The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
On October 27, 1951, the new Project Grudge was officially
established. I'd written the necessary letters and had received the
necessary endorsements. I'd estimated, itemized, and justified direct
costs and manpower. I'd conferred, inferred, and referred, and now I
had the money to operate. The next step was to pile up all this paper
work as an aerial barrier, let the saucers crash into it, and fall
just outside the door.
I was given a very flexible operating policy for Project Grudge
because no one knew the best way to track down UFO's. I had only one
restriction and that was that I wouldn't have my people spending time
doing a lot of wild speculating. Our job would be to analyze each and
every UFO report and try to find what we believed to be an honest,
unbiased answer. If we could not identify the reported object as
being a balloon, meteor, planet, or one of half a hundred other
common things that are sometimes called UFO's, we would mark the
folder "Unknown" and file it in a special file. At some later date,
when we built up enough of these "Unknown" reports, we'd study them.
As long as I was chief of the UFO project, this was our basic rule.
If anyone became anti-flying saucer and was no longer capable of
making an unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went. Conversely
anyone who became a believer was through. We were too busy during the
initial phases of the project to speculate as to whether the unknowns
were spaceships, space monsters, Soviet weapons, or ethereal visions.
I had to let three people go for being too pro or too con.
By the latter part of November 1951 I knew most of what had taken
place in prior UFO projects and what I expected to do. The people in
Project Sign and the old Project Grudge had made many mistakes. I
studied these mistakes and profited by them. I could see that my
predecessors had had a rough job. Mine would be a little bit easier
because of the pioneering they had done.
Lieutenant Metscher and I had sorted out all of the pre-1951 files,
refiled them, studied them, and outlined the future course of the new
Project Grudge.
When Lieut. Colonel Rosengarten and Lieutenant Cummings had been at
the Pentagon briefing Major General Cabell on the Fort Monmouth
incidents, the general had told them to report back when the new
project was formed and ready to go. We were ready to go, but before
taking my ideas to the Pentagon, I thought it might be wise to try
them out on a few other people to get their reaction. Colonel Frank
Dunn, then chief of ATIC, liked this idea. We had many well-known
scientists and engineers who periodically visited ATIC as
consultants, and Colonel Dunn suggested that these people's opinions
and comments would be valuable. For the next two weeks every visitor
to ATIC who had a reputation as a scientist, engineer, or scholar got
a UFO briefing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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