In early March, 1996, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a researcher in the United States, a 289-page document was unclassified by the United States Air Force. The document contains the minutes of a meeting held May 17 and 18, 1948 by the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. I do not at present have the entire document in my possession, but I received the one page on which UFOs were referenced.
The meeting was presided over by Dr. Theodore Von Karman. General Hoyt Vandenberg represented General Carl Spaatz, Air Force Chief of Staff. The Chief of the Intelligence Department, Air Material Command, Colonel McCoy, along with Colonel Taylor, gave a detailed briefing on the Utilization of Technical Intelligence.
The researcher who sent the document to me indicates that while the document had only been classified as secret, it can be speculated that all the participants held "Top Secret" clearances.
According to the document, Colonel McCoy mentioned UFOs on only one occasion during the meeting. He said:
"...We have a new project -- Project SIGN -- which may surprise you as a development from the so-called mass hysteria of the past summer when we had all the unidentified flying objects or discs. This can't be laughed off. We have over 300 reports which haven't been publicized in the papers from very competent personnel, in many instances -- men as capable as Dr. K. D. Wood, and practically all Air Force, Airline people with broad experience. We are running down every report. I can't even tell you how much we would give to have one of those crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are."
The clear implication that the Air Force did NOT have recovered material from a crash by the time of this 1948 meeting raises serious questions. Might such a statement spell an end to the Roswell story? Could Col. McCoy have just made this statement because some people at the meeting did not have the clearance to know the truth? (Since this was a "secret" rather than "top secret" meeting, according to the classification of the minutes, any reference to recovered alien artifacts might have been automatically avoided.) Was it a planted statement included only to confuse UFO researchers some decades later?
For the moment, these questions remain unanswerable. But I believe this document and its implications will be hotly debated in the near future.
Original file name: .CNI - FOIA
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