Documents / Report
The Project Twinkle Final Report, approved 27 November 1951 by Louis Elterman of the Air Force Geophysics Research Division's Atmospheric Physics Laboratory, describes a camera and observation program begun in 1950 to investigate green fireballs and other light phenomena over New Mexico, at Vaughn and Holloman AFB. It says the findings were essentially negative and puts most sightings down to aircraft, balloons, birds, planets, meteors or clouds. It recommends no further spending, with meteor camera film to be checked instead.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## ALG this could be done by Land-Air at the additional expense in the near future when the work load diminished. Mr. Kott requested formal authorization to do this and Major Doty agreed to issue this letter of authorization. It was arranged further that at such time when the study is completed all photographic and tape recordings would be sent to the Geophysics Research Division. Prior to departing HAFB, the project files were reviewed. Major Doty advised that access to the files had not been requested by any periodicals. On 28 August 1951, the subject was discussed informally with Dr. Lincoln La Paz, who expressed disbelief in all aerial phenomena except for the green fire-balls. The red fire-ball occasionally reported he believed was the visual after-effect of the green. Their recent origin (1947) and peculiar trajectories did not permit, according to Dr. La Paz, them to be classed as natural phenomena. The most recent that has come to his attention occurred over Detroit on 7 July 1951. It crossed the city from Northwest to Southeast with a sharply descending trajectory which leveled out and was observed by many residents of the city. Dr. La Paz expressed the opinion that the fireballs may be of our own military origin, but if not, they are a matter of serious concern. ## 5. Conclusions Undoubtedly, a good many of the observations reported are attributable to ordinary man-made objects such as airplanes, balloons, smoke rockets, etc. It appears that balloon observations especially are responsible for a large number of the reports. The possibility of small
Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 16 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.