Dewey Fett
Major Dewey Fett was a United States Air Force officer and member of Project Blue Book who, in 1951, launched Project Interloper — a joint USAF-Navy investigation into aerial and underwater UAP that operated parallel to and independently of Blue Book. Fett's Interloper project is the earliest known US government investigation specifically targeting Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs).
| Role | USAF Major; Project Blue Book member; director of Project Interloper |
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Project Interloper
Despite his official role as a Blue Book member, Fett conducted Project Interloper as an extra-governmental investigation — meaning it was deliberately structured outside the normal chain of command and exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests. This organizational choice, made while Fett was simultaneously a Blue Book member, indicates either that he or his superiors believed USO investigation required a level of secrecy exceeding what Blue Book's classified-but-investigatable structure provided, or that it was specifically designed to avoid any future public disclosure.
Interloper was conducted with the assistance of the US Navy, establishing an early precedent for joint USAF-Navy cooperation on maritime UAP investigation. In 1953, the project briefed the CIA on its findings. However, unlike Project Blue Book — which eventually had its files declassified — Interloper's findings never reached Congress or the American public, and only three case files are known to survive from the project.
Known Case Files
Of the surviving Interloper cases (numbered 26, 27, and 28), only Case 26 is directly relevant to USO research. It documents Lieutenant George P. Williams and his nine-man Navy Fleet Logistics Air Wing crew witnessing a trans-medium UFO emerge from the ocean and traverse the skies between Keflavik, Iceland, and Newfoundland — an object described as elliptical or cigar-shaped, at least 200 feet long, with a red-orange glow along its periphery.
Significance
Fett's Project Interloper represents the earliest documented institutional effort to investigate USOs, predating public awareness of the phenomenon by decades. Its deliberate exemption from FOIA, CIA briefing without congressional reporting, and near-total disappearance from the record are consistent with UAP Gerb's broader thesis that the most substantive US government UAP investigations were systematically kept outside any publicly accountable process.