The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
Then a secondary program was to be started, one of "educating" the
military. The old idea that UFO reports would die out when the thrill
wore off had long been discarded. We all knew that UFO reports would
continue to come in and that in order to properly evaluate them we
had to have every shred of evidence. The Big Flap had shown us that
our chances of getting a definite answer on a sighting was directly
proportional to the quality of the information we received from the
intelligence officers in the field.
But soon after the press conference we began to get wires from
intelligence officers saying they had interpreted the newspaper
accounts of General Samford's press conference to mean that we were
no longer interested in UFO reports. A few other intelligence
officers had evidently also misinterpreted the general's remarks
because their reports of excellent sightings were sloppy and
incomplete. All of this was bad, so to forestall any misconceived
ideas about the future of the Air Force's UFO project, summaries of
General Samford's press conference were distributed to intelligence
officers. General Samford had outlined the future of the UFO project
when he'd said:
"So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with
the best of our ability, giving it the attention that we feel it very
definitely warrants. We will give it adequate attention, but not
frantic attention."
The summary of the press conference straightened things out to some
extent and our flow of reports got back to normal.
I was anxious to start enlisting the aid of scientists, as General
Samford had directed, but before this could be done we had a backlog
of UFO reports that had to be evaluated. During July we had been
swamped and had picked off only the best ones. Some of the reports we
were working on during August had simple answers, but many were
unknowns. There was one report that was of special interest because
it was an excellent example of how a UFO report can at first appear
to be absolutely unsoluble then suddenly fall apart under thorough
investigation. It also points up the fact that our investigation and
analysis were thorough and that when we finally stamped a report
"Unknown" it was unknown. We weren't infallible but we didn't often
let a clue slip by.
At exactly ten forty-five on the morning of August 1, 1952, an ADC
radar near Bellefontaine, Ohio, picked up a high-speed unidentified
target moving southwest, just north of Dayton. Two F-86's from the
97th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Wright-Patterson were scrambled
and in a few minutes they were climbing out toward where the radar
showed the UFO to be. The radar didn't have any height-finding
equipment so all that the ground controller at the radar site could
do was to get the two F-86's over or under the target, and then they
would have to find it visually.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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