Project Sign - Project Sign

Project Sign

Project Sign, designated MCIAXO-3, was established under the Technical Analysis division of T-2 (military intelligence) at Wright Field. According to Craigie's directive, it would be the role of Sign to: "...collect, collate, evaluate and distribute to interested government agencies and contractors all information concerning sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere which can be construed to be of concern to the national security."

On January 22, 1948, a week after the Air Force was officially separated from the Army, Project Sign formally began its work. Sign was a branch of Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, under the direction of Captain Robert R. Sneider. Michael D. Swords writes:

The core personnel for the project were probably the most talented group to work on UFOs until the air force ended its investigation in 1969. Aiding chief officer, Capt. Robert R Sneider, were two outstanding aeronautical engineers, Alfred Loedding and Albert B. Deyarmond ... Completing the group was nuclear and missile expert Lawrence Truettner ... The quality of these people indicates the seriousness (and the comparative difference in later years) with which the air force considered the flying disk problem.

Notable were the facts that Leodding had worked extensively on disk-shaped and low-aspect aircraft designs for both the military and private companies, and that he was also one of very few people in America with first-hand expertise in rocket engines. He was firmly convinced that a disc-shaped aircraft could fly, and he had designed several such models and prototypes.

Ruppelt wrote that Sign "was given a 2A priority, 1A being the highest priority an Air Force project could have." Though it was classified "restricted", Sign's existence was eventually known to the general public under the moniker "Project Saucer". However, UFO historian Wendy Connors claimed, through an interview with a surviving Sign secretary, that "Project Saucer" was the project's original informal name and had actually begun in late 1946. If this was the case, then the Army Air Force had already begun investigation of UFOs well before the Kenneth Arnold sighting that launched the first flood of UFO reports of June–July 1947 in the United States. (See, e.g., WWII foo fighter UFOs and the post-war ghost rockets)

Flying saucer investigations were conducted by Air Intelligence at the Air Force base nearest to any particular UFO report. However, some cases were studied directly by Air Materiel Command personnel.

By late 1947, Air Force files included 109 UFO reports, nine of which remain listed as unsolved. There were four categories for UFOs: flying disks; cigar/torpedo shaped objects; balloon/spherical objects; and "balls of light". Preliminary investigation revealed that about a fifth of Sign's UFO cases were explained prosaically, with the expectation that a substantial portion of the remaining cases could be similarly explained.

The earliest hypothesis, even before Sign was formally established, was that UFOs were Soviet aircraft. Sign was based at Wright Field partly because it was the headquarters for American analysis of German aeronautical data. There was concern in U.S. military intelligence circles that the Soviet Union could make aeronautical advances on the work of Nazi scientists, especially the Horten brothers, "a pair of brilliant aeronautical engineers far in advance of their U.S. counterparts." The Horten brothers's "flying wing" designs were strikingly similar to some early UFO reports, such as Arnold's crescent-shaped objects. However, due to a lack of evidence supporting the Soviet hypothesis, a faction within the U.S. Military began contemplating an extraterrestrial explanation -- not because any specific evidence supported it, but mainly because all other interpretations for the data were exhausted.