UFO UpDates Mailing List
From: legion@werple.net.au
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 08:36:53 +1100 (EST)
Fwd Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 19:29:13 -0500
Subject: Projects Sign & Grudge - Just Cause
Hi All..
The latest issue of _Just_Cause_ just arrived in the mailbox with
more news of recently retrieved documents from Projects 'Sign' and
'Grudge'. Other articles include an analysis of NASA's cautious
announcement of the 'Martian Meteorite'; an "interesting State
Department release" documenting the nocturnal activities of two U.S.
Government officials during their visit to the HQ of the 'China UFO
Research Society'; details of a new index for UFO documents developed
by Ed Stewart; and a balanced appraisal of Carl Sagan's contributions
to science and UFOlogy.
Included with _Just Cause_ is the "Special Blowhard Edition" of Robert
Todd's new publication, _The Spot Report_. Hard-edged, between-the-eyes
stuff, definitely not for the UFOlogically feint-of-heart.
At $15 U.S. or $20 Foreign, _Just Cause_ remains one of the best
bargains in UFO literature.
To subscribe, write to: CAUS
Box 176
Stoneham, Ma. 02180
U.S.A
- John
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From: _Just Cause_ #49 'Citizens Against UFO Secrecy' Dec '96
_PROJECTS SIGN AND GRUDGE RECORDS RELEASED_.
Yet another large document release of early Project Sign and
Project Grudge records have been made available. Sign and Grudge, for
those unfamiliar, were the Air Force's first organized UFO
investigations beginning in 1947 through the early 1950s. Nearly one
thousand pages of documents were released from the National Personnel
Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. They are amongst the records
mentioned in the General Accounting Office's report on Roswell as
having been consulted by the GAO in the process of their crashed-disc
inquiry. The release was cleared by the National Air Intelligence
Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio on November 20, 1996.
About two-thirds of the records concern Project Sign activities in
1948, the rest dealing with 1949. It is a mixture of case material
and administrative handling of the investigations.
Most notable so far is that once again, as in the case of the
4602nd AISS records for the mid-1950s obtained from the National
Archives (Just Cause, March-June 1996), we see that missing cases from
the Project Sign years are surfacing through this release. For
example, the San Acadia Dam, N.M. case of July 17, 1948, listed as
missing in the Project Blue Book inventories at the Archives, is
listed here. Same with Columbus Ohio, July 8, 1948 and Sterling,
Utah, October 16, 1948. The long-suspected extra copies of Air Force
records, kept aside from the Air Force's main Blue Book case holding,
are beginning to surface, repairing some of the damage to the
historical record thought to have been created by the missing records.
An interesting remark appears in a June 23, 1948 document from the
Acting Chief of Intelligence, Col. R.D. Wentworth, enclosing
corrections to a draft copy of a "Special Report-Project Sign."
Relating information from the Air Force's Director of Research and
Development, Wentworth revealed that a "vast majority of the objects"
were similar to flying wing-type aircraft of low aspect ratio (i.e.
thin or flat) and that reference should be made to this fact and such
past experiments by the Air Force's Engineering Division and to
present experiments by the Navy. In other words many of the reports
might have been caused by the sighting of experimental vehicles by the
military. We can relate this to modern reports of strange aircraft
near places like "Area 51."
So as late as June 1948, high level thinking tilted towards UFOs
largely being experimental, low aspect ratio aircraft, not alien
ships. At this time we would have had the Roswell "vehicle" for about
a year. If we already knew that UFOs were alien and had the proof,
why this tremendous amount of wasted energy chasing high-altitude
reports? Wouldn't the Air Force's Director of Research and
Development have had his hands full doing research on the in-hand
alien vehicle instead of being concerned with sightings of distant
objects which were often not clearly reported or which contained
little useful detail for an engineer?
If we are to accept stories about the Estimate of the Situation,
the reported Air Force Project Sign document that allegedly concluded
that flying saucers were extraterrestrial vehicles, then what had
happened between June 23, 1948 and the writing of the Estimate, said
to have occurred in the summer of 1948? Major Dewey Fournet, one of
the few remaining witnesses to the existence of the Estimate, has said
that the document's conclusion was based upon the existing case
material of that time and that the conclusion was an "extreme
extrapolation" from those reports, and that physical evidence did not
figure in the conclusion. The only major story after June 23, 1948 to
the end of the summer was the Chiles-Whitted incident of July 24,
1948. The sighting at 2:45 AM by the Eastern Airlines pilots was of a
100-foot, torpedo-shaped object with a double row of glowing windows
and a blue glow of light underneath. It took place in the air near
Montgomery, Alabama. And indeed it has been said by a former head of
Project Blue Book (Edward Ruppelt, _Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects,_ 1956, page 41) that the sighting had a profound influence on
Project Sign personnel, to the extent that it led them to conclude
that UFOs were interplanetary. This one incident can be argued to be
the single most important sighting in the Air Force's records,
according to the influence it had on Air Force thinking.
But what about crashed discs and Roswell? Shouldn't that have had
a more profound influence long before? Where does such fit into real
history?
As researchers continue to gain insight into government UFO
investigations, we continue to get the same message from the flow of
early records. Physical evidence does not figure into the equation.
The government was groping for solutions. We may be surprised by
future discoveries but until that happens we must depend upon what we
know to be real rather than imaginary events.
*E-O-F*
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