The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
The photo showed a circular-shaped blob of light exactly as the
major had described it to the RB-29 crew. It didn't show any details
of the UFO because the UFO was too bright; it was completely
overexposed on the negative. The circular shape wasn't sharp either;
it had fuzzy edges, but this could have been due to two things: its
extreme brightness, or the fact that it was high, close to the RB-29,
and out of focus. There was no way of telling exactly how high it was
but if it were at 6,000 feet, as the major estimated, it would have
been about 125 feet in diameter.
Working with people from the photo lab at Wright-Patterson, Captain
Hardin from Project Blue Book carried out one of the most complete
investigations in UFO history. They checked aircraft flights,
rephotographed the area from high and low altitude to see if they
could pick up something on the ground that could have been reflecting
light, and made a minute ground search of the area. They found
absolutely nothing that could explain the round blob of light, and
the incident went down as an unknown.
Like all good "Unknown" UFO reports, there are as many opinions as
to what the bright blob of light could have been as there are people
who've seen the photo. "Some kind of light phenomenon" is the
frequent opinion of those who don't believe. They point out that
there is no shadow of any kind of a circular object showing on the
ground--no shadow, nothing "solid." But if you care to take the time
you can show that if the object, assuming that this is what it was,
was above 4,000 feet the shadow would fall out of the picture.
Then all you get is a blank look from the light phenomenon theorists.
With the sighting from the RB-29 and the photograph, all of the
other UFO reports that Blue Book has collected and all of those that
came out of the European Flap, the big question--the key question--
is: What have the last two years of UFO activity brought out? Have
there been any important developments?
Some good reports have come in and the Air Force is sitting on them.
During 1954 they received some 450 reports, and once again July was
the peak month. In the first half of 1955 they had 189. But I can
assure you that these reports add nothing more as far as proof is
concerned. The quality of the reports has improved, but they still
offer nothing more than the same circumstantial evidence that we
presented to the panel of scientists in early 1953. There have been
no reports in which the speed or altitude of a UFO has been measured,
there have been no reliable photographs that show any details of a
UFO, and there is no hardware. There is still no real proof.
So a public statement that was made in 1952 still holds true: "The
_possibility_ of the existence of interplanetary craft has never been
denied by the Air Force, _but_ UFO reports offer absolutely no
authentic evidence that such interplanetary spacecraft do exist."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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