Final Personnel Record for McCoy, Howard M., U.S. Air Force, August 31, 1954 — Department of War File
This file contains the final personnel record of U.S. Air Force officer Howard M. McCoy, who left service as a Colonel, a senior field-grade officer responsible for significant operational and administrative duties.
Incident Overview
On August 31, 1954, the Department of War preserved a service record that was declassified and published on October 23, 2026 as part of the seventh tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
The file runs to 298 pages and kept growing after the career it records had ended. The date of August 31, 1954 is the day McCoy retired. A statement of service near the front was typed on October 22, 1976, ten days after his death.
What the government released
This file contains the final personnel record of U.S. Air Force officer Howard M. McCoy, who left service as a Colonel, a senior field-grade officer responsible for significant operational and administrative duties. From December 1946 to August 1949, Colonel McCoy served as Deputy Commanding General for Intelligence (T-2), and later as Chief of the Intelligence Department, Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, at what is now known as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. During his tenure, the Air Force initiated two significant studies centering on unidentified anomalous phenomena: Project SIGN and Project GRUDGE. He was among the senior Air Force intelligence officers involved in the early design, administration, and execution of those programs.
What the file shows, and what it leaves out
A personnel file is the administrative shadow of a career. It holds oaths, fingerprint cards, orders, transcripts and efficiency reports. It records which posts a man held and how his superiors graded him. It does not hold the operational papers of the offices he ran, and it rarely says what he decided or believed.
It gives his full name as Howard Monroe McCoy, born December 4, 1907 in Kane, Pennsylvania, and schooled in Elmira, New York. He studied at Rensselaer before the U.S. Military Academy, which commissioned him a second lieutenant of Field Artillery on June 12, 1930. He moved to the Air Corps after pilot training and graduated from the Advanced Flying School at Kelly Field on October 10, 1931. He then became an engineer. The California Institute of Technology gave him a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1935, and he returned there in 1940 to study aircraft propellers. From 1942 to early 1944 he ran the Propeller Laboratory of the Engineering Division at Wright Field.
After the Army and Navy Staff College in 1944 he went to Europe with the technical services staff of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces. In October 1945 he was back at Wright Field as chief of the Analysis Division and the Air Documents Division of T-2, the intelligence arm of the Air Technical Service Command. The service chronology then shows him as acting Deputy Commanding General for T-2 from July 1946, Deputy Commanding General from December 1946, and Chief of the Intelligence Department, Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, from October 1947 to August 1949. One copied letter of June 5, 1947, signed by Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining as commander of Air Materiel Command, thanks McCoy for a lecture to the Air University on “Foreign Research and Development”.
That is where the file meets the history of Project Blue Book. Twining’s memorandum of September 23, 1947 told Air Force headquarters that the “flying disc” reports concerned something real and recommended a formal study. Headquarters ordered one at the end of 1947, and Project Sign began work at Air Materiel Command in January 1948 under McCoy’s intelligence organisation. Its output included the Project Sign progress report. Early in 1949 the work was renamed Project Grudge, and the Grudge report dated August 1949 attributed the sightings to misidentified conventional objects, hoaxes and psychological causes. McCoy left Wright-Patterson that same month.
The file itself is silent on all of this. A keyword search of its machine-read text found no mention of Sign, Grudge, flying discs or saucers. The text layer is noisy, so a passing reference could have been missed, but none of the pages read for this entry carry one. What McCoy wrote about his own Wright Field years, in a 1954 statement supporting his retirement request, concerns a different laboratory: a “Science Survey Office” that he says developed classified security and investigative equipment and was abolished after he left. The rest of the file follows him to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, to a post with the Central Intelligence Agency from July 1950, and from March 1951 to the directorship of the Physical Security Equipment Agency. A Defense Department directive abolished that agency on March 4, 1954, and McCoy asked to retire, writing that since 1946 he had spent about 20,000 hours “fighting Communism through technical means”.
Status of the case
A service record is evidence about a man, not about the sky, and it is not offered as evidence of anything that was seen. What it documents is the career of an officer who ran Air Materiel Command intelligence when the Air Force opened its first two studies of unidentified aerial objects, Project Sign and Project Grudge. That makes it useful for one narrow question, who was in the room and what experience they brought, and for none other. The two projects reached opposite conclusions in their time, and a personnel file cannot say which was right. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no determination about this record.
What McCoy thought about the 1947 to 1949 reports is not in this file. That question belongs to the Sign and Grudge project records.