State Department Assigned Personnel to 1945 Argentine Blue Book
By June Hargrove ·
Personnel names and the nature of materials procured remain unseen, leaving the purpose of the State Department's 1945 Argentine project an open question.
The US National Archives catalog contains a series description for a set of documents titled "Memorandums on the Preparation of the 'Argentine Blue Book'." This is not the book itself, but a scope-and-content description—a finding aid that tells a researcher what the series contains before they pull the boxes. According to the catalog, this specific series consists of memorandums from the Department of State.
These documents do not record the findings of the project, but rather the administrative movement behind it. The file's catalogue entry records that the memorandums cover the "procurement of material, the assignment of duties to personnel, the organization of the project, and other matters related to the preparation" of the document. It is a record of the process: who was told to do what, and where the information came from.
"Procurement of material"
In archival terms, there is a wide gap between a project's final report and the memorandums that describe how that report was built. The "Argentine Blue Book" memorandums fall into the latter category. They represent the internal plumbing of the State Department in 1945. The entry does not specify what "material" was being procured, nor does it name the personnel assigned to the duties. It simply confirms that a structured effort existed to organize and produce this specific volume.
For anyone tracking the history of government intelligence or diplomatic reporting, these administrative trails are often more revealing than the final product. A final report is a polished narrative; the memorandums on the "assignment of duties" show the actual machinery of the agency—which offices were involved and how the workload was distributed. However, because this is a catalogue description and not the records' own pages, the specific names and the nature of the "other matters" remain unseen.
1945 vs 1952
There is a potential for confusion in the nomenclature of these files. The public record identifies a well-known "Project Blue Book," the United States Air Force's systematic study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) that ran from March 1952 until December 17, 1969. That project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was designed to determine if UFOs posed a threat to national security and to analyze the data scientifically.
The "Argentine Blue Book" described in the State Department files predates the Air Force's project by seven years. While the Air Force project is inextricably linked to the "List of Sightings" maintained from 1947 through 1969 and the case files of the 4602D Air Intelligence Service Squadron, the 1945 Argentine document is a State Department product.
It is notable that in the National Archives catalog, the "Argentine Blue Book" appears in the same research proximity as records relating to military matters in Canada—which include "unidentified flying object" sightings—and the later USAF Project Blue Book files. Whether this grouping is a result of thematic archival organization or simply the result of a keyword search for "Blue Book" is not specified in the catalog entry. The record stops at the title.
ARC Identifier 854618
If the memorandums are the blueprints, the final product is housed elsewhere. The catalog entry explicitly directs researchers to another series for the actual content: "Copies of the final version of the 'Argentine Blue Book' cand be found in the series 'Copies of the "Argentine Blue Book," 1945' (ARC Identifier 854618)."
This separation is standard for archival preservation—keeping the preparatory correspondence separate from the finished publication—but it creates a fragmented view of the project. We have the description of the effort to create the book, but the substance of the book itself resides under a different identifier.
What remains in the preparation series is the evidence of a State Department project in 1945, an effort that required the assignment of personnel and the procurement of material to create a document specifically named the "Argentine Blue Book." The catalog does not explain why the State Department chose this title, or what the material procured for the book actually entailed. The records leave the purpose of the book's preparation as an open question.