The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
Project Twinkle was a bust. Absolutely nothing was photographed. Of
the three cameras that were planned for the project, only one was
available. This one camera was continually being moved from place to
place. If several reports came from a certain area, the camera crew
would load up their equipment and move to that area, always arriving
too late. Any duck hunter can tell you that this is the wrong tactic;
if you want to shoot any ducks pick a good place and stay put, let
the ducks come to you.
The people trying to operate Project Twinkle were having financial
and morale trouble. To do a good job they needed more and better
equipment and more people, but Air Force budget cuts precluded this.
Moral support was free but they didn't get this either.
When the Korean War started, Project Twinkle silently died, along
with official interest in green fireballs.
When I organized Project Blue Book in the summer of 1951 I'd never
heard of a green fireball. We had a few files marked "Los Alamos
Conference," "Fireballs," "Project Twinkle," etc., but I didn't pay
any attention to them.
Then one day I was at a meeting in Los Angeles with several other
officers from ATIC, and was introduced to Dr. Joseph Kaplan. When he
found we were from ATIC, his first question was, "What ever happened
to the green fireballs?" None of us had ever heard of them, so he
quickly gave us the story. He and I ended up discussing green
fireballs. He mentioned Dr. La Paz and his opinion that the green
fireballs might be man-made, and although he respected La Paz's
professional ability, he just wasn't convinced. But he did strongly
urge me to get in touch with Dr. La Paz and hear his side of the story.
When I returned to ATIC I spent several days digging into our
collection of green fireball reports. All of these reports covered a
period from early December 1948 to 1949. As far as Blue Book's files
were concerned, there hadn't been a green fireball report for a year
and a half.
I read over the report on Project Twinkle and the few notes we had
on the Los Alamos Conference, and decided that the next time I went
to Albuquerque I'd contact Dr. La Paz. I did go to Albuquerque
several times but my visits were always short and I was always in a
hurry so I didn't get to see him.
It was six or eight months later before the subject of green
fireballs came up again. I was eating lunch with a group of people at
the AEC's Los Alamos Laboratory when one of the group mentioned the
mysterious kelly-green balls of fire. The strictly unofficial bull-
session-type discussion that followed took up the entire lunch hour
and several hours of the afternoon. It was an interesting discussion
because these people, all scientists and technicians from the lab,
had a few educated guesses as to what they might be. All of them had
seen a green fireball, some of them had seen several.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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