The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
An ex-Air Chief Marshal in the RAF, Lord Dowding, went to bat for
the UFO's. The Netherlands Air Chief of Staff said they can't be.
Herman Oberth, the father of the German rocket development, said that
the UFO's were definitely interplanetary vehicles.
In Belgium a senator put the screws on the Secretary of Defense--he
wanted an answer. The Secretary of Defense questioned the idea that
the saucers were "real" and said that the military wasn't officially
interested. In France a member of parliament received a different
answer--the French military was interested. The French General Staff
had set up a committee to study UFO reports.
In Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, American Ambassador to Italy, said that
she had seen a UFO and had no idea what it could be.
Halfway around the world, in Australia, the UFO's were busy too. At
Canberra Airport the pilot of an RAAF Hawker Sea Fury and a ground
radar station teamed up to get enough data to make an excellent radar-
visual report.
In early 1955 the flap began to die down about as rapidly as it had
flared up, but it had left its mark--many more believers. Even the
highly respected British aviation magazine, _Aeroplane_, had
something to say. One of the editors took a long, hard look at the
over-all UFO picture and concluded, "Really, old chaps--I don't know."
Probably the most unique part of the whole European Flap was the
fact that the Iron Curtain countries were having their own private
flap. The first indications came in October 1954, when Rumanian
newspapers blamed the United States for launching a drive to induce a
"flying saucer psychosis" in their country. The next month the
Hungarian Government hauled an "expert" up in front of the microphone
so that he could explain to the populace that UFO's don't really
exist because, "all 'flying saucer' reports originate in the
bourgeois countries, where they are invented by the capitalist
warmongers with a view to drawing the people's attention away from
their economic difficulties."
Next the U.S.S.R. itself took up the cry along the same lines when
the voice of the Soviet Army, the newspaper _Red_ _Star_, denounced
the UFO's as, you guessed it, capitalist propaganda.
In 1955 the UFO's were still there because the day before the all-
important May Day celebration, a day when the Soviet radio and TV are
normally crammed with programs plugging the glory of Mother Russia to
get the peasants in the mood for the next day, a member of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences had to get on the air to calm the people's fears.
He left out Wall Street and Dulles this time--UFO's just don't exist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account