The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
The incident started when the pilot of an Air Force C-54 transport
radioed Goose AFB and said that at 10:42P.M. a large fireball had
buzzed his airplane. It had come in from behind the C-54, and nobody
had seen it until it was just off the left wing. The fireball was so
big that the pilot said it looked as if it was only a few hundred
feet away. The C-54 was 200 miles southwest, coming into Goose AFB
from Westover AFB, Massachusetts, when the incident occurred. The
base officer-of-the-day, who was also a pilot, happened to be in the
flight operations office at Goose when the message came in and he
overheard the report. He stepped outside, walked over to his command
car, and told his driver about the radio message, so the driver got
out and both of them looked toward the south. They searched the
horizon for a few seconds; then suddenly they saw a light closing in
from the southwest. Within a second, it was near the airfield. It had
increased in size till it was as big as a "golf ball at arm's
length," and it looked like a big ball of fire. It was so low that
both the OD and his driver dove under the command car because they
were sure it was going to hit the airfield. When they turned and
looked up they saw the fireball make a 90-degree turn over the
airfield and disappear into the northwest. The time was 10:47P.M.
The control tower operators saw the fireball too, but didn't agree
with the OD and his driver on how low it was. They did think that it
had made a 90-degree turn and they didn't think that it was a meteor.
In the years they'd been in towers they'd seen hundreds of meteors,
but they'd never seen anything like this, they reported.
And reports continued to pour into Project Blue Book. It was now not
uncommon to get ten or eleven wires in one day. If the letters
reporting UFO sightings were counted, the total would rise to twenty
or thirty a day. The majority of the reports that came in by wire
could be classified as being good. They were reports made by reliable
people and they were full of details. Some were reports of balloons,
airplanes, etc., but the percentage of unknowns hovered right around
22 per cent.
To describe and analyze each report, or even the unknowns, would
require a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, so I am covering
only the best and most representative cases.
One day in mid-June, Colonel Dunn called me. He was leaving for
Washington and he wanted me to come in the next day to give a
briefing at a meeting. By this time I was taking these briefings as a
matter of course. We usually gave the briefings to General Garland
and a general from the Research and Development Board, who passed the
information on to General Samford, the Director of Intelligence. But
this time General Samford, some of the members of his staff, two Navy
captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and some people I
can't name were at the briefing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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