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26 for anyone outside some double-locked doors in the Pentagon to ponder the clues and their possible meaning. Or to wonder why Air Force Intelligence was asking its agents to look for things that were not even hinted at in any known study of flying saucers, nor described in any sighting reports made prior to creation of the memorandum. The gap between what was happening and what was known on the outside grew wider and wider. Two weeks after Ken- tucky National Guard pilot Capt. Thomas Mantell died in the crash of his P-51 Mustang while trying to check out a UFO reported by hundreds of people, the first known long-term investigation of UFOs was established on January 22, 1948 at Wright Field. Because it was classified, Project Sign was known publicly as Project Saucer, the purpose of which was said to be to collect reports from persons inside and outside the govern- ment and attempt to tie them to conventional sights: airplanes, balloons, clouds, planets, meteors, optical illusions, hoaxes, and so on. Sometime around August 1948 staff members of Project Sign produced their eventually legendary Top Secret Estimate of the Situation, which allegedly concluded that the saucers were probably extraterrestrial. It went all the way up to the Chief of Staff, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, who rejected its conclu- sion as lacking evidence. All copies were ordered destroyed, though rumors persist that at least one may have survived. On October 7, 1948, after Project Sign had been in operation for almost nine months, a letter was sent by Col. H. H. McCoy, intelligence chief of the Air Materiel Command (which in- cluded Project Sign) to the Central Intelligence Agency. Classi- fied Secret, it contained an admission in direct contrast to almost everything the U.S. government has ever said on the subject: "This Headquarters is currently engaged in an intelligence investigation of all reported unidentified aerial phenomena. No concrete evidence as to the exact identity of any of the re- ported objects has been received. Similarly, the origin of the so-called ‘flying discs' remains obscure." (Emphasis added) CRASH AT CORONA