Correspondence Regarding Frontier Airlines Incident of 21 April 1957

This document file contains a Project 10073 record card and subsequent correspondence between Herbert Brucker, Chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the Secretary of the Air Force, James H. Douglas. The inquiry was prompted by a report of an incident on April 21, 1957, involving a Frontier Airlines DC-3 near Phoenix, Arizona, which allegedly lost part of its wing due to a collision with a stray missile. Mr. Brucker expressed concern regarding the Air Force's policy of requiring news about missile accidents to be cleared by the information office in Washington before release, arguing that the public has a right to know about such events. He requested that the Air Force make the facts of the Phoenix incident public and establish a system for transparent reporting of future incidents. In response, Brigadier General Arno H. Luehman, Director of Information Services for the Air Force, addressed Mr. Brucker on May 9, 1957. General Luehman explicitly denied any Air Force involvement in the Frontier Airlines incident, stating that no missiles were fired on that date and that the speculation regarding a missile collision was inaccurate. He further asserted that the Air Force had no desire to restrict unclassified information regarding its missile program and that recent instructions to field commanders were intended to hasten, rather than retard, the flow of information. The Air Force maintained that it would continue to operate its information policies in an open and above-board manner consistent with national security. The internal Project 10073 record card associated with this case categorizes the report as an 'unreliable report' and marks it as 'Other' under conclusions, indicating that the incident was not considered a valid sighting or event involving an unidentified aerial phenomenon.