Dead on Arrival?
The Development of the Aerospace Concept, 1944–58
bySTEPHEN M. ROTHSTEIN, MAJOR, USAF
School of Advanced Airpower Studies
THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIRPOWER STUDIES, MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, ALABAMA, FOR COMPLETION OF GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS, ACADEMIC YEAR 1998–99. [Air University Press, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama]
...one will find much relevant information that impacts the UFO topic.
For instance, these footnotes...
31. RAND, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, Douglas Aircraft Co., Inc., Santa Monica Plant Engineering Division, Report Number SM-11827, Contract Number W33-038 AC-15105, 2 May 1946, 1.
33. RAND, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, 10.
... created an explanation for the Chiles-Whitted UFO rocket sighting of 1948, that has been addressed by Wikipedia, Project 1947, and a terrific exegesis by the Living Moon site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_Design_of_an_Experimental_World-Circling_Spaceship
http://www.project1947.com/gr/worldcircling.htm
http://www.thelivingmoon.com/46jkrog08/02files/Chiles_Whitted_UFO_Incident_Eastern_Airlines.html
But the paper also details the internecine struggle for space exploration and technical development of space vehicles between the nascent United States Air Force and the United States Navy, in the context of the post World War II/Soviet environment:
If in the summer of 1947 the aerospace concept appeared to be taking hold within the Air Force, encouraged by Air Force leaders clearly thinking about the prospect of an operational domain that naturally extended beyond the atmosphere, within three years the concept had all but died.
Without the external influence provided by the other services, by 1947 the aerospace concept arguably would have still been confined to the pages of Arnold’s 1945 report to Secretary Patterson. Thus between 1944 and mid-1947, the combined influence of the Army and the Navy’s actions highly encouraged its development.
Almost immediately the aerospace concept’s technology push element slowed to a crawl. Budget reductions, which began in the summer of 1947 and continued for another three years, took their toll on all Air Force R&D programs. However, those specifically supporting aerospace became the earliest casualties. Convair’s early ballistic missile study was cancelled in July 1947 as soon as the budget crunch hit, although an increased re-source flow which began following the opening of the Korean War, offered room again in early 1951 to reopen it. Satellites, interestingly, despite having lost its only rocket connection for three and one-half years, man-aged to garner the funding for RAND to at least continue its studies.
Naval thinkers ushered in the maritime vision a century ago. Perhaps it is time for airmen to lift the ceiling on airpower theory.
That last sentence of the paper gives a clue to why the U.S. Navy became and is the primary investigator of UFO sightings and, perhaps, the source of the Roswell event, which, I (and others) contend was an Earthian accident from a White Sands/Rand experiment.
UFO aficionados and ersatz researchers would do well to mine the information in this paper and others to find possible explanations for UFO sightings and the so-called Roswell incident, which is confluence of nonsense -- The Mac Brazel finding of Mogul or balloon debris, the sensationalized Haut press release based on Brazel's opportunistic salvaging of that debris, Roswellian hysteria instigated by the 1978 Friedman ET insertion into the "accident."
RR
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