Edward James Ruppelt

“ I’ve heard dozens of explanations—cotton blowing in the wind, bugs’ wings reflecting sunlight, a hoax to put Farmington on the map, and real honest-to-goodness flying saucers. One explanation was never publicized, however, and if there is an explanation, it is the best. Under certain conditions of extreme cold, probably 50 to 60 degrees below zero, the plastic bag of a skyhook balloon will get very brittle, and will take on the characteristics of a huge light bulb. If a sudden gust of wind or some other disturbance hits the balloon, it will shatter into a thousand pieces. ”

“ A matter of minutes after the sighting a pilot radioed Terre Haute that he had seen a UFO. He was flying from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, when just east of Paris he’d looked back and to his left. There, level with his airplane and fairly close, was a large silvery object, “like a flattened orange,” hanging motionless in the sky. ”

“ I’d been told many times that if we had even one piece of information that was substantiated by some kind of recorded proof—a set of cinetheodolite movies of a UFO, a spectrum photograph, or any other kind of instrumented data that one could sit down and study—we would have no difficulty getting almost any scientist in the world interested in actively helping us find the answer to the UFO riddle. ”

“ As soon as the word spread that Project Blue Book was giving official briefings to groups with the proper security clearances, we had no trouble in getting scientists to swap free advice for a briefing. I might add that we briefed only groups who were engaged in government work and who had the proper security clearances solely because we could discuss any government project that might be of help to us in pinning down the UFO. Our briefings weren’t just squeezed in either; in many instances we would arrive at a place to find that a whole day had been set aside to talk about UFO’s. ”

“ Everyone at the table put in his ideas. One radar man said that he’d looked over several dozen radar reports and that his conclusion was that the UFO’s couldn’t be anything but interplanetary spaceships. He started to give his reasons when another radar man leaped into the conversation. This man said that he’d read every radar report, too, and that there wasn’t one that couldn’t be explained as a weather phenomenon—even the radar-visual sightings. In fact, he wasn’t even convinced that we had ever gotten such a thing as radar-visual sighting. ”

“ I’d gotten the personal and very candid opinion of seven airline captains, and the opinions of a half a hundred more airline pilots had been quoted. I’d learned that the UFO’s are discussed often. I’d learned that many airline pilots take UFO sightings very seriously. I learned that some believe they are interplanetary, some think they’re a U.S. weapon, and many just don’t know. But very few are laughing off the good sightings.
By May 1950 the flying saucer business had hit a new all-time peak.
The Air Force didn’t take any side, they just shrugged. ”

“ As soon as we got the lab report, we checked a few possibilities ourselves. There were no hot underground springs to heat the earth, no chemicals in the soil, not a thing we found could explain it. The only way it could have been faked would have been to heat the earth from underneath to 300 degrees F., and how do you do this without using big and cumbersome equipment and disturbing the ground? You can’t. Only a few people handled the grass specimens: the lab, the intelligence officer in Florida, and I. The lab wouldn’t do it as a joke, then write an official report, and I didn’t do it. ”

“ The airplanes were flying high, and slowly, so no sound was heard; only the bright floodlights could be seen. Since most people, even other pilots, have never seen a night aerial refueling operation and could not identify the odd lights they saw, the lights became UFO’s.
In other instances common everyday objects look like UFO’s because of some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been in the sky every day of the observer's life suddenly “takes off at high speed on a highly erratic flight path.” ”

“ Many times a weather target will be a fuzzy and indistinct spot on the scope while a real target, an airplane for example, will be bright and sharp. This question of whether a target looked real is the cause of the majority of the arguments about radar-detected UFO’s because it is up to the judgment of the radar operator as to what the target looked like. And whenever human judgment is involved in a decision, there is plenty of room for an argument. ”

“ Yet these thousands of written words and millions of spoken words—all attesting to the general interest—have generated more heat than light. Out of this avalanche of print and talk, the full, factual, true story of UFO’s has emerged only on rare occasions. The general public, for its interest in UFO’s, has been paid off in misinformation. ”

