The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
The investigation brought out a few more points on the pro side too.
We found out that the UFO's frequently visited Washington. On May 23
fifty targets had been tracked from 8:00 p.m. till midnight. They
were back on the Wednesday night between the two famous Saturday-
night sightings, the following Sunday night, and again the night of
the press conference; then during August they were seen eight more
times. On several occasions military and civilian pilots saw lights
exactly where the radar showed the UFO's to be.
On each night that there was a sighting there was a temperature
inversion but it was never strong enough to affect the radar the way
inversions normally do. On each occasion I checked the strength of
the inversion according to the methods used by the Air Defense
Command Weather Forecast Center.
Then there was another interesting fact: hardly a night passed in
June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn't an inversion in
Washington, yet the slow-moving, "solid" radar targets appeared on
only a few nights.
But the one big factor on the pro side of the question is the people
involved--good radar men--men who deal in human lives. Each day they
use their radar to bring thousands of people into Washington National
Airport and with a responsibility like this they should know a real
target from a weather target.
So the Washington National Airport Sightings are still unknowns.
Had the press been aware of some of the other UFO activity in the
United States during this period, the Washington sightings might not
have been the center of interest. True, they could be classed as good
reports but they were not the best that we were getting. In fact,
less than six hours after the ladies and gentlemen of the press said
"Thank you" to General Samford for his press conference, and before
the UFO's could read the newspapers and find out that they were
natural phenomena, one of them came down across the Canadian border
into Michigan. The incident that occurred that night was one of those
that even the most ardent skeptic would have difficulty explaining.
I've heard a lot of them try and I've heard them all fail.
At nine-forty on the evening of the twenty-ninth an Air Defense
Command radar station in central Michigan started to get plots on a
target that was coming straight south across Saginaw Bay on Lake
Huron at 625 miles an hour. A quick check of flight plans on file
showed that it was an unidentified target.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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