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.
# UNCLASSIFIED It should be noted that Dr. Whipple made a careful study of meteor photographs taken in New Mexico on 35 nights when observations were reported. None of the photographs revealed the presence of unusual sky phenomena. Finally, the overall picture obtained from the year of vigilance and inquiry does not permit a conclusive opinion concerning the aerial phenomena of interest. The comparatively high incidence of the phenomena since 1948 does not necessarily indicate that the objects are man-made. It is conceivable that the earth may be passing through a region in space of high meteoric population. Also, the sun-spot maxima in 1948 perhaps in some way may be a contributing factor. 6. Recommendations Since the findings to date cannot be considered conclusive, it appears that the following recommendations would be pertinent:
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.