Final Personnel Record for McCoy, Howard M., U.S. Air Force, 1954

This 298-page file is the official military personnel record of Howard M. McCoy, commissioned in the Air Corps on June 12, 1930, and retired from the Air Force as a colonel effective August 31, 1954, after continuous active duty. It is only loosely ordered: later records requests and veterans’ forms come first, then service cards and a chronological duty list, the 1954 retirement papers, promotion orders and oaths, and efficiency reports back to 1931, with a second run of 1942–51 efficiency reports at the end. We read the service summaries, the retirement papers and a sample of letters and efficiency reports, and keyword-searched the whole text. Private details in the file are left out here.

The career in outline

The duty list shows flight training in 1930–31, the 94th Pursuit Squadron at Selfridge Field, aeronautical engineering at Caltech (a master’s in 1935, per a 1940 letter), and years at Wright Field’s propeller laboratory, which he headed in 1942–44. After staff college and service in Europe in 1944–45, he moved into technical intelligence at Wright Field: analysis and air documents chief, then, from July 1946, first acting and then full deputy to the commanding general on the intelligence staff (known as T-2), and from October 1947 to August 1949 head of the Intelligence Department at Air Materiel Command. A 1947 report rated by Lt. Gen. N. F. Twining describes the job as planning, policy and supervision of all AMC technical intelligence. Then came the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, a CIA assignment rated by Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell, and directorship of the Physical Security Equipment Agency from March 1951.

Why it is in a UAP release

In the pages we read and in our keyword search, the file never mentions flying saucers, Project Sign or Project Grudge. Its link is the post: AARO’s description places McCoy at the head of AMC intelligence while those early studies ran (see Project Sign). His own July 27, 1954, retirement letter, written after the Defense Department abolished his security-equipment agency, says that as T-2 deputy and intelligence chief from December 1946 to August 1949 he managed a lab called the Science Survey Office that built classified security and investigative equipment; a 1949 AMC directive gives that office’s mission only as classified functions “as prescribed.” Letters of thanks from the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps center (1948) and the Air Force OSI (1949) are in the file. The record establishes his posts and ratings, not any decision he made about UFO reports.