“ There are many other prominent scientists in the world whom I met while I was chief of Project Blue Book who, I’m sure, would give the same answer—they’ve not been able to find any proof, but they continue to keep an objective outlook. There are just enough big question marks sprinkled through the reports to keep their outlook objective.
I know that there are many other scientists in the world who, although they haven’t studied the Air Force’s UFO files, would limit their comment to a large laugh followed by an, “It can’t be.” ”

“ Our original idea of attempting to get several separate reports from one sighting so we could use triangulation to measure speed, altitude, and size wasn’t working out. We had given the idea enough publicity, but reports where triangulation could be used were few and far between. Mr. or Mrs. Average Citizen just doesn’t look up at the sky unless he or she sees a flash of light or hears a sound. Then even if he or she does look up and sees a UFO, it is very seldom that the report ever gets to Project Blue Book. ”

“ The commanding officer of the fighter group, a full colonel and command pilot, believed that UFO’s were real. The colonel believed in UFO’s because he had a lot of faith in his pilots—and they had chased UFO’s in their F-86’s. He had seen UFO’s on the scopes of his radar sets, and he knew radar.
The colonel’s intelligence officer, a captain, didn’t exactly believe that UFO’s were real, but he did think that they warranted careful investigation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Lubbock Lights, Unabridged
When four college professors, a geologist, a chemist, a physicist, and a petroleum engineer, report seeing the same UFO's on fourteen different occasions, the event can be classified as, at least, unusual. Add the facts that hundreds of other people saw these UFO’s and that they were photographed, and the story gets even better. Add a few more facts—that these UFO’s were picked up on radar and that a few people got a close look at one of them, and the story begins to convince even the most ardent skeptics. ”

“ Every day the lives of thousands of people depended upon their interpretation of the radar targets they saw on their scopes. And you don’t get a job like this unless you’ve spent a good many years watching a luminous line paint targets on a good many radarscopes. Targets caused by inversions aren’t rare—in the years that these men had been working with radar they had undoubtedly seen every kind of target, real or false, that radar can detect. They had told the Bolling AFB intelligence officer that the targets they saw were caused by the radar waves’ bouncing off a hard, solid object. ”

“ For anything flying in the air the stimulus could be anything that is normally seen in the air. Balloons, airplanes, and astronomical bodies are the commoner stimuli. Birds and insects are common also, but usually are seen at such close range that they are nearly always recognized. Infrequently observed things, such as sundogs, mirages, huge fireballs, and a host of other unusual flying objects, are also known stimuli.
On Project Blue Book the problem was to identify these stimuli. We had methods for checking the location, at anytime, of every balloon launched anywhere in the United States. ”

“ I was making my headquarters at an air base where a fighter-bomber wing was stationed. Through a mutual friend I met one of the fighter-bomber pilots who had known Arnold. In civilian life the pilot was a newspaper reporter and had worked on the original Arnold story. He told me that when the story first broke all the newspaper editors in the area were thoroughly convinced that the incident was a hoax, and that they intended to write the story as such. The more they dug into the facts, however, and into Arnold’s reputation, the more it appeared that he was telling the truth. ”

“ On another occasion the crew of a C-47 that was tracking a skyhook balloon saw two similar UFO’s come loping in from just above the horizon, circle the balloon, which was flying at just under 90,000 feet, and rapidly leave. When the balloon was recovered it was ripped.
I knew the two pilots of the C-47; both of them now believe in flying saucers. And they aren’t alone; so do the people of the Aeronautical Division of General Mills who launch and track the big skyhook balloons. These scientists and engineers all have seen UFO’s and they aren’t their own balloons. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To reach their objective Project Grudge launched into a campaign that opened a new age in the history of the UFO. If a comparative age in world history can be chosen, the Dark Ages would be most appropriate. Webster’s Dictionary defines the Dark Ages as a period of “intellectual stagnation.”
To one who is intimately familiar with UFO history it is clear that Project Grudge had a two-phase program of UFO annihilation. The first phase consisted of explaining every UFO report. The second phase was to tell the public how the Air Force had solved all the sightings. ”

