The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
In early February I made another trip to Air Defense Command
Headquarters in Colorado Springs. This time it was to present a
definite plan of how ADC could assist ATIC in getting better data on
UFO's. I briefed General Benjamin W. Chidlaw, then the Commanding
General of the Air Defense Command, and his staff, telling them about
our plan. They agreed with it in principle and suggested that I work
out the details with the Director of Intelligence for ADC, Brigadier
General W. M. Burgess. General Burgess designated Major Verne
Sadowski of his staff to be the ADC liaison officer with Project
Grudge.
This briefing started a long period of close co-operation between
Project Grudge and ADC, and it was a pleasure to work with these
people. In all of my travels around the government, visiting and
conferring with dozens of agencies, I never had the pleasure of
working with or seeing a more smoothly operating and efficient
organization than the Air Defense Command. General Chidlaw and
General Burgess, along with the rest of the staff at ADC, were truly
great officers. None of them were believers in flying saucers, but
they recognized the fact that UFO reports were a problem that must be
considered. With technological progress what it is today, you can't
afford to have _anything_ in the air that you can't identify, be it
balloons, meteors, planets or flying saucers.
The plan that ADC agreed to was very simple. They agreed to issue a
directive to all of their units explaining the UFO situation and
telling specifically what to do in case one was detected. All radar
units equipped with radarscope cameras would be required to take
scope photos of targets that fell into the UFO category--targets that
were not airplanes or known weather phenomena. These photos, along
with a completed technical questionnaire that would be made up at
ATIC by Captain Roy James, would be forwarded to Project Grudge.
The Air Defense Command UFO directive would also clarify the
scrambling of fighters to intercept a UFO. Since it is the policy of
the Air Defense Command to establish the identity of any unidentified
target, there were no _special_ orders issued for scrambling fighters
to try to identify reported UFO's. A UFO was something unknown and
automatically called for a scramble. However, there had been some
hesitancy on the part of controllers to send airplanes up whenever
radar picked up a target that obviously was not an airplane. The
directive merely pointed out to the controllers that it was within
the scope of existing regulations to scramble on radar targets that
were plotted as traveling too fast or too slow to be conventional
airplanes. The decision to scramble fighters was still up to the
individual controller, however, and scrambling on UFO's would be a
second or third priority.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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