The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
I soon found a place that was interested in such a contract, and the
day after Christmas, Colonel S. H. Kirkland, of Colonel Dunn's staff,
and I left Dayton for a two-day conference with these people to
outline what we wanted. Their organization cannot be identified by
name because they are doing other highly secret work for the
government. I'll call them Project Bear.
Project Bear is a large, well-known research organization in the
Midwest. The several hundred engineers and scientists who make up
their staff run from experts on soils to nuclear physicists. They
would make these people available to me to assist Project Grudge on
any problem that might arise from a UFO report. They did not have a
staff astronomer or psychologist, but they agreed to get them for us
on a subcontract basis. Besides providing experts in every field of
science, they would make two studies for us; a study of how much a
person can be expected to see and remember from a UFO sighting, and a
statistical study of UFO reports. The end product of the study of the
powers of observation of a UFO observer would be an interrogation form.
Ever since the Air Force had been in the UFO business, attempts had
been made to construct a form that a person who had seen a UFO could
fill out. Many types had been tried but all of them had major
disadvantages. Project Bear, working with the psychology department
of a university, would study all of the previous questionnaires,
along with actual UFO reports, and try to come up with as near a
perfect interrogation form as possible. The idea was to make the form
simple and yet extract as much and as accurate data as possible from
the observer.
The second study that Project Bear would undertake would be a
statistical study of all UFO reports. Since 1947 the Air Force had
collected about 650 reports, but if our plan to encourage UFO reports
worked out the way we expected this number could increase tenfold. To
handle this volume of reports, Project Bear said that they would set
up a complete UFO file on IBM punch cards. Then if we wanted any bit
of information from the files, it would be a matter of punching a few
buttons on an IBM card-sorting machine, and the files would be sorted
electronically in a few seconds. Approximately a hundred items
pertaining to a UFO report would be put on each card. These items
included everything from the time the UFO was seen to its position in
the sky and the observer's personality. The items punched on the
cards would correspond to the items on the questionnaires that
Project Bear was going to develop.
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