The Forgotten Fourth of July
By James Hall
The year I was born, my father wrote the first—and still the only—published biography of renowned aeronautical engineer Alfred Loedding. Every Fourth of July, I’m reminded of that book—not only because of my father’s work, but because it recounts a remarkable event from July 4, 1947, when UAPs—then called “flying saucers”—collectively seized global headlines and remained in the public eye for nearly ninety days. Here’s a brief excerpt from the book:
Alfred Loedding circa 1947
The story begins on the morning of July 4th, 1947, at 1554 South Smithville Road Dayton, Ohio. That day began peacefully. An initially hazy dawn yielded to a blue sky and a sunny but muggy day of eighty-one degrees. With the aftereffects of the Second World War still being felt, the nation welcomed the long bright three-day holiday despite the heat. It felt strange, however, for Alfred Christian Loedding not to be at work on a Friday morning. Over the past decade Loedding had served as a prized civilian aeronautical engineer at the well-known Army Air Force labs just down the road at Wright Field. Like others in his office, he was a workaholic who lived and breathed aviation.
Yet for all his talents, relaxing at home was not one of them. His son, Donald, remembers his father always doing something when at the house. So maybe that morning he was hard at work cleaning and tuning his prized 1946 Buick. Perhaps Loedding was down in the basement working on a host of experiments that closely related to his work. He prided himself on being one of America’s first Army-employed engineers to study rocketry and jet propulsion which was a lifelong passion of his.
Undoubtedly, sometime during the Independence holiday Loedding stopped to pay attention to the news. Since June 24th there had been a small number of unique stories in the press concerning sightings of unusual flying objects. At the time, these were coined “flying discs” or “saucers” after private pilot Kenneth Arnold likened the nine objects he saw over the Cascade Mountains on that date to “saucers skipping across the water”.
It was not until the July 4th weekend that the sightings dramatically increased in intensity and started to dominate news headlines. West Coast newspapers had been the first to detail the stories although soon the reports spanned the nation. Loedding may have heard accounts of the latest sightings on the WNBC Bob Smith morning radio news show that Friday at 9:00AM. On Saturday he could have caught some Midwest stories in print. By Sunday even the New York Times had a page-one feature on the discs.
It would be interesting to have known Loedding’s initial reaction to these accounts or to read the mind of this brilliant engineer who had graduated the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics back in 1930. This is especially important because Alfred had been privately designing flying wing-shaped aircraft (then termed low-aspect-ratio) and lecturing about the concept with a glass slide show since the 1930s. Some of these concepts by 1947 were translated into small working models, looking more like flying saucers than flying wings. He certainly knew aviation, having held a key position with the Bellanca family in their noted aircraft company before coming to work for Wright Labs in 1938.
At Wright Labs Loedding established the first jet propulsion division and became the resident expert on rocketry. Before the war he even became a key contact from Wright Field with civilian rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard. Loedding had then been working in an aeronautics laboratory under the T-3 Engineering Department. He had had an admirable tenure at T-3 but after WWII went to work in the T-2 Intelligence Department, then headed up by Colonel Donald L. Putt. The famed T-2 Intelligence branch of Air Material Command (AMC) had analyzed the massive amounts of German technical documents and hardware recovered at the close of the war. In fact, Loedding went to work for T-2 Intelligence because they needed help in analyzing the more radical German jet and rocket powered aircraft such as the Messerschmitt 163.
Being in Intelligence, it is fair to speculate that Loedding might have even had some hint of the more spectacular saucer stories before he returned to work on Monday, July 7th. He may have been intrigued by the July 6th Sunday New York Times exclusive on the recent deployment of two reactivated B-29 bomber groups to the West Coast and how their appearance coincided in place and time with many of the disc sightings. Certainly, that last day of the long holiday weekend he would have been mulling over all he had learned to date. Up to that time the military had issued only a few and very contradictory statements on the incidents.
Loedding would have surely been aware of this because he knew and worked for many of those Army Air Force personnel being quoted. For example, right after Arnold’s sighting in late June, Army Air Force (AAF) spokesmen had been telling reporters that the saucer sightings would be “looked into.” Loedding soon learned that on July 2nd, AMC Commander Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining had sent a routing slip about the Arnold case to Brigadier General S.R. Brentnall. General Brentnall was the Chief of the T-3 Engineering Operations unit and Deputy Commanding General of T-3. He was also Loedding’s former boss. That routing slip stated that the disc sightings “required attention.” Shortly after that 4th of July weekend Brentnall personally traveled to New Mexico. Was this related to a very strange story coming out of Roswell, New Mexico, of a recovered disk which proved to be a story that had then only briefly made attention in news broadcast? Of course years later the story would resurface and become part of UFO legend and lore.
A July 3rd Boise Statesman article by aviation reporter Dave Johnson, a decorated B-29 veteran and Air National Guard organizer, did announce publicly that Lieutenant General Twining had started an investigation into the flying discs and invited people to write him. In contrast, on that same day Army Major Paul Gaynor stated to newsmen that a preliminary investigation had been dropped for “lack of evidence.”
