United States Air Force general, commanding Air Materiel Command in 1947 and later Air Force Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His name attaches to the single most cited document of the early flying disc period.
On 23 September 1947 Twining signed a letter from AMC headquarters, subject “AMC Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs’”, to the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, attention Brigadier General George Schulgen. Its paragraph 2a states that the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. The letter sets out the reported flight characteristics, notes the lack of physical evidence, and recommends that a priority security-classified project be set up to study the subject. That recommendation is the direct ancestor of Project Sign, established by directive on 30 December 1947.
The letter is published in full as pages 234 to 236 of PURSUE Release 05 record DOW-UAP-D100, marked SECRET and struck through at declassification, control number U-39552, over the signature block N. F. Twining, Lieutenant General, U.S.A., Commanding. A caveat for researchers working from the released file: the machine text layer over that page is destroyed, so a keyword search of the released document for “Twining”, “visionary” or “fictitious” returns nothing. The sentence is legible only on the page image.
Connections
Air Materiel Command · George Schulgen · Project Sign · PURSUE · H. M. McCoy · General Charles P. Cabell