18 100754 General 1946-7 Vol 2

This bundle of Air Force correspondence covers the weeks in late 1947 when the flying disc reports turned into a formal program. It belongs to the same paper trail as Project Sign’s first report, and several letters are signed by Colonel H. M. McCoy, chief of intelligence at the Air Materiel Command (AMC) at Wright Field.

The letters that started a project

In a letter of December 1947 to Major General L. C. Craigie, AMC complains that Air Force headquarters had never commented on its earlier opinions about the discs, and says continued reports from qualified observers keep the matter a concern. Headquarters’ answer, dated 30 December 1947, states that it is Air Force policy not to ignore such reports and directs AMC to set up a project to collect and evaluate them, with an initial report and quarterly updates. The partly legible text gives it priority 2A and a restricted classification; this became Project Sign.

Two smaller cases

The file also follows photographs sent by the Fourth Air Force from Portland, Oregon, taken in November 1946 near Jefferson, Oregon, by a woman who had not seen anything herself but thought marks on the prints might be discs. Headquarters judged the marks to be defects in the film, paper or camera and asked that no further investigation be made.

A November 1947 AMC letter forwards newspaper clippings — a Seattle sighting and a story by Lionel Shapiro about war weapons supposedly developed in Spain with German help — noting that German scientists at AMC knew of no such work. It also asks for follow-up on an Alaska sighting and for progress on plotting all incidents.