Fifth AF's 1948 Estimate, Not Project Sign's: 20 Spheroids Over Alaska

What this record is

The title will mislead almost everyone who knows UFO history. This is not the “Estimate of the Situation” that Project Sign drafted in 1948, the document that, according to Project Blue Book’s later chief Edward Ruppelt, argued for an interplanetary explanation and was rejected by Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg. That Sign estimate has never surfaced. This record is something else: a routine periodic intelligence digest issued by the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, A-2, Headquarters Fifth Air Force, dated 8 September 1948. In 1948 the Fifth Air Force was the occupation air force in Japan, headquartered at Nagoya.

The digest runs to 21 typed pages (48 in the PDF, many blank) and was classified SECRET. It covers what an occupation intelligence staff cared about in 1948: war fears over Berlin, Communist espionage, Korea, China, Malaya, Turkey, Indo-China and the Soviet Pacific Fleet. It is in the UAP transfer because of a single paragraph about Alaska.

What it says about UFOs

One item among dozens concerns UFOs. The table of contents on page 7 of the PDF lists it under the heading ALASKA as “Spheroid Airborne Objects Sighted over Alaska”, and the item itself is on page 31 of the PDF (page 14 of the digest’s own 21). It is marked CONFIDENTIAL.

The item reports that on 9 July two officers of the 72nd Reconnaissance, who were fishing at Fielding Lake, saw a group of unidentified objects whose appearance and behaviour were “reminiscent of last year’s ‘flying disc’ encounters”, meaning the 1947 wave. The objects looked like a group of dots, greyish black, about 20 in number. They were plainly visible and seemed to be either spheroid or disc-shaped. They appeared to jockey back and forth within a loose formation that the witnesses likened to a shotgun blast pattern.

The officers put the objects at about 5,000 feet, just below the cloud base, flying a straight course from west-northwest to east-southeast at more than 500 mph. Just before the formation came into view they heard a loud roaring, which they first took for wind in the timber. As the objects approached and passed, the sound sharpened into a roar like a formation of jets. No exhaust trails were visible. The item closes by saying that later checks found no formations of fighter aircraft operating near Fielding Lake at the time.

The Fifth Air Force did not gather this itself. The item carries source letter (k), and the key to sources on page 45 of the PDF identifies (k) as Alaskan Air Command Intel Review #48-14, dated 1 August 1948. No comment, evaluation or follow-up is added.

Context

The confusion is understandable. Project Sign was running at Wright-Patterson that summer, and its estimate followed the Chiles-Whitted sighting of July 1948; see the Project Sign progress report for what survives of Sign’s work. But “estimate of the situation” was standard staff language, and many commands used it. This one shows that a flying-disc report from Alaska reached Air Force intelligence in Japan within two months.

The site also holds a separate record from the Air Force’s incident log, Fielding Lake, Alaska, incident #145. The place and year match, and it very probably refers to the same sighting, though that entry is too thin to confirm it.

Status

The record shows what one command reported and another passed on, not what the officers saw. A loose, shifting group of dark dots with a jet-like roar fits several ordinary explanations reasonably well, including a flock of birds heard against wind noise, or jet aircraft that the check on “fighter formations” missed. The speed and altitude are ground estimates with nothing to measure them against, and the officers are not named.

The record adds a firm date (9 July 1948), a place, a fairly detailed description and evidence of how far the report travelled. It is also a reminder that an “Estimate of the Situation” found in an archive should not be assumed to be the lost Project Sign document.

Sources

• National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/659965376
• PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/656595571/00258350_Estimate_of_the_Situation.pdf
• Series: Records from the Department of the Air Force Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/656595571
• National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615