THE DOCUMENT
DOW-UAP-D100, “Air Materiel Command Report on UFOs, 1947-1948”, a Department of War record from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 05, published at war.gov/ufo, cleared 7 August 2026. 245 pages, the largest single document in the release. It is not a report. It is the Headquarters USAF Directorate of Intelligence working correspondence file on “Flying Discs” and Project SIGN, office symbol AFOIR-CO, principal action officer Lt Col George D. Garrett, Jr., running 23 September 1947 to 19 November 1948, declassified under NARA authority NND 57563. Air Materiel Command is the file’s principal correspondent, not its author.
Why this one is worth your time
The release title names a report. There is no report in the file, and no cover page, table of contents, title page or PURSUE release sheet either; the title is a label applied at release. The 245 pages hold a working file kept in Washington by the Directorate of Intelligence, arranged broadly reverse chronologically: fourteen months of traffic between Headquarters USAF and Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson about flying discs. What later hardened into Project SIGN sits here unhardened, as routing slips, indorsements, memoranda for record and requests that were refused.
It also contains, complete, the AMC letter of 23 September 1947 signed by Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining. A keyword search of the released text will not find it.
What the document says
The shape of the file. 45 discrete correspondence items on AFOIR-4 cover sheets, 6 memoranda for record, 11 first indorsements and 2 second indorsements. No appendices, no tabs. Enclosures are called “Incl” and often annotated “n/c” for no copy or “Incl w/d” for withdrawn, so the file records what was attached better than it preserves it. Most substantive pages carry a SECRET stamp struck through, page 210 is marked RESTRICTED, and TOP SECRET appears only in the accountability paperwork at pages 77 to 79. No modern redactions were found, and the * * * marks are 1948-era extract markers for omitted paragraphs. Five pages yield no OCR text: 4, 62, 132, 210 and 240.
The spine. A basic letter of 3 November 1948 from Headquarters USAF, subject “Flying Object Incidents in the United States”, to the Commanding General, Air Materiel Command, signed C. P. Cabell, Major General, Director of Intelligence, control P105530; a 1st Indorsement of 8 November 1948 from Hq AMC, MCIAT/ABD/amb, control T-73017, twelve paragraphs, signed H. M. McCoy, Colonel, Chief, Intelligence Department; and a 2nd Indorsement of about 15 November 1948 back to AMC.
What AMC told Washington. The indorsement opens on a study of approximately 180 incidents. Paragraph 7 records that discs, cigar-shaped objects and balls of light are not of domestic origin. Paragraph 6 records that prominent scientists including Dr Irving Langmuir of General Electric were interviewed, with a further Langmuir interview planned that never appears in the file. Paragraph 8 says the possibility of vehicles from another planet has not been ignored, that tangible evidence is completely lacking, and that AMC plotted incident frequency against the approach curves of Mercury, Venus and Mars, finding a periodic variation which may be purely a coincidence. Paragraph 9 cites “The Books of Charles Fort”, Tiffany Thayer introduction, Henry Holt 1941. Paragraph 10 concludes that most observers have seen a flying object they cannot classify from experience, that there is no conclusive proof such objects other than known balloons are real aircraft, and, in the words quoted below, that their exact nature cannot be established without a crash. Paragraph 11 advises against giving the press anything; paragraph 12 says a summarising technical report is nearly complete.
The Twining letter. Pages 234 to 236, file symbol TSDIN/HNM/ig/6-4100, date stamp SEP 23 1947, subject “AMC Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs’”, to the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, ATTENTION Brig. General George Schulgen, AC/AS-2, control U-39552, SECRET struck through, signed N. F. Twining, Lieutenant General, U.S.A., Commanding. Paragraph 2a on page 234 is the sentence the letter is known for. On the page image it reads, cleanly, that the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. In the released text layer it is wreckage: search that text for “Twining”, for “visionary” or for “fictitious” and you get nothing.
