Topic
Official programs, reports, laws and hearings, from Project Blue Book to AARO and the National Archives. 366 events, newest first.
Government29 Jul 1952
Maj. Gen. John Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence, held a Pentagon press conference on the Washington sightings. He said the reports showed no threat to the U.S., that temperature inversions might explain the radar returns, and that the objects were not U.S. tests.
Photo: US Gov, Public domain
Government29 Jul 1952
Days after the Washington radar sightings, Ralph L. Clark, acting head of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, sent the Deputy Director for Intelligence a memo on recent unexplained sightings. The CIA's own history says the agency then formed a special OSI study group on the reports.
Government28 Jul 1952
Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a minute to the Secretary of State for Air asking what the flying saucer stories amounted to. The Air Ministry replied on August 9, 1952, citing a 1951 intelligence study that found conventional explanations for the reports.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Government29 Apr 1952
Air Force Letter 200-5 told every Air Force base to wire UFO reports to the Air Technical Intelligence Center and the Pentagon, followed by fuller reports by mail. Edward Ruppelt wrote that it also let Project Blue Book contact any Air Force unit directly.
GovernmentMar 1952
The Air Force reorganized its UFO investigations as Project Blue Book. By the time it closed in 1969, the Air Force programs had logged 12,618 reports, 701 of them still listed as unidentified.
Photo: US Governement, Public domain
Government1952
Canada's Defence Research Board set up Project Second Storey, an advisory committee on flying saucer reports chaired by Dominion Observatory astronomer Peter Millman, which ran from 1952 to 1954. It did not investigate sightings itself but worked on a standard reporting form.
Photo: NRAO/AUI/NSF, photo by Woodruff T. Sullivan III, CC BY 4.0
GovernmentNov 1951
Starting in November 1951, the reactivated Project Grudge, renamed Blue Book in March 1952, issued a series of 12 classified status reports on its work. They were declassified in 1960 but, per the Condon Report, were hard to obtain until NICAP published them in 1968.
Photo: US Air Force, Public domain
GovernmentJun 1951
A small Ministry of Defence scientific intelligence working party set up in 1950 delivered a secret report concluding that saucer sightings were misidentified aircraft, balloons, astronomical objects, illusions or hoaxes, and advised against further study without material evidence.
Photo: Bernard Hailstone, Public domain
Government21 Nov 1950
Canadian Department of Transport radio engineer Wilbert Smith sent a Top Secret memo proposing geomagnetic research tied to flying saucers. It relays what U.S. contacts reportedly told him, including that saucers were the most highly classified U.S. subject. The proposal led to Project Magnet.
Photo: Unknown photographer, Public domain
Government22 Mar 1950
A one-page memo from FBI Washington field office head Guy Hottel to J. Edgar Hoover relayed a third party's story that three saucers with small bodies had been recovered in New Mexico. The FBI says it never investigated the claim and that the memo is unrelated to Roswell.
Photo: Guy Hottel, Public domain
Government27 Dec 1949
The Air Force announced that Project Grudge was closed and released its final report, which attributed saucer reports to misidentification, mild hysteria and hoaxes and recommended cutting the effort back. Grudge continued at a minimal level until Project Blue Book replaced it.
Photo: US Air Force, Public domain
Government27 Apr 1949
The National Military Establishment released a digest of Air Materiel Command studies of more than 240 U.S. and 30 foreign reports. About 30 percent had been explained, visits from space were called highly improbable, and the memo said the sightings were neither a joke nor cause for alarm.
Government16 Feb 1949
Los Alamos lab staff met with FBI, Atomic Energy Commission and military representatives to discuss green fireballs seen over New Mexico. The meeting judged them no serious threat and led to Project Twinkle, a camera watch that was never fully set up and ended about two years later.
Government11 Feb 1949
The Air Force renamed Project Sign as Project Grudge, a scaled-down successor that treated most reports as misidentifications. Its 1949 report concluded sightings came from misread natural objects, hoaxes or psychological causes.
Photo: US Air Force, Public domain
GovernmentFeb 1949
Air Materiel Command issued Project Sign's final report, 'Unidentified Aerial Objects', which found no proof either way that the objects were real unknown aircraft. An appendix by RAND's James Lipp judged visits from space very improbable.
Photo: US Air Force, Public domain
Government31 Jan 1949
A confidential FBI San Antonio memo to J. Edgar Hoover, filed under 'Protection of Vital Installations', said the Army and Air Force treated flying saucer reports as a top-secret matter and that recent sightings were concentrated near the Atomic Energy Commission site at Los Alamos.
Government13 Dec 1948
RAND scientist James Lipp answered Brig. Gen. Donald Putt's request with a letter weighing whether flying objects could be spaceships. He judged such visits possible but very improbable, and the letter was printed as Appendix D of the February 1949 Project Sign report.
Photo: Cbl62, CC BY-SA 3.0
Government10 Dec 1948
A Top Secret Air Force and Navy intelligence study reviewed about 210 sighting reports. It found something was being seen but its nature was unknown, and said that if the objects were foreign, a Soviet source would be most logical. Copies survived a 1950 order to destroy it.
GovernmentSep 1948
Project Sign staff drafted a top secret 'Estimate of the Situation' concluding that some saucers were interplanetary craft. According to later Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt, Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg rejected it for lack of proof and it was later burned; no copy has surfaced.
Photo: USAF, Public domain
Government1948
In early 1948, Air Force officers from Wright-Patterson asked J. Allen Hynek, director of Ohio State's McMillin Observatory, to help Project Sign find which saucer reports were astronomical. Hynek, then a skeptic, had no role in Grudge but returned as Blue Book's consultant from 1952 to 1969.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
