What happened
Three months into the 1947 wave of flying disc reports, Army Air Forces intelligence asked Air Materiel Command at Wright Field for its considered view. The reply, signed by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining on 23 September 1947, drew on interrogation reports and a conference of intelligence and engineering staff from the aircraft, power plant and propeller laboratories. Its first finding was blunt: the phenomenon was real, not visionary. It described a common picture of metallic, disc-shaped objects as big as aircraft, often silent, flying in formation and seeming to take evasive action, and judged that some might be controlled manually, automatically or remotely. It weighed a secret US project or a foreign power with advanced, perhaps nuclear, propulsion, and noted the lack of crash-recovered hardware. It recommended a classified, code-named study shared across the services and agencies. That recommendation produced Project Sign. The letter stayed secret until Edward Ruppelt described it in 1956; its full text appeared in the 1969 Condon Report.
The original account
It is the opinion that: a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. b. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft. ... d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.
Lt. Gen. N. F. Twining to Commanding General, Army Air Forces, 'AMC Opinion Concerning "Flying Discs"', 23 September 1947, para. 2 (US government document, public domain; reproduced as Appendix R of the Condon Report)
The official explanation
Skeptics stress that the memo was a preliminary staff opinion based on reports, not on physical evidence, and it says so itself, listing the lack of crash-recovered exhibits and allowing that some reports were natural phenomena such as meteors. Its working assumption, reflected in the CIA's later history by Gerald Haines, was that the objects might be a domestic secret project or Soviet technology. Later Air Force studies, from Project Grudge to Blue Book, concluded that reports were overwhelmingly misidentifications.
The anomalous case
This is the earliest firm documentary evidence that senior US military engineers took flying discs seriously. Twining's staff, drawn from the laboratories that built American aircraft, concluded the objects were real, disc-shaped, aircraft-sized, sometimes evasive and possibly controlled. They considered that they might be a secret domestic project unknown to Air Materiel Command, or foreign craft with nuclear propulsion beyond US knowledge. Both possibilities imply genuinely advanced technology, and the memo does not mention extraterrestrials at all. It was written just eleven weeks after the Roswell announcement, and critics of the Roswell explanation point out that it cites a lack of crash-recovered exhibits, which skeptics read as evidence against a recovery and proponents read as a document written below the level of any such secret. Either way, the US government's own first verdict was that the phenomenon was something real.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Twining letter, 23 September 1947 (Condon Report Appendix R) official, files.ncas.org
- Craigie directive establishing Project SIGN, 30 December 1947 (Condon Report Appendix S) official, files.ncas.org
Sources
- Condon Report, Appendix R: Letter from General N. F. Twining, 23 September 1947 National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
- The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (section on the Twining memo) Wikipedia
- CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 (Gerald K. Haines, Studies in Intelligence, 1997) Federation of American Scientists (reprint of CIA article)
Witness reports elsewhere
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