Curtis LeMay Collection, 1945–1947: An Air Staff File With No UFO Content
Fifty-four pages from LeMay's time running Army Air Forces research and development: Project RAND, operations analysis and a bombing survey conference. There is no mention of UFOs, rockets or foo fighters anywhere in it.
What this record is
This is a 54-page file from the office of Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay during his tour as Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development at Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington, the post he held between his wartime command in the Pacific and his move to Europe in late 1947. It was classified RESTRICTED, later declassified under Executive Order 11652, and cleared again by the Air Force Declassification Office on May 2, 2025.
Its papers are ordinary staff business. The largest item, on pages 3 to 15, is LeMay’s reply of August 5, 1947, to a War Department request of July 8, 1947, for a report on “Evaluation of Military Worth”, the wartime discipline of operations research. LeMay named Project RAND as the AAF activity most closely aligned with the request and described it as a program of study on intercontinental warfare “other than surface.” The enclosure lists the kinds of questions such work might tackle, including what causes a nation to yield, the relative merits of biological and atomic attack, and the future cost of guided missiles compared with bombers. Other items include a July 1946 request for comparative data on Twentieth Air Force flying hours and maintenance manpower (pages 17 to 19). There are also staff papers from spring 1946 on whether the Operations Analysis section should move into LeMay’s office (pages 21 to 35) and a proposal of early 1946 to publish a history of wartime operations analysis, carrying comments from Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg (pages 37 to 43). Pages 45 to 50 give excerpts from an October 1945 conference at which Henry W. Alexander, vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, discussed the survey’s findings on Germany. Page 51 is a Signal Corps photograph of a jeep and trailer wrecked by Japanese planes at Rendova.
What it says about UFOs
Nothing. The automated keyword scan found no UFO terms, and a broader search of every page for rockets, ghost rockets, foo fighters, unidentified aircraft or objects, discs, saucers, sightings, mysterious phenomena, radar and space found none either. The only near-misses are two lines in the operations research enclosure on page 15 about guided missiles, which are about American weapons planning, and routine uses of words such as “object” in the sense of “objective.” The file has no sighting, report, investigation or reference to anything anomalous.
Why it is here
The record itself does not say why it was included, so what follows is inference. Two explanations seem likely. The first is the microfilm. Every page carries the reel or batch number 00105830, the same number stamped on the July 1947 history of MacDill Field, Florida, which does contain a “flying disc” item. If the Air Force Historical Research Agency selected material by reel, or flagged a reel because one document on it matched, unrelated files filmed alongside it would have come along. The second is LeMay himself. He ran Army Air Forces research and development during the first flying saucer wave, and his name comes up in later accounts of the 1947 events, so a reviewer searching for his files could reasonably have pulled this one. Neither explanation is documented in the transfer, and the catalog entry gives no reason.
Context
LeMay went on to command the Berlin Airlift’s air forces and Strategic Air Command and became Air Force Chief of Staff in 1961. For the real phenomena of 1944 to 1946 that readers might expect to find here, see the foo fighters of the Second World War and the Scandinavian ghost rockets.
Status
This record adds nothing to the UFO story. It is a useful window on how the new Air Force was thinking about research, RAND and operations analysis in 1946 and 1947, but anyone looking for LeMay and flying saucers will not find them here. Its presence in the transfer says more about how the collection was assembled than about the subject.