The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
Ginna arrived and the ATIC UFO "expert" talked to him. Ginna later
told me about the meeting. He had a long list of questions about
reports that had been made over the past four years and every time he
asked a question, the "expert" would go tearing out of the room to
try to find the file that had the answer. I remember that day people
spent a lot of time ripping open bundles of files and pawing through
them like a bunch of gophers. Many times, "I'm sorry, that's
classified," got ATIC out of a tight spot.
Ginna, I can assure you, was not at all impressed by the
"efficiently operating UFO project." People weren't buying the hoax,
hallucination, and misidentification stories quite as readily as the
Air Force believed.
Where it started or who started it I don't know, but about two
months after the visit from _Life's_ representative the official
interest in UFO's began to pick up. Lieutenant Jerry Cummings, who
had recently been recalled to active duty, took over the project.
Lieutenant Cummings is the type of person who when given a job to do
does it. In a few weeks the operation of the UFO project had improved
considerably. But the project was still operating under political,
economic, and manpower difficulties. Cummings' desk was right across
from mine, so I began to get a UFO indoctrination via bull sessions.
Whenever Jerry found a good report in the pile--and all he had to
start with was a pile of papers and files--he'd toss it over for me
to read.
Some of the reports were unimpressive, I remember. But a few were
just the opposite. Two that I remember Jerry's showing me made me
wonder how the UFO's could be sloughed off so lightly. The two
reports involved movies taken by Air Force technicians at White Sands
Proving Ground in New Mexico.
The guided missile test range at White Sands is fully instrumented
to track high, fast-moving objects--the guided missiles. Located over
an area of many square miles there are camera stations equipped with
cinetheodolite cameras and linked together by a telephone system.
On April 27, 1950, a guided missile had been fired, and as it roared
up into the stratosphere and fell back to earth, the camera crews had
recorded its flight. All the crews had started to unload their
cameras when one of them spotted an object streaking across the sky.
By April 1950 every person at White Sands was UFO-conscious, so one
member of the camera crew grabbed a telephone headset, alerted the
other crews, and told them to get pictures. Unfortunately only one
camera had film in it, the rest had already been unloaded, and before
they could reload, the UFO was gone. The photos from the one station
showed only a smudgy dark object. About all the film proved was that
something was in the air and whatever it was, it was moving.
Alerted by this first chance to get a UFO to "run a measured
course," the camera crews agreed to keep a sharper lookout. They also
got the official O.K. to "shoot" a UFO if one appeared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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