped aircraft, like what Whitted and Chiles said they saw, would require a “method of propulsion… far in advance of presently known engines.”) As for the last, fourth, category, Sign had “no reasonable hypothesis of the true nature of the balls of light.”
In an appendix to the main report, physicist George E. Valley, who was a founding member of the air force’s science advisory board, broke down the characteristics and patterns of the most reliable sightings. The flying disks, he explained, were largely reported during the daytime, and were sometimes sighted in groups, whereas nighttime reports almost always featured single objects. He gave deep thought to the possibility of new technologies—including that the flying objects were aided by an antigravity shield proposed by writers like H. G. Wells—but in the end thought it was more likely that the witnesses were just confused about what they saw. “One would like to assume that the positions held by many of the reported observers guarantee their observations. Unfortunately, there were many reports of curious phenomena by pilots during the war—the incident of the fire-ball fighters comes to mind. Further, mariners have been reporting sea-serpents for hundreds of years yet no one has yet produced a photograph.”
All told, about 20 percent of the sightings were identified as “conventional aerial objects,” so far as the Sign researchers could determine, and many of the rest could be explained by sightings of “weather and other atmospheric sounding balloons” or other astronomical phenomena. Some chunk of the sightings, too, were undoubtedly the result of what the Aeromedical Laboratory called “errors of the human mind and senses,” including vertigo-induced dizziness and “swimming of the head” that came with the disorientation of flying at night.
“The possibility that some of the incidents may represent technical developments far in advance of knowledge available to engineers and scientists of this country has been considered,” the team asserted, but “no facts are available to personnel at this Command that will permit an objective assessment of this possibility. All information so far presented on the possible existence of space ships from another planet or of aircraft propelled by an advanced type of atomic power plant have been largely conjecture.”
In the end, Project Sign was left unable to prove or disprove the sightings, or provide evidence that flying objects existed at all—even the most reliable observers fell short in offering inconvertible evidence of what they’d seen. “[The air force] just couldn’t get the kind of ‘hard data’ the military was used to getting,” Hynek recalled later. “They wanted close-up photos, pieces of hardware, detailed descriptions, and so forth. Instead, a military pilot would report that he saw a metallic-looking object, possible ‘disc-shaped’; a wingless craft which ‘buzzed’ him and then shot away at incredible speed—and that was about all.”
Still, the report made clear that it hadn’t detailed enough sightings to chase down and solve every mysterious claim: “Proof of non-existence is equally impossible to obtain unless a reasonably and convincing explanation is determined for each incident.” It also notably articulated that it remained unconvinced that witnesses really were reporting some new advanced technology unknown to the American military, which at the time, after all, was the most advanced industrial nation in the world. “It would be necessary for any other country to conduct research and development work in extreme secrecy for any such project to have reached such an advanced state of development without a hint of its existence becoming known here,” Sign posited, saying that there was little evidence that the USSR was capable of such a cutting-edge project, given that the majority of its aeronautical “innovation” actually came from copying craft from other countries. “An objective evaluation of the ability of the Soviets to produce technical development so far in advance of the rest of the world results in the conclusion that the possibility is extremely remote,” it concluded. Recommendations for further research filled barely a third of a page, a clear indication of the group’s disheartenment, frustration, and general bafflement. Future investigations, they advised, “should be carried on at the minimum level necessary to record, summarize, and evaluate the data,” until enough incidents were able to “indicate that these sightings do not represent a threat to the security of the nation.” At that point, it suggested, the project could be stopped altogether and folded into the routine intelligence work of the air force.
The final nail in the proverbial coffin was delivered with a nine-page follow-up report, written by James Lipp and included in the portfolio as “Appendix D.” In it, Lipp ran through the math of the galaxy, rocket propulsion, and more, explaining that no evidence had been found that Earth was likely under the active study of an advanced civilization—and while such visits might make sense in the abstract, given the recent arrival of the nuclear age, it just didn’t seem to square that such visits were actually occurring. “Such a civilization might observe that on Earth we now have atomic bombs and are fast developing rockets. In view of the past history of mankind, they should be alarmed,” Lipp explained. “We should, therefore, expect at this time above all to behold such visitations. Since the acts of mankind most easily observed from a distance are A-bomb explosions we should expect some relation to obtain between the time of A-bomb explosions, the time at which the space-ships are seen, and the time required for such ships to arrive from and return to home-base.” This, he argued, was all conjecture, though. Any observed behavior of the flying saucers made little sense in reality. Based on the reports gathered by Project Sign, the flying objects also weren’t acting with any apparent meaningful purpose—especially considering that sightings seemed to inexplicably come almost entirely from the United States, whereas surely any advanced civilization visiting Earth would “scatter their visits more or less uniformly over the globe.” Even if the outer space visitors were probing Earth’s defenses, surely the paltry pursuits of the best and most advanced aircraft of the US Air Force had shown how little they had to fear from human technology. “It is hard to believe that any technically accomplished race would come here, flaunt its ability in mysterious ways, and then simply go away,” he continued. “They must have been satisfied long ago that we can’t catch them. It seems fruitless for them to keep repeating the same experiment.”
