The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects — John Shaqi
The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
On Project Blue Book our problem was to identify these stimuli. We
had methods for checking the location, at any time, of every balloon
launched anywhere in the United States. To a certain degree the same
was true for airplanes. The UFO observer's estimate of where the
object was located in the sky helped us to identify astronomical
bodies. Huge files of UFO characteristics, along with up-to-the-
minute weather data, and advice from specialists, permitted us to
identify such things as sun-dogs, paper caught in updrafts, huge
meteors, etc.
This determination of the stimuli that triggered UFO sightings,
while not an insurmountable task, was a long, tedious process. The
identification of known objects was routine, and caused no
excitement. The excitement and serious interest occurred when we
received UFO reports in which the observer was reliable and the
stimuli could not be identified. These were the reports that
challenged the project and caused me to spend hours briefing top U.S.
officials. These were the reports that we called "Unknowns."
Of the several thousand UFO reports that the Air Force has received
since 1947, some 15 to 20 per cent fall into this category called
unknown. This means that the observer was not affected by any
determinable psychological quirks and that after exhaustive
investigation the object that was reported could not be identified.
To be classed as an unknown, a UFO report also had to be "good,"
meaning that it had to come from a competent observer and had to
contain a reasonable amount of data.
Reports are often seen in the newspapers that say: "Mrs. Henry
Jones, of 5464 South Elm, said that 10:00A.M. she was shaking her
dust mop out of the bedroom window when she saw a flying saucer"; or
"Henry Armstrong was driving between Grundy Center and Rienbeck last
night when he saw a light. Henry thinks it was a flying saucer." This
is not a good UFO report.
This type of UFO report, if it was received by Project Blue Book,
was stamped "Insufficient Data for Evaluation" and dropped into the
dead file, where it became a mere statistic.
Next to the "Insufficient Data" file was a file marked "C.P." This
meant crackpot. Into this file went all reports from people who had
talked with flying saucer crews, who had inspected flying saucers
that had landed in the United States, who had ridden in flying
saucers, or who were members of flying saucer crews. By Project Blue
Book standards, these were not "good" UFO reports either.
But here is a "good" UFO report with an "unknown" conclusion:
On July 24, 1952, two Air Force colonels, flying a B-25, took off
from Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco, for Colorado
Springs, Colorado. The day was clear, not a cloud in the sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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