Estimate of the Situation

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The so-called Estimate of the Situation was a document reportedly written in 1948 by personnel of the United States Air Force’s Project Sign--including the project’s director, Captain Robert R. Sneider--which explained their reasons for supporting the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the best explanation for unidentified flying objects.

Air Force officials have denied that the Estimate ever existed, but a few Air Force officers and one consultant have stated that the report was real, but suppressed. Randles and Hough describe the Estimate as the "Holy Grail of ufology" and note that Freedom of Information Act requests for the document have been fruitless. (Randles and Hough, 85)

(The term "estimate of the situation" is generic, often used in military intelligence to descibe a type of early report on an important subject.)

[edit] History

Historian David Michael Jacobs writes that a highly-publicized UFO sightings by experienced airline pilots (the so-called Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter) "had a great impact at Sign" (Jacobs, 47). Two experienced airline pilots reported a close encounter with a torpedo shaped object which nearly collided with their plane. Sign personnel judged the report convincing and compelling (the alleged object also closely matched the description of an independent sighting from The Hague a few days earlier.)

Despite the lack of physical evidence, some Sign personnel thought the reports quite persuasive, and concluded that UFOs could have only a non-earthly source. As Dr. Michael D. Swords notes, "The project members reasoned that they had several dozen aerial observations that they could not explain, many of them by military pilots and scientists. The objects seemed to act like real technology, but their sources said they were not ours. The flying fuselage encounter (Chiles-Whitted) intrigued them. The Prandtl theory of lift indicated that such an odd shape can fly, but it would need some form of power plant advanced well beyond what we could build (e.g., nuclear)." (Swords, p.93) Given that there was no evidence that either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. had anything remotely like the UFOs reported, Sign personnel gradually began considering extraterrestrial origins for the objects.

The first public disclosure of the Estimate was in Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. He wrote:

In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem you write a report that is known as an "Estimate of the Situation." A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed (the Chiles-Whitted UFO report), the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an Estimate of the Situation. The situation was the UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!

It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on legal sized paper. Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.

It contained the Air Force's analysis of many of the incidents I have told you about plus many similar ones. All of them had come from scientists, pilots, and other equally credible observers, and each one was an unknown ...

... When the estimate was completed, typed, and approved, it started up through channels to higher command echelons. It drew considerable comment but no one stopped it on its way up.

After being rejected by Hoyt S. Vandenberg "before it was batted back down" due to lack of supporting physical evidence, Ruppelt writes, "The estimate died a quick death. Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator. A few copies, one of which I saw, were kept as mementos of the golden days of the UFO's. "

Clark writes, "Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg rejected it on the grounds that its authors had not proven their case, due, primarily, to the lack of corroborative physical evidence. Some months later it was declassified and all copies were ordered destroyed." (Clark, 177) Ruppelt reported that a few copies were retained as keepsakes; indeed, Ruppelt reported that he read a copy of the Estimate some four years after all copies were ordered destroyed.

Swords argues that this consideration of non-earthly origin was "not as incredible in intelligence circles as one might think." Because many in the military were "pilots, engineers and technical people" they had a "'can do' attitude" and tended to regard unavailable technologies not as impossibilities, but as challenges to be overcome. Rather than dismissing UFO reports out of hand, they considered how such objects might function. This perspective, argues Swords, "contrasted markedly with many scientists characterizations of such concepts as impossible, unthinkable or absurd." (Swords, p93)

Ruppelt's 1956 book, which first publicly disclosed the Estimate, was cleared by the Air Force. There were reports that some intriguing material was censored by the Air Force: in her master's thesis, Diana Palmer Hoyt writes that "Michael Swords inspected the original draft of Ruppelt's manuscript and discovered that Ruppelt's published account of the material contained in the Estimate of the Situation left out significant documentation proving that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. Swords concludes that the Air Force censored Ruppelt's published account." (Hoyt, p 15)

Clark notes that "No copies of this near-legendary document have surfaced since, though its existence has been confirmed by Dewey J. Fournet, who as an Air Force major in the Pentagon served as liaison with official UFO project headquartered as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio." (Clark, 178) An Air Force consultant, astronomer Dr. Allen Hynek also verified the Estimate’s existence. (Hynek, 173)

In the early 1980s, researcher Kevin Randle said he spoke with an unnamed colonel who had helped write the Estimate when he was a lieutenant. According to the colonel, when Vandenberg was sent a working draft of the report, he allegedly ordered the paragraphs giving physical evidence (metal recovered in New Mexico) removed from the report. After doing so, Vandenberg then rejected the final version as lacking physical evidence. Randle added that when he finally realized the significance of this anecdote a few years later while investigating the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico crash, the colonel had unfortunately died and a followup interview was not possible. (Randle)

[edit] Sources

Jerome Clark; The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial; Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1-57859-029-9
David Michael Jacobs; The UFO Controversy In America; Indiana University Press, 1975; ISBN 0-253-19006-1
Diana Palmer Hoyt, "UFOCRITIQUE: UFO's, Social Intelligence and the Condon Committee"; Master's Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2000; read it online
J. Allen Hynek; The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry; 1972; Henry Regnery Company
Kevin Randle; UFO Casebook; Warner Books; 1989; ISBN 0-446-35715-4
Jenny Randles and Peter Houghe; The Complete Book of UFOs: An Investigation into Alien Contact and Encounters; Sterling Publishing Co, Inc, 1994; ISBN 0-8069-8132-6
Edward J. Ruppelt; The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects; 1956; Doubleday & Company online--see Chapter 2
Michael D. Swords, "UFOs, the Military, and the Early Cold War" (pp. 82-122 in UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge, David M. Jacobs, editor; University Press of Kansas, 2000; ISBN)
Michael D. Swords, "Project Sign and the Estimate of the Situation" (2000) read it online