General Hoyt Vandenberg
Air Force Chief of Staff during the Roswell incident and officer who received memos of suspected UFOs through Project Sign.
General Hoyt Vandenberg, US Air Force (USAF) Chief of Staff, is believed by many to have purposefully debunked US government information regarding UFOs.
Vandenberg was the second Director of Central Intelligence, from June 1946 to May 1947, before joined the newly formed U.S. Air Force in 1947. Project Sign was created by the USAF at the end of 1947 in order to field UFO sightings and protect national security. As Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Vandenberg would have been briefed often. Members of Project Sign were able to account for most UFO sightings but the team's best hypothesis for others was extraterrestrial. Vandenberg immediately squashed this theory due to a lack of evidence and eventually ordered all documents stating this to be burned.
A Seattle United Press story from 1952 has Vandenberg stating that UFOs "Certainly are not machines flown by men from Mars or from any foreign power. I don't like the continued occurrence of mass hysteria about flying saucers. The Air Force has had teams of experts investigating all reports since the end of World War II, and they never have found anything to substantiate existence of such things."
Vandenberg's involvement in the Roswell case was also blurry with conflicting accounts. Multiple newspapers reported General Hoyt Vandenberg's direct involvement in the case and that he hurried to the Washington press room to take charge. Then, in the 1994 Roswell report, the air force claimed that Vandenberg never directed any of activity in regards to Roswell.
In April 2015, a photograph of General Ramey holding a memo was decoded using modern technology and computer equipment. The paper turns out to be a telegram from General Ramey to the Pentagon and General Hoyt Vandenberg on July 8, 1947. Although it is still extremely blurry, many people believe to have deciphered the words "THAT A DISK IS NEXT NEW FIND," "THE VICTIMS OF THE WRECK," "OPERATION AT THE RANCH," and that "YOU" (in reference to General Vandenberg) ordered the victims or possibly wreckage "FORWARDED" to "FORT WORTH, TEX." The Army and Navy tried to debunk the idea of an alien aircraft following the Roswell incident by having weather balloon demonstrations in order to the convince the public that these are what have been mistaken as UFOs.
