The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
I was just about to ask my caller if the target might not have been
some experimental airplane from Edwards AFB when he second-guessed
me. He said that after sitting around looking at each other for about
a minute, someone suggested that they call Edwards. They did, and
Edwards' flight operations told them that they had nothing in the area.
I asked him about the weather. The target didn't look like a weather
target was the answer, but just to be sure, the test crew had
checked. One of his men was an electronics-weather specialist whom he
had hired because of his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of radar
under certain weather conditions. This man had looked into the
weather angle. He had gotten the latest weather data and checked it,
but there wasn't the slightest indication of an inversion or any
other weather that would cause a false target.
Just before I hung up I asked the man what he thought he and his
crew had picked up, and once again I got the same old answer:
"Yesterday at this time any of us would have argued for hours that
flying saucers were a bunch of nonsense but now, regardless of what
you'll say about what we saw, it was something damned real."
I thanked the man for calling and hung up. We couldn't make any more
of an analysis of this report than had already been made, it was
another unknown.
I went over to the MO file and pulled out the stack of cards behind
the tab "High-Speed Climb." There must have been at least a hundred
cards, each one representing a UFO report in which the reported
object made a high-speed climb. But this was the first time radar had
tracked a UFO during a climb.
During the early part of June, Project Blue Book took another jump
up on the organizational chart. A year before the UFO project had
consisted of one officer. It had risen from the one-man operation to
a project within a group, then to a group, and now it was a section.
Neither Project Sign nor the old Project Grudge had been higher than
the project-within-a-group level. The chief of a group normally calls
for a lieutenant colonel, and since I was just a captain this caused
some consternation in the ranks. There was some talk about putting
Lieutenant Colonel Ray Taylor of Colonel Dunn's staff in charge.
Colonel Taylor was very much interested in UFO's; he had handled some
of the press contacts prior to turning this function over to the
Pentagon and had gone along with me on briefings, so he knew
something about the project. But in the end Colonel Donald Bower, who
was my division chief, decided rank be damned, and I stayed on as
chief of Project Blue Book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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