Wright Patterson needed Battelle to accomplish this work. Much of the reason for this is because Battelle had something that Wright Patterson did not- an advanced arc furnace that was capable of melting and refining Titanium to the purity required to make memory metal.

The history of Titanium (which is required to make Nitinol) is itself also very revealing. We learn through review of the literature that, according to Encyclopedia Britannica: "After 1947, Titanium changed from a laboratory curiosity to an important structural metal." According to the Industrial Arts Index, the number of science abstracts published on Titanium spiked dramatically from 1946 (and prior years) as compared to abstracts on Titanium written after 1947. In Rand Corporation's 1962 abstract "The Titanium Decade" we learn that: "A far larger Titanium industry arose from the point of view of production capacity than was needed to produce the material that was actually used in aircraft. The time period of 1948-1958 involved virtually all of the costs." An astonishing $2.5 billion (in today's dollars) was spent on Titanium research by the US government in the years immediately following 1947.

THE SCIENTISTS AND THE REPORTS ARE IDENTIFIED

The Battelle memory metal report is titled "Second Progress Report on Contract AF33 (038)-3736" and was completed for Wright Patterson Air Force Base in 1949. It is authored by C.M. Craighead, F. Fawn and L.W. Eastwood. It appears to be part of a series of such contracts conducted through the early 1950s. Interestingly, the scientists who authored the report were very closely associated with Battelle's chief Titanium metallurgist (and later, Battelle's UFO researcher for Project Bluebook) Dr. Howard Cross, previously mentioned. The scientists went on to author reports on exotic metallurgy that related to such areas as "metal and superplasticity," "metal transformation," and "metal microstructures."

Based on the sections of the studies that were found that reference this Battelle report- we know that this “progress report” offers the first “phase diagram” ever produced to attempt to successfully alloy Titanium and Nickel. This would be required to make memory metal. We can also infer that it examined refinement of Titanium to high purity levels. High purity Titanium is required to create the shape-recovery effect.

No references have ever been located to something that must surely exist- Battelle's "First Progress Report" on the memory metal. While the Second Progress Report (completed in 1949) refers to techniques to process the alloy, the First Progress Report (authored in 1947 or 1948) probably relates to the actual analysis of "Roswellian" memory metal.

Although Nitinol is not identical to the Roswell debris material, it represents our best attempts at re-creation of the found memory metal. The impetus for this "shape-recovery" metallurgical research has to be the crash debris discovered at Roswell in the summer of 1947.

THE REPORTS ARE MISSING

A year long effort was made by this author to locate Battelle's First and Second Progress Reports on memory metal. Though footnotes have been located to the reports in military sponsored studies on memory metal, access to the actual reports remains impossible.

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