The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
Newhouse had his movie camera so he turned the turret around to a 3-
inch telephoto lens and started to photograph the UFO's. He held the
camera still and took several feet of film, getting all of the bright
objects in one photo. All of the UFO's had stayed in a compact group
from the time the Newhouse family had first seen them, but just
before they disappeared over the western horizon one of them left the
main group and headed east. Newhouse swung his camera around and took
several shots of it, holding his camera steady and letting the UFO
pass through the field of view before it disappeared in the east.
When I received the Tremonton films I took them right over to the
Wright Field photo lab, along with the Montana Movie, and the photo
technicians and I ran them twenty or thirty times. The two movies
were similar in that in both of them the objects appeared to be large
circular lights--in neither one could you see any detail. But, unlike
the Montana Movie, the lights in the Tremonton Movie would fade out,
then come back in again. This fading immediately suggested airplanes
reflecting light, but the roar of a king-sized dogfight could have
been heard for miles and the Newhouse family had heard no sound. We
called in several fighter pilots and they watched the UFO's circling
and darting in and out in the cloudless blue sky. Their unqualified
comment was that no airplane could do what the UFO's were doing.
Balloons came under suspicion, but the lab eliminated them just as
quickly by studying the kind of a reflection given off by a balloon--
it is a steady reflection since a balloon is spherical. Then, to
further scuttle the balloon theory, clusters of balloons are tied
together and don't mill around. Of course, the lone UFO that took off
to the east by itself was the biggest argument against balloons.
Newhouse told an intelligence officer from the Western Air Defense
Forces that he had held his camera still and let this single UFO fly
through the field of view, so the people in the lab measured its
angular velocity. Unfortunately there were no clouds in the sky, nor
was he able to include any of the ground in the pictures, so our
estimates of angular velocity had to be made assuming that the
photographer held his camera still. Had the lone UFO been 10 miles
away it would have been traveling several thousand miles an hour.
After studying the movies for several weeks, the Air Force photo lab
at Wright Field gave up. All they had to say was, "We don't know what
they are but they aren't airplanes or balloons, and we don't think
they are birds."
While the lab had been working on the movies at Wright Field, Major
Fournet had been talking to the Navy photo people at Anacostia; they
thought they had some good ideas on how to analyze the movies, so as
soon as we were through with them I sent them to Major Fournet and he
took them over to the Navy lab.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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