Air Materiel Command
Air Materiel Command (AMC) was the United States Army Air Forces and later United States Air Force command responsible for logistics, depot-level aircraft maintenance and research and development, based at Wright Field. It was established on 9 March 1946 as the redesignation of the Air Technical Service Command and became Air Force Logistics Command in 1961, its research and development functions passing to the newly created Air Force Systems Command. Its commander in 1947, Nathan Twining, signed the Twining memo, the command's own opinion on "flying discs"; its intelligence department, T-2, became the Air Technical Intelligence Center; and its Engineering Division ran Project Mogul, the classified balloon programme the Air Force names as the source of the debris found near Roswell.
The Air Force and the researchers who dispute it agree that the Roswell debris went to Wright Field and part company on what it was. The Air Force's 1994 report by Col. Richard L. Weaver and 1st Lt. James McAndrew holds that Roger Ramey forwarded it to the command best placed to identify one of its own research devices, and that it was Mogul equipment; Kevin D. Randle and Donald Schmitt, and the insider Philip Corso, hold that Wright Field received recovered craft material and bodies and that the command's laboratories and intelligence staff analysed them. If the report is right, the witnesses who recall flying wreckage to Dayton are describing balloon hardware or are mistaken; if Randle and Schmitt are right, the Mogul identification is a cover story built from the command's own programme, and the Twining memo's remark on the absence of crash-recovered exhibits was written by a command that held some. Joseph P. Farrell reads the chain differently again, asking whether Wright Field, home also to a contingent of German aerodynamics engineers brought over under Operation Paperclip, was chosen for that reason.
Organisation and intelligence
The command's Engineering Division and Intelligence Department (T-2) sat at Wright Field, and the Air Force's Roswell report describes T-2 as the unit that later became the Air Technical Intelligence Center, the body that ran Project Blue Book, which grew out of Project Sign and Project Grudge. The Twining memo records that the command's opinion was reached in a conference of personnel from the Air Institute of Technology, T-2, the Office of the Chief of the Engineering Division and the Aircraft, Power Plant and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3. T-2's chief in 1948, Colonel H. M. McCoy, wrote in a secret memorandum, released under the Freedom of Information Act to the investigator William LaParl in 1996, that "although it is obvious that some types of flying objects have been sighted, the exact nature of those objects cannot be established until physical evidence, such as that which would result from a crash, has been obtained."
The Twining assessment
Nathan Twining was AMC's commanding officer. On 23 September 1947 he signed the "AMC Opinion Concerning 'Flying Discs'", addressed to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, which stated:
a. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious. b. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft.
It was released through the Freedom of Information Act, so its existence is not in dispute, only its meaning. Its text is quoted the same way by those who read it as the Air Force taking the discs seriously and by the Skeptical Inquirer. The opinion affirms that the phenomenon is real and disc-shaped and that it is an assessment of reports; it does not state that the command held anything. What it does state is a lack of "physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits." Randle and Schmitt read that line as a command that knew of the Roswell crash shutting off one line of inquiry: Twining and his staff, they write, wanted more intelligence on the discs but did not want anyone looking into the crash stories, because those would lead back to Roswell. They add that Twining and the highest-ranking members of his staff would have been notified if a disc had crashed, and that the laboratories able to examine one were at Wright Field. Corso reads the memo as one of the "lower security" channels Twining kept so that he could exchange information with commands not cleared to the top. Edward J. Ruppelt's Report on Unidentified Flying Objects is the standard account of what followed inside the Air Force.
Roswell debris at Wright Field
The Eighth Air Force issued the Roswell statements; AMC is where the material is said to have gone. The Air Force's 1994 report describes Wright Field as the home of T-2 and as a location that "would, in fact, be a logical location to study unknown materials from whatever origin." Thomas DuBose said the debris he ordered off Roswell on 5 July went to Wright Field by way of Washington, the pilot O. W. "Pappy" Henderson is said to have flown a planeload there, and an FBI teletype of 8 July records that the "disc and balloon" were being transported to Wright Field by special plane for examination. The Air Force's report answers that the claims it examined rest on verbal reports made many years afterwards and that what is "uniquely lacking" is official positive documentary or physical evidence that anything unusual happened; Randle and Schmitt answer that the documentation that does exist tends to reveal the level of secrecy inside the military establishment. Farrell notes persistent rumors that the debris and bodies were reunited, in the mid-1950s, in a structure referred to only as "Building 18-A, Area B" at Wright-Patterson, a base where the Hangar 18 stories also place alleged recovered material.
Arthur Exon, who commanded Wright-Patterson from 1964, said "we heard the material was coming to Wright Field" and that the technicians who tested it in the command's labs said it was very unusual. Randle and Schmitt say that Exon was repeating what colleagues at Wright Field told him, that his only first-hand experience was flying over the debris field later, and that although he was a student at the Air Force Institute of Technology in July 1947 he had been on the AMC headquarters staff until August 1946.
Twining's own movements are part of the same dispute. Standard Roswell accounts, Farrell notes, treat his change of plan from a visit to the Boeing plant in Seattle to a trip to New Mexico as a mark of the event's gravity; Corso says the general cancelled a West Coast trip and remained at Alamogordo, a field office of his own command, until at least 10 July; the Air Force's report found records that Twining went to the Bomb Commanders' Course on 8 July with a number of other general officers, having requested orders on 5 June. Farrell observes that attending the course does not in itself preclude something extraordinary having happened, since Twining could have dealt with it on his return to Wright Field.
Project Mogul
Main article:
Project Mogul
Mogul was approved and begun by AMC in early 1946, assigned to its Engineering Division's Electronics Subdivision and carried out by the Watson Laboratories at Red Bank, New Jersey. The Air Force's report says the debris sent to Wright Field was identified by Colonel Marcellus Duffy, who had been a Mogul project officer and under whose purview the project operated. Farrell answers that the Mogul explanation fails to account for the more exotic properties of the debris described by Major Jesse Marcel and others.
The Fort Riley manifest
The other recurring AMC claim is a chain-of-custody one, and it belongs to one man: Philip Corso. He said he found an Army Intelligence document inside a crate at Fort Riley manifesting remains from Roswell, New Mexico to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field and to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for autopsy. In his book the trucks that carried the crates came from Fort Bliss, bound for AMC at Wright Field, with cargo manifests listing spare aircraft parts. Stated without a name, the claim reads as a documentary fact about the command; stated with one, it is a single uncorroborated recollection from a much-contested witness whose account Randle examines critically. The Twining opinion is a released document whose text anyone can read, while the manifest is a document one man says he saw.
Central node
The Air Force's report calls Wright Field "a logical location to study unknown materials from whatever origin," and the Aviation Studies electrogravitics analysis treats AMC at Wright Field as "the central node for crash retrieval analysis and classified contractor research throughout the early 1950s"[citation needed] and reads a coordinated silence across the aerospace industry as consistent with a classification order issued from there. Corso places Twining as the point man for the initial research and dissemination of the material recovered at Roswell, a role that in his account led to an ad hoc group of senior officials advising the president; the alleged Majestic 12 documents, including the Cutler-Twining memo, attach Twining's name to that group.
Distinct from Air Force Materiel Command
Two similar names denote two different organisations. Air Materiel Command is the historical command discussed above. Air Force Materiel Command is the modern successor organisation, and it is the command named in accounts of Area 51 and Eglin Air Force Base. They are separated by decades: the 1947 decisions belong to the historical command, not to its modern successor.
Open questions
References
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