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 It was learned from Major Doty; that Col. Baynes, C. O. at HAFB, no longer felt there was any justification for the allocation of funds for maintaining systematic investigation. Rather, he provided that the project be maintained on a standby basis and without official Air Force status. This entails assignment of an officer (Major Doty) to collect incoming reports, make periodic review of the files "for patterns or persistent characteristics in the reports", maintain liaison with OSI, Provost Marshall's Office and any other agencies whose activities may serve to provide information concerning future aerial phenomena developments. Land-Air has agreed to report and if possible photograph any abnormal sightings made during their scheduled periods of operation (about eight hours each day). The weather station will function similarly. Also, all pilots have been briefed to report any unusual observations. If necessary, the project can be activated very quickly, even to the extent where funds will be made available, for the purchase of equipment. Major Doty also arranged a conference with Mr. Warren Kott, who is in charge of Land-Air operations. Mr. Kott pointed out that a formal report covering the year's vigilance period had not been issued since the contract contained no such provision. Actually, a time correlation study should be made covering the film and verbal recordings at both Askania stations. This would assure that these records did not contain significant material. However, such a study is quite laborious, and would require about thirty man days to complete. Again, no provisions are contained in the contract for this study, but Mr. Kott felt that
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.