Project Sign - Aftermath

Aftermath

By late 1948, Project Sign was discontinued in name and replaced by a much more negatively oriented Project Grudge. Ruppelt reported that the choice of the word "Grudge" to describe the new project was deliberate: Grudge was intended to provide prosaic explanations for as many UFO reports as possible.

Ruppelt wrote,

"On February 11, 1949, an order was written that changed the name of the UFO project from Project Sign to Project Grudge. The order was supposedly written because the classified name, Project Sign, had been compromised. This was always my official answer to any questions about the name change. I'd go further and say that the names of the projects, first Sign, then Grudge, had no significance. This wasn't true; they did have significance, a lot of it."

Ruppelt referred to the Project Grudge era as the "Dark Ages" of official Air Force UFO investigations. Still, by late 1949, some 20 percent of UFO sightings remained classified as "unknown" by Grudge. By late 1951, according to Ruppelt, some highly influential Pentagon generals had become so disenchanted with Grudge's debunking that Grudge itself was dismantled and replaced by Project Blue Book, with Ruppelt in charge.

Historian David Michael Jacobs argues that, overall, Project Sign's personnel did an admirable job. However, Jacobs has also stated, " main problem was that the staff was too inexperienced to discriminate between which sightings to investigate thoroughly. Because of unfamiliarity with the phenomenon, the staff spent inordinate amounts of time on sightings that were obviously aircraft, meteors or hoaxes."