AARO and the Beginning of MOON DUST

Here’s another positive from the latest from AARO. Well, it’s not exactly anything they published, but is a consequence of research into their list of various projects and investigations. I was going back through some of the material that I had gathered on Project MOON DUST and found something interesting there.

First, a little background. While I was writing The Government UFO Files, I was reading documents that had been created around the time of the Levelland, Texas, sightings of November 2/3, 1957. I found a document addressed to one of those Air Force officers investigating the sightings who had been complaining about the workload as the number of sightings expanded beyond Levelland. Hundreds of sightings had been made and dozens of them reported to the Air Force. The reference I found was a response to that complaint. More on the response later.

The second part of this is that there had been a discussion about the beginning of MOON DUST with everyone pointing to the early 1950s as the starting point. As I reported in a previous post, the 4602d AISS had been created to find downed enemy airmen, recover wreckage of enemy aircraft, and interrogate the aircrew captured. When the Korean War ended, that mission also ended, to a degree. Captain Edward Ruppelt was complaining that he didn’t have the staff to follow up on all the UFO reports coming in during the wave of 1952. At that point the 4602d was tasked with interviewing the witnesses and recovering any physical evidence that might have been found.

This was treated more as a training exercise for those assigned to the 4602d because it would give them some real-world experience. It would also reduce the workload of those assigned to Project Blue Book. It was a win-win situation for everyone. Those in the UFO community believed this was the beginning of Project MOON DUST.

However, in my research into the sightings of November 1957, I found a document in the Blue Book files that provided some insight into the situation. The document, from Headquarters, U.S. Air Force Message #54322 and dated December 23, 1957, discussed a new project called MOON DUST. The mission was to “collect and analyze raw intelligence reports from the field on fallen space debris and objects of unknown origin.” Remember, I have mentioned a complaint about the workload generated by the sightings in 1957.

I believe that this was a response to the Soviet launch of the first artificial satellites, but since the message was in a file relating to the UFO sightings that began in November, 1957, it suggests a connection there.

I found this message on microfilm and had no way of making a hard copy at the time and I have been unable to locate it again. I wrote down the relevant information and have searched for it. I filed a couple of FOIA requests hoping that the information I did have would allow someone at those various government offices to locate a copy, but no such luck.

The point is that this seemed to suggest that MOON DUST began as a real project in October 1957. The information about the 4602d was a precursor to the MOON DUST, but it wasn’t actually MOON DUST.

So, you’re wondering, what’s the point. Well, I was rereading the letters that Air Force officers had sent to U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman, when he requested information about MOON DUST. I won’t add all that here, other to say, that it appears in the following posting.

Here’s what caught my eye. In a letter written by Air Force Colonel George Mattingley, Jr., he noted, “As the occasion never arose to use these air defense teams, the mission was assigned to Headquarters, United States Air Force in 1957 [emphasis added] and expanded to include the following peace-time functions: a) Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), to investigate reliably reported UFOs in the United States…”

Mattingley had confirmed my discovery that MOON DUST began, not during the Korean War, but during the Cold War and was inspired by the Soviet satellite launches in 1957. While I still haven’t found that original message, here was Mattingley confirming the date for the beginning of MOON DUST. Had it not been for the AARO report, I wouldn’t have been looking for the specific information about MOON DUST and wanted to show how the Air Force had misrepresented their original response to Bingaman. (Yes, I said misrepresented, but you could interpret it to be more nefarious than that.)

Question does remain, however. How did AARO miss MOON DUST in their review of the chronology of UFO projects?