On September 23, 1947, an extraordinary letter titled “AMC Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs’” was signed by Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining of the United States Air Material Command (AMC) and sent to Air Force Brigadier General George Schulgen per his request to understand what was going on regarding reports of “flying discs.” The extraordinary part was the conclusion that the flying discs were “something real and not visionary or fictitious.”
At the time, the United States was being inundated with reports of unidentified aircraft or flying saucers. World War II had recently ended, a Cold War was ramping up, and the world’s remaining powers were quickly developing new technologies to overtake one another (particularly the United States and Russia). As a result, when reports of unidentified strange aircraft were coming in, the U.S. military had to ensure a foreign threat wasn’t present.
In early July 1947, the Army Air Force Intelligence Collections Division, located in the Pentagon, began an investigation with Lieutenant George Garrett assigned to lead the gathering of information. After collecting several UFO reports, Lt. Garrett, with assistance from FBI liaison S.W. Reynolds, prepared an estimate document of the situation wherein they concluded that patterns in the sightings suggested real aircraft and questioned whether the UFOs were secret technology of the United States itself. The estimate was signed off by Lt. Garrett’s superior, Chief Collection Branch Colonel Robert Taylor III, and passed on to other military heads to inquire on the elusive disc’s origins.