The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
Almost exactly a month later another UFO did appear, or at least at
the time the camera crews thought that it was _a_ UFO. This time the
crews were ready--when the call went out over the telephone net that
a UFO had been spotted, all of the crews scanned the sky. Two of the
crews saw it and shot several feet of film as the shiny, bright
object streaked across the sky.
As soon as the missile tests were completed, the camera crews rushed
their film to the processing lab and then took it to the Data
Reduction Group. But once again the UFO had eluded man because there
were apparently two or more UFO's in the sky and each camera station
had photographed a separate one. The data were no good for
triangulation.
The records at ATIC didn't contain the analysis of these films but
they did mention the Data Reduction Group at White Sands. So when I
later took over the UFO investigation I made several calls in an
effort to run down the actual film and the analysis. The files at
White Sands, like all files, evidently weren't very good, because the
original reports were gone. I did contact a major who was very co-
operative and offered to try to find the people who had worked on the
analysis of the film. His report, after talking to two men who had
done the analysis, was what I'd expected--nothing concrete except
that the UFO's were unknowns. He did say that by putting a correction
factor in the data gathered by the two cameras they were able to
arrive at a rough estimate of speed, altitude, and size. The UFO was
"higher than 40,000 feet, traveling over 2,000 miles per hour, and it
was over 300 feet in diameter." He cautioned me, however, that these
figures were only estimates, based on the possibly erroneous
correction factor; therefore they weren't proof of anything--except
that something was in the air.
The people at White Sands continued to be on the alert for UFO's
while the camera stations were in operation because they realized
that if the flight path of a UFO could be accurately plotted and
timed it could be positively identified. But no more UFO's showed up.
One day Lieutenant Cummings came over to my desk and dropped a stack
of reports in front of me. "All radar reports," he said, "and I'm
getting more and more of them every day."
Radar reports, I knew, had always been a controversial point in UFO
history, and if more and more radar reports were coming in, there was
no doubt that an already controversial issue was going to be
compounded.
To understand why there is always some disagreement whenever a
flying saucer is picked up on radar, it is necessary to know a little
bit about how radar operates.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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