UFOs in the U.S. National Archives

by Paul Nahay

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On Sunday, July 17, 2011, I visited the United States National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. (Note: NOT the National Archives at College Park, where the Blue Book documents are stored!)

In their public exhibitions, The National Archives Experience, I was delighted to find, in The Public Vaults section, an exhibit concerning the Archives' role in the UFO issue. This was on a touch-screen electronic display. There were a number of such displays, each with a couple of topics on them. The one devoted to UFOs also had a separate display concerning the Kent State shootings of 1970.

The UFO exhibit contained five documents that the user could use the touch screen to move around, make larger and smaller, and turn pages through:

• Two pages from the Status Report, Project Blue Book, Report No. 8. Formerly Project Grudge. Project No. 10073. 31 December 1952. Air Technical Intelligence Center. Wright-Patternson Air Force Base, Ohio. Here's the full document as a PDF (4.58 MB). The two pages shown to the user were:
  1. The very first page (page 1 in the PDF above), the report cover page, containing the italicized text quoted above, and
  2. A page about mid-way through that report (page 14 in the PDF above) showing a graph labeled Frequency of Unidentified Flying Object Reports, June through September, 1952.
• Two pages from the EC comic's "Flying Saucer Report Issue", of a comic titled "Saucers Over Washington, D.C.", with story by Al Feldstein and art by Reed Crandall, concerning the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO incident. The first of the two pages of the comic can be seen here. The final frame of the comic was very critical of the U.S. Government's "temperature inversion explanation", and detailed how it could not explain the sightings. (More information about this, and other UFO comics, is available from thecomicsdetective.blogspot.com.)
• A typed document containing this text:

  7. A telephone call was also received from a Gen. Landry's secretary. She stated that the President had requested Gen. Landry to find out the details of the sighting that had occurred in Washington on Saturday night. She was advised that ATIC had the report and was working on it and that an evaluation would be forthcoming.

  Here is information about General Robert B. Landry, the Air Force Aide to President Truman, whom the document quoted above refers to.
• A video of a Paramount News newsreel from 1952, about:
  1. A New York City resident who had a UFO sighting;
  2. The 1952 Washington D.C. UFO incident;
  3. The July 29, 1952 press conference by General John A. Samford (who was later appointed Director of the National Security Agency):

As if that weren't enough of UFOs in the U.S. National Archives, the Archives Shop (their gift shop) had on the shelf four copies of Need to Know: UFOs, the Military, and Intelligence, 2007, by Timothy Good.

Links to this page:

• Larry W. Bryant's UFOview