Estimate of the Situation

The 1947 Twining UFO Memo Still Matters

Everything old is new again. A “smoking gun” of the UFO era, the Twining Memorandum, written in 1947, is more relevant than ever. It says UFOs are real and that we don’t make them.

United States Air Force General Nathan Farragut Twining was a very big deal. During World War Two, he was considered an outstanding commander of bombing operations in both the European and Pacific theaters. After the war, then Lieutenant General Twining was named Commanding General of the military’s Air Materiel Command, working with the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was in this esteemed capacity that he was asked to write a secret memo about UFOs in 1947 for Brigadier General George Schulgen, Chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division at the Pentagon.

Twining put his name to a high level “coordinated” memo from extremely in-the-know officers and scientists on September 23rd, 1947 in which he stated his considered opinion (and theirs) that UFOs were real and had capabilities he did not believe the U.S. had yet achieved. For context, this memo came just three months after the Kenneth Arnold sightings, two months after the Roswell crash…