Project Sign: The Air Force's First UFO Investigation Reveal

Project Sign: The Air Force's First UFO Investigation Revealed in 1948 Progress Report

This initial report on unidentified flying objects, directed by General L. C. Craigie in December 1947, consolidates over 100 incident reports and documents a consultation with Dr. Irving Langmuir of General Electric, who was 'reluctant to consider the so-called flying discs as a reality.'

Published

October 6, 2026

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Project Sign's 1948 Progress Report on Unidentified Objects

The document That single administrative sentence establishes the document's status: this is the first installment of a formal, scheduled investigative program, not an isolated memorandum. The report's scope is deliberately bounded. It consolidates reports received directly by Headquarters AMC together with those forwarded by the Director of Intelligence, USAF, and Inclosure 1 tabulates and breaks down all available reports through 1 February 1948.

The program itself was activated as Project HT-304 on 26 January 1948, with Technical Instruction 2185 published on 11 February 1948. " What makes the document consequential is the posture of its authors. They did not treat the sightings as folklore.

They cross-checked schedules of lighted night-flying advertising blimps as a possible source of incident reports, and they catalogued performance characteristics — high rates of climb, apparent hovering, reported sizes from a 25-cent piece to 260 feet in diameter — as engineering data. The central question the…

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Based on the official release at https://www.war.gov/UFO/

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DOW-UAP-D097, Project Sign Progress Report, 1948

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https://www.war.gov/UFO/

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