The only case list. The 18 December 1947 “Analysis of ‘Flying Disc’ Reports”, pages 240 to 244, sets out thirteen numbered incidents in three groups. Seven are typical disc observations, all 1947: five Portland police officers on 7 July; William Rhoads of Phoenix the same day, who photographed a round front and square tail in plan form; a PAA mechanic near Harmon Field and three persons at Codroy, both Newfoundland; Kenneth Arnold near Tacoma, Washington on 29 July, with two USAF pilots at Hamilton Field the same day watching two discs trail a P-80 toward Oakland; a crew near Bethel, Alaska outrun at 170 mph; and two discs trailing fire seen from the carrier Ticonderoga off the Oregon coast at 700 to 900 mph. Three are lights and trails, over Maxwell Field, over Birmingham with a photograph taken, and between Midway and Honolulu at an estimated 1,000 knots. Three are radar intercepts near or over Japan.
What that analysis concluded. That flying discs probably represent something real and tangible even though crash-recovered exhibits are not available; that human control, manual, remote or pre-set, must be considered a possibility; and that the discs, if they exist, are on present information foreign in origin, so investigation of the possible country of development should continue. Its paragraph 3 lists six lines already run: an independent AMC study; a canvass for a classified US programme, negative; a scientific group that concluded such phenomena could not account for all the observations; an FBI check for a planned effort to create mass hysteria, first forty witnesses, negative; the first ten sightings against Weather Service balloon releases, no correlation; and the Horten “Ho-9” and “EF-130” flying wings. Its paragraph 1 states that no connection was found between the Swedish ghost rocket sightings and the US and Pacific sightings.
Two further items. “Request for Study by Rand Project”, pages 33 to 34, AMC file symbol MCIAXS, stamped OCT 22 1948, control T-65582, signed W. R. Clingerman, Colonel, Actg Chief, Intelligence Department, carries an Exhibit “A”, Project Sign Study Requirements. It records that AMC has considered whether the objects may have been experimental spaceships, or test vehicles for developing them, and concludes it is more likely they represent a foreign nation’s effort than a product from beyond the Earth. And AMC went to CIA: a McCoy letter of 7 October 1948 and a Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence of 27 October 1948, subject “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”, signed Garrett, asking for any evidence that the objects are of domestic origin.
What was refused. It is Air Force policy, the file says, not to ignore reports of sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere. AMC is the designated collecting agency, every Air Force installation reports direct to it, worldwide from 26 February 1948, and the airlines come in through JANAP 146. But McCoy’s proposal that fighters be held on continuous alert in the Zone of the Interior to intercept discs was rejected by Plans and Operations on 3 March 1948 over the signature of Maj Gen S. E. Anderson, conveyed to AMC on 9 March: too costly, interception impossible without complete radar coverage the Air Force is incapable of providing, and doubtful that fighters could follow up reports emanating for the most part from civilian sources.
What the document does not say
It does not call itself a report. The Department of War’s own PDF metadata misspells “Materiel” as “Material”.
Names later inseparable from this period are absent, on literal and fuzzy search alike: Project Saucer, Project Grudge, Roswell, the 1948 “Estimate of the Situation”, Muroc, Godman Field, Mantell and Chiles-Whitted do not appear in this file. That is a statement about these 245 pages, not about the wider record. Mount Rainier is absent too, which matters: the file’s Kenneth Arnold entry is his 29 July 1947 Tacoma sighting, not the 24 June 1947 Mount Rainier sighting. The witness usually written Rhodes is spelled Rhoads here.