However Johnson, in essence, had the story because he indicated that the AMC was going to be the outfit which would be analyzing the sightings. At the time AMC’s T-2 and T-3 departments were indistinguishable to many. This is understandable because their workshops and offices were not only located close together at Wright Field, but the units often coordinated on various projects. Correspondence discovered in the 1990s tells us what Loedding may have soon then learned. The documents show that as directed by Lieutenant General Twining, Brigadier General Brentnall did indeed use the T-3 engineering and research offices to conduct some of the very first inquires. However, T-2 intelligence and specifically Alfred Loedding would soon take a lead on that task. The wheels were then also turning in the Pentagon. The July 4th reports spurred action in Washington.
As Loedding was driving down Springfield Road on his way toward Wright Field that Monday morning, a precedent-setting meeting began 600 miles away. It was held in the office of Brigadier General George F. Schulgen, the Intelligence Requirements Chief at AAF Intelligence Headquarters in the Pentagon. Brigadier General Schulgen served as one of the top Pentagon executive officers under AAF Intelligence Commander, Major General George C. McDonald.
Schulgen was given the authority to decide just as Twinging had, that some incidents should be investigated and witnesses interviewed. It was also decided to ask Twinging’s AMC in Dayton to follow through on any analysis they had begun. Twining and his AMC command was not directly under Schulgen’s AAF Intelligence Headquarters office. The AMC served under the command of Major General Laurence C. Craigie, Director of Research & Development, Headquarters. But basically, the different offices coordinated efforts as needed. So, a memorandum for record was written by Schulgen and cables drafted to the AMC in Dayton and the Air Defense Command (ADC) based at Mitchel Field, New York.
The cables requesting the interviews were not dispatched until 5:45PM EST on the 9th of July 1947. The ADC at Mitchel Field used a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) detachment assigned to them to conduct the interviews and coordinated with CIC agents at various bases in the West like Roswell Army Air Field and the numbered Air Force commands. On July 10th, the ADC involved Fourth Army Intelligence at Hamilton Field, California, because the Arnold sighting had occurred in their area of the country.
So, it was the ADC that ordered the Fourth Army Air Force, via its own CIC officers, to conduct interviews of the first witnesses. Those investigations started as early as July 12th and were handled by Fourth AAF Captain William Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Mercer Brown, under Lieutenant Colonel Donald L. Springer’s supervision. The AMC and Alfred Loedding had nothing to do with that. Nor did Loedding ever have a chance to meet Brown or Davidson because they were both soon killed in a tragic airplane crash. It is ironic because eventually Loedding ended up inheriting and expanding their mission later that summer. In fact, by the fall of 1947 and into 1948, Loedding would be officially recognized as the “project engineer for unidentified flying objects,” a term he himself would create.
Records from 1947 detail that Army Air Force brass such as Brigadier General Schulgen in Washington were very worried during the early July time frame. The concern focused on the Russians and possible reconnaissance flights by the "reds." It is unknown just how much reactive pressure the Truman Administration placed on the Pentagon.
By all accounts the Army Air Intelligence officers were baffled that there was not more apparent interest from higher up the chain of command on the sightings. In other words, Brigadier Generals on down were apprehensive but the high brass and full generals seemed to ignore the issue. Yet, the wheels apparently were turning when some high-ranking spokesman, likely from General Vandenberg’s office, released this statement:
Washington, July 9 (UP)--Official Washington was sure today that it knew what the flying saucers were not--but it hadn’t the faintest idea what they were. The Army Air Forces said they had the matter under investigation. Preliminary study has disclosed that the flying discs are not:
1. Secret bacteriological weapons of some foreign power.
2. New-type Army rockets.
3. Spaceships.
By that point Brigadier General Schulgen formally asked for help from the FBI. Schulgen’s Collections Branch assistants, Colonel Taylor and Lieutenant Colonel Garrett, served as the chief liaison with the FBI. They utilized FBI Special Agent S.W. Reynolds to coordinate the Bureau’s assistance in the interrogation of witnesses. By late July, someone, most likely Lieutenant Colonel Garrett of the Collection Branch, decided to write up a preliminary report for the Air Intelligence Requirement Division. As he set there in his Pentagon office in room 4544, Garrett put all the gathered data in perspective. He then assuredly passed it onto his superior, Collections Branch Chief Colonel Taylor. Taylor would have been the one to hand deliver it to his boss, Brigadier General Schulgen.
Schulgen would have presented it to his direct superior, AAF Intelligence Commander Major General McDonald. Eventually the document was sent to Wright Field and shared with Colonel McCoy and Alfred Loedding at T-2 as well as the T-3 group. We know this because wording from Garrett’s report found its way into a report Colonel McCoy wrote for AMC commander General Twining. The resulting “Twining memo” from later that September has been a point of interest for decades. But of note here is Lieutenant Colonel Garret’s preliminary estimate which evolved into the famous Twining memo that stated as early as 1947 that the phenomenon is “real and not visionary.”
Loedding became the civilian head of Project Sign in 1948 and was the man mostly responsible for the famous "Estimate of The Situation" draft.