SUBJECT: PROJECT GRUDGE FILE: UFO2471
With the initiation of Project Grudge, wrote Edward J. Ruppelt, who would
serve as the project's last director and the first of its successor, Project
Blue Book, the "Dark Ages" of U.S. Air Force UFO study began. Reports were
now "being evaluated on the premise that UFOs couldn't exist. No matter
what you see or hear, don't believe it" (Ruppelt, 1956).
Following the rejection by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg
of the Estimate of the Situation, prepared by the pro-extraterrestrial-
visitation faction of Project Sign, the project (head-quartered at Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio) was taken over by personnel who were
convinced that all reports could be accounted for in conventional terms.
Plans for an expanded investigation were canceled. On February 11, 1949, Sign
was renamed Grudge, retaining the older project's 2A security classification.
As part of its effort to "get rid of UFOs," as Ruppelt put it, Grudge
cooperated with journalist Sidney Shallett, who in a two-part article in the
widely read Saturday Evening Post wrote that flying saucers had much more
to do with mistakes, hoaxes, and gullibility than with interplanetary visitors
(Shallett, 1949). Grudge thought that Shallett's piece would discourage
people from reporting UFOs, but when a flood of sightings came to the
project a few days after the second installment, personnel were convinced
that because Shallett had mentioned, if only in passing, that some sightings
remained unexplained, his article had only fed belief in UFOs. A debunking
press release a few days later failed to stem rising interest in UFOs - and
suspicions of official pronouncement on the subject.
According to Ruppelt, the Shallett article, indicative of what to outsiders
(and even some insiders) looked like an abrupt reversal in official UFO
policy, "planted a ... seed of doubt. If UFOs were so serious a few months
ago, why the sudden debunking? Maybe Shallett's story was a put-up job
for the Air Force" (ibid.).
With J. Allen Hynek, an Ohio State University astronomer and UFO skeptic
who had been hired as consultant to give a scientist's perspective on
sightings, Grudge set out to explain all reports. By August 1949 it had
prepared a 600-page report (Technical Report No. 102-AC 49/15-100,
classified Secret) which reviewed 244 sightings. It acknowledged that 23
percent remained unexplained, but "there are sufficient psychological
explanations for the reports of unidentified flying objects to provide
plausible explanations for reports not otherwise explainable.... [T]here is
no evidence that objects reported upon are the result of an advanced
scientific foreign development; and therefore, they constitute no direct
threat to the national security." Nonetheless, anticipating a later concern
of the CIA-sponsored Robertson panel, Grudge fretted that "public
apprehension" about UFOs could be used by enemy forces for psychological-
warfare purposes.
The project "recommended that the investigation and study" of UFO reports
"be reduced in scope" (Gillmor, 1969).
Thereafter Grudge "lapsed more and more into a period of almost complete
inactivity" (Ruppelt, op. cit.). On December 27 the Air Force announced it
was closing down the project, even as it was launching a classified
investigation into a rash of reports of unusual aerial phenomena in New
Mexico (see Green Fireballs and Other Southwestern Lights). Meanwhile
Grudge's files were put into storage.
In its January 1950 issue True, then a hugely popular men's magazine, ran a
dramatic article, "The Flying Saucers Are Real," by retired Marine Corps
major and aviation journalist Donald E. Keyhoe. Keyhoe wrote that
"Project Saucer" - the project's public nickname (its classified real name was
not generally known) - was only pretending to be skeptical, that in reality it
knew UFOs to be extraterrestrial but wanted to keep this unsettling truth
secret. The article attracted enormous attention and for years afterwards
influenced popular opinion about an official UFO cover-up.
The public pronouncement notwithstanding, Grudge was not quite dead. It
retained a marginal existence, enough at least to assist Bob Considine as he
researched a UFO-bashing piece which would appear in the January 1951 issue of
Cosmopolitan. In it Considine, with Grudge's encouragement, lashed out at UFO
witnesses, whom he characterized as "screwballs" and "true believers."
By the summer of that year the nearly inert Grudge was down to one
investigator, Lt. Jerry Cummings. But the situation changed rapidly in
September, following a series of sightings and radar trackings of fast-
moving unknowns in the vicinity of an Army Signal Corps radar center in
New Jersey (see Fort Monmouth Radar/Visual Case). Ordered to investigate
immediately, Cummings and Lt. Col. N. R. Rosengarten, chief of the Air
Technical Intelligence Center's Aircraft and Missiles Branch, spent a day at
the site interviewing all participants, then reported personally to Maj.
Gen. C. P. Cabell, head of Air Force Intelligence. Once there, Cummings
and Rosengarten were taken into a meeting already in progress and
subjected to severe criticism by Cabell, other high-ranking military officers,
and two representatives of Republic Aircraft. The group complained about
the quality of Grudge's work and its apparent indifference to a potentially
explosive national-security matter. By the time the two officers were ready
to return to Wright-Patterson, they had been ordered to reorganize the UFO
project.
Cumming's days in the Air Force were numbered, however, and soon he was
released from active duty to return to the California Institute of
Technology, to resume work on a classified government project.
Rosengarten asked Ruppelt, an intelligence officer attached to the Air
Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson, to reorganize
Grudge. On October 27 Grudge was officially back in business.
Ruppelt set about filing and cross-referencing all Grudge and sign reports.
He put together a staff consisting of individuals who had no firm opinions
about the UFO phenomenon and consequently could judge reports on their
merits. ("I had to let three people go for being too pro or too con"
[ibid.].) Beginning in December, staff members prepared regular status
reports which were issued approximately monthly. Four of these appeared
during Grudge's remaining reign; the first three were classified Confidential,
the last Secret (United States Air Force, 1968).
Working with Hynek, the new Grudge staff prepared a standardized
questionnaire for UFO reports. Ruppelt and others briefed Air Force
officers around the country to let them know that reports would be gladly
received and competently investigated. In an effort to learn about sightings
Grudge was not getting, Ruppelt subscribed to a clipping service. He hoped
to be able to gain insights into the UFO phenomenon through the
compilation of statistics, and he got the Air Force to agree. It contracted
with the Battle Memorial Institute, a Columbus-based think tank, to conduct
such an analysis (which would be incorporated into Project Blue Book
Special Report 14, released in 1955).
By March 1952 the Air Force had upgraded Grudge from a mere "project
within a group" to a "separate organization, with the formal title of the
Aerial Phenomena Group" (ibid.). That same month Grudge got a new
name: Project Blue Book.
SOURCE: The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning Through 1959
by Jerome Clark
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