The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
During the early spring of 1952 reports of radar sightings increased
rapidly. Most of them came from the Air Defense Command, but a few
came from other agencies. One day, soon after the Alaskan Incident, I
got a telephone call from the chief of one of the sections of a
civilian experimental radar laboratory in New York State. The people
in this lab were working on the development of the latest types of
radar. Several times recently, while testing radars, they had
detected unidentified targets. To quote my caller, "Some damn odd
things are happening that are beginning to worry me." He went on to
tell how the people in his lab had checked their radars, the weather,
and everything else they could think of, but they could find
absolutely nothing to account for the targets; they could only
conclude that they were real. I promised him that his information
would get to the right people if he'd put it in a letter and send it
to ATIC. In about a week the letter arrived--hand-carried by no less
than a general. The general, who was from Headquarters, Air Materiel
Command, had been in New York at the radar laboratory, and he had
heard about the UFO reports. He had personally checked into them
because he knew that the people at the lab were some of the sharpest
radar engineers in the world. When he found out that these people had
already contacted us and had prepared a report for us, he offered to
hand-carry it to Wright-Patterson.
I can't divulge how high these targets were flying or how fast they
were going because it would give an indication of the performance of
our latest radar, which is classified Secret. I can say, however,
that they were flying mighty high and mighty fast.
I turned the letter over to ATIC's electronics branch, and they
promised to take immediate action. They did, and really fouled it up.
The person who received the report in the electronics branch was one
of the old veterans of Projects Sign and Grudge. He knew all about
UFO's. He got on the phone, called the radar lab, and told the chief
(a man who possibly wrote all of the textbooks this person had used
in college) all about how a weather inversion can cause false targets
on weather. He was gracious enough to tell the chief of the radar lab
to call if he had any more "trouble."
We never heard from them again. Maybe they found out what their
targets were. Or maybe they joined ranks with the airline pilot who
told me that if a flying saucer flew wing tip to wing tip formation
with him, he'd never tell the Air Force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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