As a final note, Lipp stated that, “[a]lthough visits from outer space are believed to be possible, they are believed to be very improbable. In particular, the actions attributed to the ‘flying objects’ reported during 1947 and 1948 seem inconsistent with the requirements for space travel.” The notion that the flying objects were “visitors from another planet” should only be seriously considered once “all other solutions” had been eliminated.
Lipp’s final verdict—and the Project Sign report overall—marked a key shift in how the US government and scientific community had progressed in its thinking about outer space. The more astronomers and scientists learned about the sheer vastness of the universe, the more likely it seemed that life existed out there—it just didn’t seem likely that those other life-forms, whoever or whatever they may be, were the cause of the weird sightings in our own skies.
As far as the military was concerned, if the “flying objects” weren’t a threat, figuring out what they really were could only be left to the scientists. Project Sign was over; the military’s interest would go forward in a new project, known now as Project Grudge.
I. During the same period, the air force was beginning its biggest test yet as an independent military branch. In June 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin prompted UK and US air forces to mobilize in the greatest resupply mission ever conceived. C-47 and C-54 transport airplanes raced in and out of Germany—at the height of the effort, a supply plane was landing every thirty seconds—delivering everything from coal to candy twenty-four hours a day, each plane carefully staggered in flight and on the ground. As the summer progressed, though, and the US and its allies realized it was in for a long grind and not a short endeavor, the airlift began to falter; maintenance suffered, and crews were tiring. The air force appointed a new commander, only to have him forced to circle Berlin Tempelhof Airport after a series of errors amid clouds and rain led to multiple crashes ahead of his arrival; in the weeks ahead, revamping the airlift would speed the air force’s maturation, but it was still a service that was a long way from becoming the global force and defender of freedom it pained to be.
II. The only proof of the report’s existence comes from the personal testimony of Edward Ruppelt and J. Allen Hynek, who evidently confirmed its existence in a February 1971 interview. No sign of the document has ever surfaced and no text from it has ever been quoted directly. As historian Kate Dorsch wrote in 2019, “No other corroborating evidence suggesting even the existence of this document—let alone its contents—has ever been uncovered. No drafts, no mentions either before or immediately after from either military personnel or consulting scientists, not a single surviving copy (even though Ruppelt claims a few were saved ‘as mementos of the golden days’) of the many that were allegedly distributed.” Dorsch concluded that she’s unconvinced the document existed at all, writing, “It does, however, demonstrate how little evidence considerable parts of the UFO lore from their period is built on.”
III. Gorman is usually referred to in UFO literature as a “construction manager,” but according to his interview file with counterintelligence agents, he listed his occupation as “Dairy Line Salesman, International Harvester Co.”
6 Project Grudge
Though the government had tried now for a year to downplay or publicly dismiss the nation’s flying saucer fascination—the final Sign report remained classified—there was a lot of evidence it was far more interested than it let on, evidence, in turn, that led to speculation among those interested that something big was being hidden. “Whenever a reporter went to interview a person who had seen a saucer, he found the Air Force had already been there,” aerospace historian Curtis Peebles later explained. “It was clear that the Air Force was intensely interested in flying saucers. The implication was that behind all the questions, there was something there.” Those reporters, in turn, had no issue relaying that involvement to the masses, via a new medium that would come to define the alien information age.
Even as Sign’s investigators had fanned out across the country in 1948 to try to infuse some reality into the situation, pulp entertainment magazines had begun to feverishly stoke the flying saucer craze. The genre of cheaply printed monthlies, filled with stories of science, danger, love, heroes, and detectives, with names like Thrilling Adventures, Astounding, Unknown, and Popular Detective, had taken off in the 1920s, featuring brightly colored covers of scantily clad women, dashing men, and a whole lot of robots. The flying disks were like magazine editor catnip, especially for publications like True magazine, which combined science fiction, mystery, and adventure, and the newly launched Fate, which focused specifically on the paranormal—the first issue of the latter, in March 1948, featured a cover story on the “flying disks” and an article by Kenneth Arnold about his encounter.
The air force, uneasy from the attention, organized and executed their own media strategy, offering Sidney Shalett, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, high-level access for a two-part series in the April 1949 issue that promised to tell readers “What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers.” The Post was at its peak in popularity, reaching something like 5 million readers, the perfect vehicle for a widespread countercampaign.
Shalett’s reporting was the first in-depth exploration of the so-called “Classics”—Mantell’s death, the Chiles and Whitted sighting, and the Gorman dogfight—and featured the first real public confirmation and discussion of Project Sign, even the code name of which was still secret (Shalett referred to it only as “Project Saucer”). He was given access to eyewitness accounts, select details, and even air force officials, including former general Carl Spaatz, who dismissed the entire “saucer hysteria” wave on the record: “If the American people are capable of getting so excited over something which doesn’t exist, God help us if anyone ever plasters us with a real atomic bomb,” he told Shalett, adding, “I can tell you unequivocally that the reported sightings of so-called saucers were completely unconnected with any form of secret research that the Air Force was conducting during my term as Chief of Staff.” Shalett also interviewed Dr. Irving Langmuir, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who served on the air force’s Scientific Advisory Board, and he had some friendly advice for the service’s flying saucer hunt: “Forget it!”
