The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
The Navy lab spent about two months studying the films and had just
completed their analysis. The men who had done the work were on hand
to brief the panel of scientists on their analysis after the panel
had seen the movies.
We darkened the room and I would imagine that we ran each film ten
times before every panel member was satisfied that he had seen and
could remember all of the details. We ran both films together so that
the men could compare them.
The Navy analysts didn't use the words "interplanetary spacecraft"
when they told of their conclusions, but they did say that the UFO's
were intelligently controlled vehicles and that they weren't
airplanes or birds. They had arrived at this conclusion by making a
frame-by-frame study of the motion of the lights and the changes in
the lights' intensity.
When the Navy people had finished with their presentation, the
scientists had questions. None of the panel members were trying to
find fault with the work the Navy people had done, but they weren't
going to accept the study until they had meticulously searched for
every loophole. Then they found one.
In measuring the brilliance of the lights, the photo analysts had
used an instrument called a densitometer. The astronomer on the panel
knew all about measuring the density of an extremely small
photographic image with a densitometer because he did it all the time
in his studies of the stars. And the astronomer didn't think that the
Navy analysts had used the correct technique in making their
measurements. This didn't necessarily mean that their data were all
wrong, but it did mean that they should recheck their work.
When the discussion of the Navy's report ended, one of the
scientists asked to see the Tremonton Movie again; so I had the
projectionists run it several more times. The man said that he
thought the UFO's could be sea gulls soaring on a thermal current. He
lived in Berkeley and said that he'd seen gulls high in the air over
San Francisco Bay. We had thought of this possibility several months
before because the area around the Great Salt Lake is inhabited by
large white gulls. But the speed of the lone UFO as it left the main
group had eliminated the gulls. I pointed this out to the physicist.
His answer was that the Navy warrant officer might have thought he
had held the camera steady, but he could have "panned with the
action" unconsciously. This would throw all of our computations 'way
off. I agreed with this, but I couldn't agree that they were sea gulls.
But several months later I was in San Francisco waiting for an
airliner to Los Angeles and I watched gulls soaring in a cloudless
sky. They were "riding a thermal," and they were so high that you
couldn't see them until they banked just a certain way; then they
appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would
expect from sea gulls. There was a strong resemblance to the UFO's in
the Tremonton Movie. But I'm not sure that this is the answer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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