The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
It is interesting to note that out of the representative cross
section of astronomers, five of them, or 11 per cent, had sighted
UFO's. For a given group of people this is well above average. To
check this point, the astronomer who was making our study picked
ninety people at random--people he met while traveling--and got them
into a conversation about flying saucers. These people were his
"control group," to borrow a term from the psychologists. Although
the percentage of people who were interested in UFO's was higher for
the control group than for the group of astronomers, only 41 per cent
of the astronomers were interested while 86 per cent of the control
group were interested; 11 per cent of the astronomers had seen UFO's,
while only about 1 per cent of the control group had seen one. This
seemed to indicate that as a group astronomers see many more UFO's
than the average citizen.
When I finished my briefing, it was too late to start the question-
and-answer session, so the first day's meeting adjourned. But
promptly at nine o'clock the next morning the group was again
gathered, and from the looks of the list of questions some of them
had, they must have been thinking about UFO's all night.
One of the first questions was about the results of photography
taken by the pairs of huge "meteorite patrol" cameras that are
located in several places throughout North America. Did they ever
photograph a UFO? The cameras, which are in operation almost every
clear night, can photograph very dim lights, and once a light is
photographed its speed and altitude can be very accurately
established. If there were any objects giving off light as they flew
through our atmosphere, there is a chance that these cameras might
have photographed them. But they hadn't.
At first this seemed to be an important piece of evidence and we had
just about racked this fact up as a definite score against the UFO
when we did a little checking. If the UFO had been flying at an
altitude of 100 miles, the chances of its being picked up by the
cameras would be good, but the chances of photographing something
flying any lower would be less.
This may account for the fact that while our "inquiring astronomer"
was at the meteorite patrol camera sites, he talked to an astronomer
who had seen a UFO while operating one of the patrol cameras.
Many people have asked why our astronomers haven't seen anything
through their big telescopes. They are focused light-years away and
their field of vision is so narrow that even if UFO's did exist and
littered the atmosphere they wouldn't be seen.
Another question the panel had was about Orson Welles' famous _War_
_of_ _the_ _Worlds_ broadcast of October 1938, which caused thousands
of people to panic. Had we studied this to see if there were any
similarities between it and the current UFO reporting?
We had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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