The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
With the completed photo lab report in my hands, I was still without
an answer. The report was interesting but didn't prove anything. All
I could do was to get opinions from as qualified sources as I could
find. A physiologist at the Aeromedical Laboratory knocked out the
timing theory immediately by saying that if Hart had been excited he
could have easily taken three photos in four seconds if we could get
two in four seconds in our experiment. Several professional
photographers, one of them a top _Life_ photographer, said that if
Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning
action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours. I
recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting
events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for a good
panning technique.
The photographs didn't tally with the description of the lights that
the professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that
they were of "home manufacture." The professors had reported soft,
glowing lights yet the photos showed what should have been extremely
bright lights. Hart reported a perfect formation while the
professors, except for the first flight, reported an unorderly group.
There was no way to explain this disagreement in the arrangement of
the lights. Of course, it wasn't impossible that on the night that
Hart saw the lights they were flying in a V formation. The first time
the professors saw them they were flying in a semicircle.
The intensity of the lights was difficult to explain. Again I went
to the people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory. I asked them if
there was any possible situation that could cause this. They said
yes. An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in
the red end of the spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it. The
eye is not sensitive to such a light, it could appear dim to the eye
yet be "bright" to the film. I asked them what kind of a light source
would cause this. There were several things, if you want to
speculate, they said, extremely high temperatures for one. But this
was as far as they would go. We have nothing in this world that flies
that appears dim to the eye yet will show bright on film, they said.
This ended the investigation of the photographs, and the
investigation ended at a blank wall. My official conclusion, which
was later given to the press, was that "The photos were never proven
to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine." There is no
definite answer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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