The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
There were lots of opinions, weather targets for example, but once
again the chances of a weather target's being in exactly the same
direction as a bright star and having the star appear to move with
the false radar target aren't too likely--to say the least. And then
the same type of thing had happened twice before inside of a month's
time, once in California and once in Michigan.
As one of the men at the briefing I gave said, "It's incredible, and
I can't believe it, but those boys in FEAF are in a war--they're
veterans--and by damn, I think they know what they're talking about
when they say they've never seen anything like this before."
I could go into a long discourse on the possible explanations for
this sighting; I heard many, but in the end there would be only one
positive answer--the UFO could not be identified as something we knew
about. It could have been an interplanetary spaceship. Many people
thought this was the answer and were all for sticking their necks out
and establishing a category of conclusions for UFO reports and
labeling it spacecraft. But the majority ruled, and a UFO remained an
_unidentified_ flying object.
On my next trip to the Pentagon I spent the whole day talking to
Major Dewey Fournet and two of his bosses, Colonel W. A. Adams and
Colonel Weldon Smith, about the UFO subject in general. One of the
things we talked about was a new approach to the UFO problem--that of
trying to prove that the motion of a UFO as it flew through the air
was intelligently controlled.
I don't know who would get credit for originating the idea of trying
to analyze the motion of the UFO's. It was one of those kinds of
ideas that are passed around, with everyone adding a few
modifications. We'd been talking about making a study of this idea
for a long time, but we hadn't had many reports to work with; but
now, with the mass of data that we had accumulated in June and July
and August, the prospects of such a study looked promising.
The basic aim of the study would be to learn whether the motion of
the reported UFO's was random or ordered. Random motion is an
unordered, helter-skelter motion very similar to a swarm of gnats or
flies milling around. There is no apparent pattern or purpose to
their flight paths. But take, for example, swallows flying around a
chimney--they wheel, dart, and dip, but if you watch them closely,
they have a definite pattern in their movements--an ordered motion.
The definite pattern is intelligently controlled because they are
catching bugs or getting in line to go down the chimney.
By the fall of 1952 we had a considerable number of well-documented
reports in which the UFO's made a series of maneuvers. If we could
prove that these maneuvers were not random, but ordered, it would be
proof that the UFO's were things that were intelligently controlled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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