Category: Air Force Studies

• The Project Sign Cover-up

  This theory held that Project Sign, the first formal U.S. Air Force study of flying saucers, reached an extraordinary conclusion in 1948: that at least some UFOs were interplanetary craft. According to later accounts within UFO history, Sign staff wrote this assessment into a classified document known as the Estimate of the Situation, only to have it rejected and destroyed—sometimes specifically said to have been burned—by higher command. No authenticated copy has surfaced in the archival record. Even so, the story became one of the most important early cover-up traditions because it implied that the Air Force privately accepted the extraterrestrial explanation almost from the beginning.