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.
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# UNCLASSIFIED emissive clouds issuing from atomic installations also has been proposed. Many of the sightings are attributable to natural phenomena such as flight of birds, planets, meteors, and possibly cloudiness. Dr. Fred L. Whipple of Harvard, in a memorandum to this laboratory dated 9 August 1950 relative to this problem, indicated that he had observed a tendency for the occurrence of small detached clouds in New Mexico which might have been mistaken for an aerial object when illuminated by the reflected light of the moon. Dr. Whipple investigated the possibility of a correlation between the frequency of aerial phenomena observations and weather conditions -- specifically cloudiness. A rough analysis of available weather data, indicated that on the 53 nights (between 5 December 1948 and 5 March 1951) when observations were reported, 10 were clear, 24 partially cloudy, 5 completely overcast and 14 had no record. The number of cloudy nights involved seems unusually high for New Mexico. The weather reports were for the Las Cruces Area only where as many of the observations were a considerable distance from Las Cruces. Further investigation is therefore necessary to determine correlations with cloudiness. Dr. Whipple also conducted a study as to whether the age of the moon was related to the frequency of aerial phenomena observations. The results did not indicate that the phenomena were observed largely at full moon. The statistics show that of the 72 observations reported, 45 occurred when the moon was up and 27 when it was down with many of the observations occurring at the time of the moon's first quarter. From the statistical study, Dr. Whipple suggests that the existence of moonlight is correlated with the phenomena. Dr. Whipple's frequency diagram of observations vs. age of moon is included in this report. CONFIDENTIAL UNCLASSIFIED DOWNGRADED AT 8 YEAR INTERVAL DECLASSIFIED AFTER 12 YEARS. DQD. DIR. 5200.10
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.