Project Sign: the U.S. Air Force's first UFO report (1948) is now online
On July 10, 2026, the U.S. Department of War's PURSUE portal published online the "Project Sign Progress Report": the initial report of the Air Force's first official program to investigate "flying discs," dated April 23, 1948 at Wright-Patterson AFB (Ohio) and signed by Col. H. M. McCoy, chief of intelligence of the Air Materiel Command. It is a snapshot of official ufology's "moment zero": the document with which the government literally began counting saucers.
Project Sign was born out of the 1947 wave — Kenneth Arnold's Mt. Rainier sighting and the hundreds of reports that summer. The order was signed by Gen. L. C. Craigie on December 30, 1947, and the report itself confirms the bureaucratic start first-hand: "Project HT-304 was activated on 26 January 1948." To the public it was sold under another name: "Project Saucer."
What's inside? A tabulation of some 85 incidents reported through February 1948 — including the Muroc AFB sightings of July 1947, Arnold's, and the case of Capt. Thomas Mantell, killed in January 1948 while chasing an object over Kentucky, broken down into seven sub-incidents — and history's first official UFO statistics: the object was described as "oval, disc or saucer-shaped" some 31 times; reported sizes ranged "from that of a 25-cent piece to 250 feet in diameter"; and speed, verbatim, "has been estimated throughout the entire range from very slow or hovering to supersonic."
Most revealing is what it does NOT say: in April 1948 the word "extraterrestrial" does not appear once. The working hypothesis was terrestrial. The team consulted Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir — who was "reluctant to consider the so-called 'flying discs' as a reality" — cross-checked the schedules of night-flying advertising blimps as a possible source of reports, and attached studies on the Horten brothers' German flying wings. They suspected a secret weapon (their own, inherited German, or Soviet), not visitors.
The contrast would come four months later. According to Edward Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, after the Chiles-Whitted airline pilot sighting (July 1948) the Sign team drafted the legendary "Estimate of the Situation": a TOP SECRET report concluding the objects were interplanetary. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg rejected it for lack of physical proof and ordered all copies destroyed. Not one has ever surfaced. What survived the fire is exactly what can be read today.
The honest caveat: these papers are not unseen. The National Archives stamps they carry (NND 927545) show they were declassified years ago through ordinary channels; what is new is the government publishing them digitized, gathered and searchable on its UAP portal. And the two cases that drove the program have documented conventional explanations: Mantell likely chased a secret Navy Skyhook balloon and died of oxygen starvation; the Chiles-Whitted object was attributed to a fireball.
The same release included the "Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S." (1948-49), produced jointly by Air Force and Navy intelligence, TOP SECRET in its day. Its conclusion, verbatim: "The conclusion that some type of flying object has been observed over the U.S. seems to be substantiated. It is not known at this time whether these observations are misidentifications of domestically launched devices, natural phenomena, or foreign unconventional aircraft." If they belonged to anyone, they were thinking Moscow, not Mars.
All three complete documents, with their full searchable text, are now in Nodriza's Declassified archive (D097, D093 and D094, PURSUE Release 04), citing the official source.