In Air Force circles, behind the scenes, officials were acutely aware that “the very existence of Air Force official interest” fanned the flames of UFO hysteria, and so the public relations program Project Grudge needed to officially end. On December 27, 1949, the Air Force publicly announced that it saw no reason to continue its UFO investigations and was terminating the project. Meanwhile, the covert UFO study programs steamed ahead. In 1952, the Air Force opened up yet another, even more secret UFO organization, this one called Project Blue Book. That the Air Force clearly kept from the public what it was actually doing with UFO study would later become a major point of contention for ufologists who believed UFOs were from out of this world.
The UFOs being reported seemed to have no end. In addition to the flying disc sightings, bright, greenish-colored lights in the sky were also reported by a growing number of citizens. This was particularly concerning for the Air Force because many of these sightings were in New Mexico near sensitive military facilities such as Los Alamos, Sandia, and White Sands. Witnesses to these “green balls of light,” which had been reported since the late 1940s, included credible scientists and astronomers. These sightings were put into an Air Force category known as Green Fireballs. In 1949, the Geophysics Research Division of the Air Force initiated Project Twinkle specifically to investigate these various light-related phenomena. Observation posts were set up at Air Force bases around the country where physicists made electromagnetic-frequency measurements using Signal Corps engineering laboratory equipment. In secret, air traffic control operators across the nation were given 35-millimeter cameras called vidoons and asked by the Air Force to photograph anything unusual. All work was performed under top secret security protocols with the caveat that under no circumstances was the public to know that the Air Force was investigating UFOs. As the files for Project Twinkle and Project Blue Book got fatter by the month, Air Force officials repeatedly told curious members of Congress that no such files existed.
For Air Force investigators, the UFO explanations trickled in. One group of scientists assigned to Holloman Air Force Base, located on the White Sands Missile Range and home to the Paperclip scientists, determined many of the sightings were observations of V-2 rocket contrails. Other sightings were determined to be shooting stars, cosmic rays, and planets visible in the sky. Another study group concluded that some responsibility fell on birds, most commonly “flocks of seagulls or geese.” But the numbers of sightings were overwhelming. By 1951, the Air Force had secretly investigated between 800 and 1,000 UFO sightings across the nation, according to a CIA Studies in Intelligence report on UFOs declassified in 1997. By 1952, that number rose to 1,900. The efforts were stunning. Data-collection officers met with hundreds of citizens, all of whom were told not to disclose that the Air Force had met with them and asked to sign inadvertent-nondisclosure forms. Classified for decades, these investigations have resulted in over thirty-seven cubic feet of case files—approximately 74,000 pages. But for every one or two hundred sightings that could be explained, there were always a few that could not be explained—certainly not by Air Force data-collection supervisors who had a very limited need-to-know. Seeds of suspicion were being sown among these Air Force investigators and in some cases among their superiors, a number of whom would later famously leave government service to go join the efforts of the ufologists on the other side of the aisle.
Ultimately, the Air Force concluded for the National Security Council that “almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and hallucination; misinterpretation of known objects; or hoax.” The sightings that couldn’t be explained this way went up the chain of command, where they were interpreted by a few individuals who had been cleared with a need-to-know. In the mid-1950s, this included the elite group over at the CIA working under Todos Odarenko, analysts responsible for matching the CIA’s U-2 flights with Air Force unknowns. But no matter how many sightings were explained as benign, there was still the unexplained mother of all unidentified flying objects—the nefarious crashed craft from Roswell. Everything about that flying disc had to remain hidden from absolutely everyone but a select few. If Americans found out about it, or about what the government had been doing in response, there would be outrage.