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.
“Holloman Air Force Base”3 pages
## ABSTRACT Early in 1950 the Geophysics Research Division received a directive to investigate peculiar light phenomena that had been observed in the skies of the southwestern United States. Project Twinkle was established to check into these phenomena and their explanation. The gist of the findings is essentially negative. The period of observations covers a little over a year. Some unusual phenomena were observed during that period, most of them can be attributed to such man-made objects as airplanes, balloons, rockets, etc. Others can be attributed to natural phenomena such as flying birds, small clouds, and meteorites. There has been no indication that even the somewhat strange observations often called "Green Fireballs" are anything but natural phenomena. Our recommendations are in essence that there is no use in sinking any more funds into this at the present time and that we will keep in connection with one of our meteor studies a sharp eye on anything unusual along this line. DECLASSIFIED AFTER 12 YEARS. DOD DIR 5200.10 Security Information UNCLASSIFIED
Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 16 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.