Shortly after the Estimate of the Situation was supposedly submitted to the Pentagon and subsequently rejected, Project Sign was dismantled and replaced with Project Grudge, which began in 1948. While Project Grudge ultimately concluded that UFOs were natural phenomena or misidentifications of normal aircraft, it also acknowledged that some 23% of reports could not be fully explained.

Initially organized at the request of General Nathan Twining, Project Sign ran for only about a year. Its base of operations was the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which would also serve as the home of all subsequent official Air Force investigations into unidentified flying objects. According to Captain Ruppelt, when Project Sign was reorganized into Project Grudge, its goal changed dramatically. Ostensibly, the intention was to use “standard intelligence procedures” to evaluate UFO data, but Ruppelt would later write that, “Everything was being evaluated on the premise that UFOs couldn’t exist. No matter what you see or hear, don’t believe it.”

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If Project Sign skewed toward credulity and Project Grudge had a bias toward debunking, then Project Blue Book, which kicked off in 1952, could possibly be seen as the happy medium between the two. Working initially under the command of Captain Ruppelt, by the time it shut down in January of 1970, Project Blue Book had collected more than twelve thousand reports of unidentified objects in the sky.

Project Blue Book: The Government Investigation into UFOs

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