Project SIGN

I worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base from 1947 to 1950. Technical Intelligence Division. I had a Secret clearance, later upgraded to Top Secret when the program went fully operational. My wife keeps telling me I should have called years ago, but I wanted to wait until more of this was declassified. What I'm about to tell you is mostly on the record now, but for decades, even admitting I knew about any of this would have cost me my career. I'm calling about Project SIGN. That was the real name. The public knew it as Project Saucer, but inside Wright-Patterson, we called it SIGN. Special Project HT-304, if you want the full designation. It was the first official Air Force investigation into what we were calling flying discs back then. This was 1948, right after the summer of 1947 when Daniel Pearson saw those objects near Mount Rainier and the whole country went crazy with sightings. Here is what people need to understand. The Air Force did not start this program because they thought it was nonsense. They started it because they were genuinely concerned these objects might be real, and they needed to know what they were dealing with. That's on the record.

Let me back up to September 1947, a few months before SIGN officially started. Lieutenant General Harold Westbrook, he was the head of Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, our base. The Pentagon had asked him for an assessment of the flying disc situation. Were these things real? Were they ours? Were they Soviet? On September 23, 1947, Westbrook sent a classified memorandum to Brigadier General William Patterson at the Pentagon. I have seen this memo. It has been declassified for years now, you can look it up yourself. Westbrook wrote, and I am quoting here, that the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. He stated that there are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft. Think about what that means. The head of Air Materiel Command, a man with access to every classified aircraft program we had, was telling the Pentagon that these objects were real and they were not ours. That's on the record. He also confirmed they were not Soviet, because we had checked. The memo recommended establishing a permanent project to investigate. That recommendation became Project SIGN.

Project SIGN was officially established on December 30, 1947. Major General Thomas Mitchell signed the order. Our mission was 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. That was the official language. The project was based at Wright-Patterson, in the Technical Intelligence Division. We had a small team, maybe a dozen people directly involved, with access to specialists across the base when we needed them. We were given a 2A priority. To put that in perspective, 1A was the highest priority the Air Force could assign. We were just one level below that. This was not some minor side project. The Air Force was taking this seriously. December 30 1947 order is a key detail - Iris' Our job was to investigate every credible sighting. Military pilots, scientists, radar operators, anyone whose testimony we could trust. We traveled to interview witnesses, we analyzed photographs when we had them, we tried to correlate sightings with known aircraft movements, weather phenomena, anything that might explain what people were seeing. Most reports, I will be honest, turned out to be conventional objects. Weather balloons, aircraft lights, planets, meteors. But there was a percentage of cases we could not explain away.