Project Twinkle Final Report, November 1951

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ernissive clouds issuing 1rom atomic installations also has been rroposcd .
IW"ly ot· the sightinf;S are attributable to natural ohcnoruena such as
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flight 0 ~ o1r ds , planets , meteors , and possib~y cloudiness . Dr . Fred L.
\Ihi pole of Harvard , in a memorandum to t his lo.bo1·atory dated 9 J~urrt.tst 1950
relative to this problell, indicated that he had observed a tendency for
the occurrence of small detachea clouds in Hou l ~xi co Hhich might have
been mist~en for an aerial object when illuminated by the reflected
light of the moon. Dr . .hipple investigated the possibility of a cor-
relation between the frequency of aerial pheno~ena observations and
weather conditions -- specifically cloudiness . A rough analysis of
available \reather data, in... icated that on the 53 nights (bet\veen
5 December 1948 and 5 March 1951) vrhen observations were r eoorted , 10
were clear , · 4 partially cloudy, 5 cor.1pletcly overcast and 14 had no
record. The nt~ber of cloudy nights i nvolved seems unusually hirh f or
New I:exico. The weather reports vrere for the Las Cruces Ar~a only where-
as many of the observations were a considerable distance from Las Cruces .
li'urther investigation is therefore necess ary to determine correlations
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with cloudiness .
ur . Uhiople also conducted a study us to \Jhethcr tho ar:e of the
moon was related to th0 frequency of aerial phenomena observations . The
res~ts did not indicate that the phenomena were observed largely at
fUll moon . The stctistics show th8t of the 72 observations reported, 45
occurred when the moon was uo 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 . lhipple sugges ts that the existence of moon-
light is correlated with the ohenomena. Dr . \lhipple 1 s frequency diagrar1
of observations vs . age of moon is included in.tbjs report. ~ - - _
'AT 8 YEAR INTERVAT~S:
AFTER 12 YEARS.
PIB 6200.10·~· .