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Project Sign was an official U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) undertaken by the United States Air Force and active for most of 1948. Project Sign's final report, published in early 1949, stated that while some UFOs appeared to represent actual aircraft there was not enough data to determine their origin.〔Blum, Howard, Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. Simon and Schuster, 1990〕 However, prior to this final report, Sign officially argued that UFOs were likely of extraterrestrial origin, and most of the project's personnel came to favor the extraterrestrial hypothesis before this opinion was rejected and in 1948 project sign was reorganized and renamed Project Grudge, which was later renamed Project Blue Book in 1952.〔Edward J. Ruppelt (1956). ''The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects'', Doubleday & Co. (online )〕〔Swords, Michael D. (2000). "Project Sign and the Estimate of the Situation." Journal of UFO Studies, n.s. 7, 2000, pp. 27-64.〕 Project Sign was first disclosed to the public in 1956 via the book ''The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects'' by retired Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt.〔 The full files for Sign were declassified in 1961.〔Hoyt, Diana Palmer (2000). (UFOCritique: UFOs, Social Intelligence, and the Condon Committee ); Master's thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.〕 ==Background== On June 24, 1947 while flying his small airplane near Mt. Rainer, Washington, businessman Kenneth Arnold said he witnessed nine disc- or saucer-like aerial objects. (A month later he added that one was actually more crescent-shaped.) By pacing their progress against known landmarks, Arnold conservatively calculated their speed at a then-fantastic 1,700 mph. Arnold, widely considered a sincere and credible witness, earned major press coverage, and his was easily the most prominent of the more than 800 "flying objects" (flying saucer was never used in his reports) reports made by Americans in the summer of 1947.〔〔Bloecher, Ted (1967). (Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 ).〕 Because of their extreme maneuvers that would kill a human pilot, Arnold initially concluded he'd witnessed either the test flight of a new military remote-controlled weapon or that the objects were from another world.〔(Interview with Arnold in Chicago Daily Times, July 7, 1947, p.3, "'Flying discs' called real by 2 air veterans." )〕 By the first week of July 1947, Pentagon officials were expressing alarm about the flying disk reports, due in no small part to a remarkable series of close encounters in and near the restricted airspace near Muroc Army Air Base (now Edwards AFB). On 7 July 1947 at about 10.00 a.m., pilot Major J.C. Wise was readying his XP-84 jet at Muroc when he observed a circular white-yellow object at about 10,000 feet. It flew to the east at what Wise estimated was 200 to 225 mph (320 to 360 km/h). On 8 July at about 8.00 a.m., three highway department employees near Yuma, Arizona reported three silvery disks flying at high altitude towards the northeast. At roughly 9.30 a.m., four military personnel at Muroc reported two circular objects flying against the wind at about 300 mph (480 km/h), making tight circular motions as they receded towards the horizon. At about noon at nearby Rogers Dry Lake test range, two technicians observing an ejection seat test also observed a silvery object at about 20,000 feet (6000 m) for about 90 seconds. At about 9.00 pm that evening, a P-51 pilot twice attempted to intercept what he would describe as a "flat object of light-reflecting nature," thought he was unable to reach its altitude.〔〔 Though they occurred six months before Sign's official creation, the Muroc incidents were cataloged as the first case in Sign's files.〔 Following the Muroc incidents, military personnel were told to not publicly discuss flying saucers without permission.〔 New orders were issued requiring all unexplained flying saucer incidents to be reported to the T-2 division at Wright Field. T-2, which studied enemy aircraft during WWII, would soon be renamed Technical Intelligence Division (TID).〔 In a document dated July 10, the office of Air Force Directorate of Intelligence at the Pentagon requested the assistance of other branches of the armed forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in compiling data and determining how to best investigate the flying saucer reports.〔 In a document dated 30 July 1947, Lt. Col. George Garrett at the Pentagon analyzed data from sixteen flying saucer reports which had occurred from 19 May to 12 July 1947; several had occurred at military facilities.〔 Garrett's report noted that credible eyewitnesses, some of them with scientific or technical training, gave detailed descriptions of highly unorthodox aircraft that exhibited advanced flight capabilities and were seemingly under intelligent control. He wrote, "something is really flying around." Given the distinct lack of inquiries about the flying saucers from "topside" (i.e., higher-ranking officials), Garrett thought it probable that they were a newly developed "domestic aircraft." Garrett's report was forwarded to his superiors and to the FBI, both of whom inquired of military contacts to determine if the flying disks were in fact domestically-developed aircraft. The answer was a resounding no.〔 Gen. George Schulgen, Garrett's superior at the Pentagon, ordered a more thorough review of flying saucer data. In response, Lt. Gen. Nathan F. Twining, then-head of Air Material Command's intelligence and engineering divisions at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (then Wright Field), compiled and analyzed the data. Twining's memorandum to Schulgen, dated 23 September 1947, stated, in part:〔Twining, Nathan (1947). (AMC Opinion Concerning "Flying Discs" ); URL accessed February 23, 2007〕 * The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. * There are objects probably approximately the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft. * There is the possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena, such as meteors. * 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. * It is possible within the present U.S. knowledge... to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description ... * Any development in this country along the lines indicated would be extremely expensive... * Due consideration must be given to the following: :: The possibility that these objects are of domestic origin - the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this command. :: The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects. :: The possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion, possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge. Twining also recommended that " ... Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and code name for detailed study of this matter." 〔Clark, Jerome (1998). ''The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial''. Detroit: Visible Ink, ISBN 1-57859-029-9〕 Though conducted by the Army Air Force, the study's information and conclusions would be made available to all the armed services, and to scientific agencies with formal government ties. In early December 1947, Gen. Curtis LeMay asked for an update on the flying saucer investigation. Twining's memo, which had been revised and expanded as it climbed the chain of command, recommended that a project be formally established to investigate the flying saucer phenomenon. The project was formally authorized on 30 December 1947 by Director of Research and Development under the Deputy Chief of staff for Materiel at Headquarters U.S. Air Force., Maj. Gen. Laurence Craigie, who had recently replaced LeMay.〔 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." 〔(Text of Craigie's directive setting up Project Sign )〕 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〔Swords, Michael D. "UFOs, the Military, and the Early Cold War" (pp. 82–122 in ''UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge''. David M. Jacobs, editor; University Press of Kansas, 2000〕 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.〔Hall, Michael D. and Wendy Connors (n.d.). (Alfred Loedding and the Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947 ).〕 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,〔Connors, Wendy. "(Project Blue Book )"〕 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Project Sign」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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