SUBJECT: PROJECT GRUDGE FILE: UFO2471 With the initiation of Project Grudge, wrote Edward J. Ruppelt, who would serve as the project's last director and the first of its successor, Project Blue Book, the "Dark Ages" of U.S. Air Force UFO study began. Reports were now "being evaluated on the premise that UFOs couldn't exist. No matter what you see or hear, don't believe it" (Ruppelt, 1956). Following the rejection by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg of the Estimate of the Situation, prepared by the pro-extraterrestrial- visitation faction of Project Sign, the project (head-quartered at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio) was taken over by personnel who were convinced that all reports could be accounted for in conventional terms. Plans for an expanded investigation were canceled. On February 11, 1949, Sign was renamed Grudge, retaining the older project's 2A security classification. As part of its effort to "get rid of UFOs," as Ruppelt put it, Grudge cooperated with journalist Sidney Shallett, who in a two-part article in the widely read Saturday Evening Post wrote that flying saucers had much more to do with mistakes, hoaxes, and gullibility than with interplanetary visitors (Shallett, 1949). Grudge thought that Shallett's piece would discourage people from reporting UFOs, but when a flood of sightings came to the project a few days after the second installment, personnel were convinced that because Shallett had mentioned, if only in passing, that some sightings remained unexplained, his article had only fed belief in UFOs. A debunking press release a few days later failed to stem rising interest in UFOs - and suspicions of official pronouncement on the subject. According to Ruppelt, the Shallett article, indicative of what to outsiders (and even some insiders) looked like an abrupt reversal in official UFO policy, "planted a ... seed of doubt. If UFOs were so serious a few months ago, why the sudden debunking? Maybe Shallett's story was a put-up job for the Air Force" (ibid.). With J. Allen Hynek, an Ohio State University astronomer and UFO skeptic who had been hired as consultant to give a scientist's perspective on sightings, Grudge set out to explain all reports. By August 1949 it had prepared a 600-page report (Technical Report No. 102-AC 49/15-100, classified Secret) which reviewed 244 sightings. It acknowledged that 23 percent remained unexplained, but "there are sufficient psychological explanations for the reports of unidentified flying objects to provide plausible explanations for reports not otherwise explainable.... [T]here is no evidence that objects reported upon are the result of an advanced scientific foreign development; and therefore, they constitute no direct threat to the national security." Nonetheless, anticipating a later concern of the CIA-sponsored Robertson panel, Grudge fretted that "public apprehension" about UFOs could be used by enemy forces for psychological- warfare purposes. The project "recommended that the investigation and study" of UFO reports "be reduced in scope" (Gillmor, 1969). Thereafter Grudge "lapsed more and more into a period of almost complete inactivity" (Ruppelt, op. cit.). On December 27 the Air Force announced it was closing down the project, even as it was launching a classified investigation into a rash of reports of unusual aerial phenomena in New Mexico (see Green Fireballs and Other Southwestern Lights). Meanwhile Grudge's files were put into storage. In its January 1950 issue True, then a hugely popular men's magazine, ran a dramatic article, "The Flying Saucers Are Real," by retired Marine Corps major and aviation journalist Donald E. Keyhoe. Keyhoe wrote that "Project Saucer" - the project's public nickname (its classified real name was not generally known) - was only pretending to be skeptical, that in reality it knew UFOs to be extraterrestrial but wanted to keep this unsettling truth secret. The article attracted enormous attention and for years afterwards influenced popular opinion about an official UFO cover-up. The public pronouncement notwithstanding, Grudge was not quite dead. It retained a marginal existence, enough at least to assist Bob Considine as he researched a UFO-bashing piece which would appear in the January 1951 issue of Cosmopolitan. In it Considine, with Grudge's encouragement, lashed out at UFO witnesses, whom he characterized as "screwballs" and "true believers." By the summer of that year the nearly inert Grudge was down to one investigator, Lt. Jerry Cummings. But the situation changed rapidly in September, following a series of sightings and radar trackings of fast- moving unknowns in the vicinity of an Army Signal Corps radar center in New Jersey (see Fort Monmouth Radar/Visual Case). Ordered to investigate immediately, Cummings and Lt. Col. N. R. Rosengarten, chief of the Air Technical Intelligence Center's Aircraft and Missiles Branch, spent a day at the site interviewing all participants, then reported personally to Maj. Gen. C. P. Cabell, head of Air Force Intelligence. Once there, Cummings and Rosengarten were taken into a meeting already in progress and subjected to severe criticism by Cabell, other high-ranking military officers, and two representatives of Republic Aircraft. The group complained about the quality of Grudge's work and its apparent indifference to a potentially explosive national-security matter. By the time the two officers were ready to return to Wright-Patterson, they had been ordered to reorganize the UFO project. Cumming's days in the Air Force were numbered, however, and soon he was released from active duty to return to the California Institute of Technology, to resume work on a classified government project. Rosengarten asked Ruppelt, an intelligence officer attached to the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson, to reorganize Grudge. On October 27 Grudge was officially back in business. Ruppelt set about filing and cross-referencing all Grudge and sign reports. He put together a staff consisting of individuals who had no firm opinions about the UFO phenomenon and consequently could judge reports on their merits. ("I had to let three people go for being too pro or too con" [ibid.].) Beginning in December, staff members prepared regular status reports which were issued approximately monthly. Four of these appeared during Grudge's remaining reign; the first three were classified Confidential, the last Secret (United States Air Force, 1968). Working with Hynek, the new Grudge staff prepared a standardized questionnaire for UFO reports. Ruppelt and others briefed Air Force officers around the country to let them know that reports would be gladly received and competently investigated. In an effort to learn about sightings Grudge was not getting, Ruppelt subscribed to a clipping service. He hoped to be able to gain insights into the UFO phenomenon through the compilation of statistics, and he got the Air Force to agree. It contracted with the Battle Memorial Institute, a Columbus-based think tank, to conduct such an analysis (which would be incorporated into Project Blue Book Special Report 14, released in 1955). By March 1952 the Air Force had upgraded Grudge from a mere "project within a group" to a "separate organization, with the formal title of the Aerial Phenomena Group" (ibid.). That same month Grudge got a new name: Project Blue Book. SOURCE: The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning Through 1959 by Jerome Clark ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************