The national frame: 1947 and the Air Force investigations

1947 — 17 December 1969

The frame: Mishawaka's one line sits inside a national record that begins, by the usual reckoning, on 24 June 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine bright objects in a chain near Mount Rainier, Washington, moving, in his phrase, like a saucer skipped across water; a newspaper writer's adaptation of the phrase gave the era its term, "flying saucer." A fortnight later the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico announced, and within a day retracted, the recovery of a "flying disc"; the Air Force's later reports attributed the debris to a classified balloon project, Project Mogul. Mishawaka's single case was reported into a system the Air Force had built to receive such reports.

The system: The Air Force ran three successive studies: Project Sign (from December 1947), Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book (March 1952 to 17 December 1969), headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Air Force's own fact sheet gives the totals this section uses throughout: from 1947 to 1969, 12,618 sightings were reported to Project Blue Book, and 701 of them remained "Unidentified" at the close; 11,917 were found to have been caused by material objects (balloons, satellites, aircraft), immaterial objects (lightning, reflections and other natural phenomena), astronomical objects (stars, planets, the sun and the moon), weather conditions, and hoaxes. The project's stated conclusions, quoted from the same fact sheet, were three: no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force ever gave any indication of threat to national security; there was no evidence that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" were extraterrestrial vehicles. The decision to terminate the project rested on the University of Colorado's study, "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" (the Condon report). The records — about 84,000 pages by the National Archives' account — passed to the National Archives, where the case files sit on microfilm publication T-1206, arranged chronologically. Every Blue Book statement in this section is drawn from those records, from the Air Force's own yearly indexes to them, or from the fact sheet itself.

Sources:

1. U.S. Air Force Fact Sheet concerning UFOs and Project BLUE BOOK (Wright-Patterson AFB, January 1985), via the National Archives — the 12,618 / 701 totals, the explained-categories breakdown, the three conclusions, the termination rationale.
2. National Archives, Project BLUE BOOK reference report — the record set's size (about 84,000 pages), its chronological arrangement and its custody on microfilm publication T-1206.
3. Contemporary and reference accounts of the Arnold report (24 June 1947) and the Roswell press release and retraction (8–9 July 1947); the Air Force's 1990s reports attributing the Roswell debris to Project Mogul.