The Report on Unidentified Flying ObjectsRuppelt, Edward J.
History
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects
Ruppelt, Edward J.
Unidentified flying objects
On the night of August 25, 1951, about 9:20P.M., just twenty minutes
after the Albuquerque sighting, four college professors from Texas
Technological College at Lubbock had observed a formation of soft,
glowing, bluish-green lights pass over their home. Several hours
later they saw a similar group of lights and in the next two weeks
they saw at least ten more. On August 31 an amateur photographer had
taken five photos of the lights. Also on the thirty-first two ladies
had seen a large "aluminum-colored," "pear-shaped" object hovering
near a road north of Lubbock. The report went into the details of
these sightings and enclosed a set of the photos that had been taken.
This report, in itself, was a good UFO report, but the similarity to
the Albuquerque sighting, both in the description of the object and
the time that it was seen, was truly amazing.
I almost overlooked the report from the radar station because it was
fairly short. It said that early on the morning of August 26, only a
few hours after the Lubbock sighting, two different radars had shown
a target traveling 900 miles per hour at 13,000 feet on a
northwesterly heading. The target had been observed for six minutes
and an F-86 jet interceptor had been scrambled but by the time the F-
86 had climbed into the air the target was gone. The last paragraph
in the report was rather curt and to the point. It was apparently in
anticipation of the comments the report would draw. It said that the
target was not caused by weather. The officer in charge of the radar
station and several members of his crew had been operating radar for
seven years and they could recognize a weather target. This target
was real.
I quickly took out a map of the United States and drew in a course
line between Lubbock and the radar station. A UFO flying between
these two points would be on a northwesterly heading and the times it
was seen at the two places gave it a speed of roughly 900 miles per
hour.
This was by far the best combination of UFO reports I'd ever read
and I'd read every one in the Air Force's files.
The first thing I did after reading the reports was to rush a set of
the Lubbock photos to the intelligence officer of the 34th Air
Division in Albuquerque. I asked him to show the photos to the AEC
employee and his wife without telling them what they were. I
requested an answer by wire. Later the next day I received my answer:
"Observers immediately said that this is what they saw on the night
of 25 August. Details by airmail." The details were a sketch the man
and his wife had made of a wing around the photo of the Lubbock
Lights. The number of lights in the photo and the number of lights
the two observers had seen on the wing didn't tally, but they
explained this by saying that they could have been wrong in their
estimate.
The next day I flew to Lubbock to see if I could find an answer to
all of these mysterious happenings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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