Documents / Report
This declassified U.S. Air Force file contains the final report of Project Twinkle, dated 27 November 1951 and written by Louis Elterman of the Geophysics Research Division, together with related correspondence. The project was set up to investigate the green fireballs and other light phenomena around Holloman AFB and Vaughn, New Mexico, and it was run with Askania cameras. The report calls its findings essentially negative and recommends no further funding. In March 1952 the Directorate of Intelligence declined to declassify it.
“Headquarters”5 pages
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## 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
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. 29 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.