Wright-Patterson and the UFOs in the Filing Cabinets
Near Dayton, Ohio
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base traces its lineage to nineteen seventeen, when the Army established aviation facilities near Dayton in the first year of American involvement in World War One. The location was deliberate. The Wright brothers had tested aircraft on Huffman Prairie, a few hundred yards from where the base now stands, and the proximity to aviation expertise was seen as an asset.
The base consolidated into its present form in nineteen forty-eight and became one of the most important aerospace research and engineering centers in the world. It houses the Air Force Materiel Command and employs tens of thousands of people in military and civilian roles. It is also the home of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the largest military aviation museum in the world, where the nineteen oh five Wright Flyer Three and aircraft from every era of powered flight are displayed.
But the story that captured the public imagination for decades was something different. In June of nineteen forty-seven, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine unidentified objects flying at extraordinary speed over Washington State. The Army Air Forces launched an investigation. That investigation eventually evolved into Project Blue Book, headquartered at Wright-Patterson.
From nineteen fifty-two to nineteen sixty-nine, Air Force personnel at Wright-Patterson collected and analyzed twelve thousand six hundred eighteen UFO reports from across the country. Of those, seven hundred one were classified as unidentified at the project's end. Every Air Force base in the country had a Blue Book officer. The project was terminated in December of nineteen sixty-nine based on a scientific review concluding that further investigation was unlikely to yield new discoveries. The files went to the National Archives. The questions did not go anywhere.