A long list of documents is referenced and not included. The 30 December 1947 letter that established Project SIGN is quoted in a file note at page 232, which then points to Central Files. The Project SIGN final report is not here, nor is the technical report promised in paragraph 12. The 24 September 1947 AMC letter is accounted for but its three inclosures are not: the “Loedding Flying Disc” drawing LD-2, RAE Technical Note AERO 1703, and T-2 report F-SU-1110-ND on the Horten brothers’ German flying wings. Forty-four documents loaned to AMC on 5 February 1948 under Control No. A-2641 appear only as accession numbers, returned 10 March. The “Swedish Incidents” file, Collection Memorandum #7, the Air Intelligence Guide for Alleged Flying Saucer Type Aircraft and JANAP 146 itself are named and none enclosed. No CIA reply appears either: the October 1948 approaches to the Director of Central Intelligence are here, whatever came back is not.
And AMC’s figure of approximately 180 incidents is a count of what AMC had studied by 8 November 1948, not a count of what is in this file.
From the record
a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.
DOW-UAP-D100, page 234, paragraph 2a of the Twining letter of 23 September 1947, read from the page image; the released text layer renders this line as unusable OCR, which is why no keyword search of the file reaches it
a study of approximately 180 such incidents .
DOW-UAP-D100, page 7, opening AMC’s 1st Indorsement of 8 November 1948; the paragraph continues: initial reports were supplemented by mailed check lists, interrogations of other field agencies and personal investigation
a. The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another
DOW-UAP-D100, page 8, paragraph 8 of the same indorsement; the sentence continues: planet has not been ignored, and the next says tangible evidence to support such a conclusion is completely lacking
been sighted, the exact nature of those objects cannot be established until
DOW-UAP-D100, page 9, the third of AMC’s three conclusions in paragraph 10; the sentence continues: physical evidence, such as that which would result from a crash, has been obtained
11. It is not considered advisable to present to the press information
DOW-UAP-D100, page 9, opening the press paragraph; it continues: on objects that cannot yet be identified, and suggests that if the press insist they be told many objects have been identified as weather balloons or astral bodies
(5) On 29 July, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, while flying near
DOW-UAP-D100, page 241, item 5 of the seven typical disc reports in the 18 December 1947 analysis; the entry continues: Tacoma, Washington, where Arnold saw a formation of flying objects whose shape corresponded closely to that in the Rhoads photographs
Where the case connects
This is the paperwork underneath much of what the previous release covered. Release 04 Briefing 2 read the Project Sign progress report, DOW-UAP-D097; the letter that created the project is quoted here at page 232 and then sent to Central Files. Release 04 Briefing 1 covered Study 203, DOW-UAP-D093 and D094, which grew out of the case collection this file is setting up, and Release 04 Briefing 6 the Blue Book paper trail, the same machinery two names later. Release 03 covered the 1948 US Army flying saucer study, DOW-UAP-D084, and the CIA historical block; the AMC approaches to the Director of Central Intelligence here start that relationship, and the answer is in neither place. Release 05 Briefing 6 covers the Scandinavian ghost rockets, which the December 1947 analysis here explicitly disconnects from the US and Pacific sightings, and Release 05 Briefing 4 the Navy’s 1953 film analysis, five years on.
The file’s open ends are mostly its own missing enclosures, and it names them all: the Twining letter’s inclosures, the forty-four loaned documents, the promised technical report, the further Langmuir interview, the CIA answer. Any later tranche that releases them lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
DOW-UAP-D100, “Air Materiel Command Report on UFOs, 1947-1948”, 245 pages, is hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 05. The Twining letter is at pages 234 to 236 and the case list at pages 240 to 244. Read both from the page images.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and publisher behind this briefing, and on the subjects it touches.
- PURSUE
- Department of War
- Air Materiel Command
- Nathan F. Twining
- George Schulgen
- H. M. McCoy
- Project Sign
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-D100, “Air Materiel Command Report on UFOs, 1947-1948”, PURSUE Release 05, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 04 Briefing 2, on the Project Sign progress report
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 04 Briefing 6, on the Blue Book paper trail
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 05 Briefing 6, on the ghost rockets this file’s December 1947 analysis disconnects from the US sightings