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.
# CONFIDENTIAL ## 1. Background In accordance with instructions contained in a classified letter from Chief of Staff, USAF to CG, AMC, subject "Light Phenomena", on 14 September 1949, Lt. Col. Frederic C.E. Oder of CRD attended a conference at Los Alamos, 14 October 1949 on the subject of "Green Fireballs" observed in the Northern New Mexico area. Since the phenomena had been observed only in this area and only since 1947, it had caused considerable concern among security agencies in the area. It was the conclusion of the scientists present at this meeting that the information available was not sufficiently quantitative. Instrumental observations - photographic, triangulation, and spectroscopic were considered essential. Dr. L. La Paz of the Department of Meteoritics of Univ. of New Mexico was present at the Los Alamos meeting and subsequently was invited to submit proposals for studying this phenomena under GRD sponsorship. On 2 February 1950, Dr. La Paz advised that due to difficulties with academic arrangements, he was unable to undertake this study. During February 1950, the frequent reports of unexplained aerial phenomena in the vicinity of Holloman Air Force Base and Vaughn, New Mexico prompted the Commanding Officer of Holloman Air Force Base to initiate a program to gather factual data.
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.