The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
The emphasis of the investigation was now switched to the
professors' sighting. The meager amount of data that they had
gathered seemed to be accurate but it was inconclusive as far as
getting a definite answer was concerned. They had measured two
things, how much of the sky the objects had crossed in a certain time
and the angle from one side of the formation to the other. These
figures didn't mean a great deal, however, since the altitude at
which the formation of lights was flying was unknown. If you assumed
that the objects were flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could
easily compute that they were traveling about 3,600 miles per hour,
or five to six times the speed of sound. The formation would have
been about 1,750 feet wide. If each light was a separate object it
could have been in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter. These
figures were only a guess since nobody knew if the lights were at,
above, or below 10,000 feet. If they had been higher they would have
been going faster and have been larger. If lower than 10,000 feet,
slower and smaller.
The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB
intelligence officer and I were investigating the professors'
sightings was that the UFO's were birds reflecting the city lights;
specifically plover. The old cowboy from Lamesa had described
something identical to what the professors described and they were
plover. Secondly, whenever the professors left the vicinity of their
homes to look for the lights they didn't see them, yet their wives,
who stayed at home, did see them. If the "lights" were birds they
would be flying low and couldn't be seen from more than a few hundred
feet. While in Lubbock I'd noticed several main boulevards lighted
with the bluish mercury vapor lights. I called the intelligence
officer at Reese AFB and he airmailed me a city map of Lubbock with
the mercury-vapor-lighted streets marked. The place where the
professors had made their observations was close to one of these
streets. The big hitch in this theory was that people living miles
from a mercury-vapor-lighted boulevard had also reported the lights.
How many of these sightings were due to the power of suggestion and
how many were authentic I didn't know. If I could have found out, it
would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if
they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be
an answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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