“ After obtaining the colonel’s story, we collected all available data concerning known incidents in which there seemed to be a correlation between the visual sighting of UFO’s and the presence of excess atomic radiation in the area of the sightings.
There was one last thing to do. I wanted to take the dates and times of all the reported radiation increases and check them against all sources of UFO reports. This project would take a lot of leg work and digging, but I felt that it would offer the most positive and complete evidence we could assemble as to whether or not a correlation existed. ”

“ If I could have found out, it would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be an answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.
The fact that the lights didn’t make any perceivable sound seemed as if it might be a clue. Birds or light phenomena wouldn’t make any sound, but how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or above the speed of sound? Jet airplanes don’t fly as fast as the speed of sound but they make a horrible roar. ”

“ Of these reports, the radar-visual sightings are the most convincing. When a ground radar picks up a UFO target and a ground observer sees a light where the radar target is located, then a jet interceptor is scrambled to intercept the UFO and the pilot also sees the light and gets a radar lock on only to have the UFO almost impudently outdistance him, there is no simple answer. ”

“ Then there was another interesting fact: hardly a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn’t an inversion in Washington, yet the slow-moving, “solid” radar targets appeared on only a few nights.
But the one big factor on the pro side of the question is the people involved—good radar men—men who deal in human lives. Each day they use their radar to bring thousands of people into Washington National Airport and with a responsibility like this they should know a real target from a weather target. ”

“ Then one of the other officers at the table cut in, “That’s just the point, we do have the reports and we have read them. None of us can understand why Intelligence is so hesitant to accept the fact that something we just don’t know about is flying around in our skies—unless you are trying to cover up something big.” ”

“ When a new shift took over at the ARTC radar room at National Airport, the air traffic was light so only one man was watching the radarscope. The senior traffic controller and the six other traffic controllers on the shift were out of the room at eleven-forty, when the man watching the radarscope noticed a group of seven targets appear. From their position on the scope he knew that they were just east and a little south of Andrews AFB. In a way the targets looked like a formation of slow airplanes, but no formations were due in the area. ”

“ Aerodynamicists at ATIC and at Wright Field’s Aircraft Laboratory computed the maximum performance that could be expected from the German designs. The designers of the aircraft themselves were contacted. “Could the Russians develop a flying saucer from their designs?” The answer was, “No, there was no conceivable way any aircraft could perform that would match the reported maneuvers of the UFO’s.” The Air Force’s Aeromedical Laboratory concurred. If the aircraft could be built, the human body couldn’t stand the violent maneuvers that were reported. ”

“ These individuals, frightened perhaps by threats of atomic destruction, or lesser fears—who knows what—act as if nothing that men can do can save the earth. Instead, they seek salvation from outer space, on the forlorn premise that flying saucer men, by their very existence, are wiser and more advanced than we. Such people may reason that a race of men capable of interplanetary travel have lived well into, or through, an atomic age. ”

“ Mantell had unfortunately been killed trying to reach the planet Venus.
To the press, the nonchalant, offhand manner with which the sighting was written off by the Air Force public relations officer showed great confidence in the conclusion, Venus, but behind the barbed-wire fence that encircled ATIC the nonchalant attitude didn’t exist among the intelligence analysts. One man had already left for Louisville and the rest were doing some tall speculating. The story about the tower-to-air talk, “It looks metallic and it’s tremendous in size,” spread fast. ”

“ The Bolling AFB intelligence officer said he would write up the complete report and forward it to ATIC.
That afternoon things bustled in the Pentagon. Down on the first floor Al Chop was doing his best to stave off the press while up on the fourth floor intelligence officers were holding some serious conferences. There was talk of temperature inversions and the false targets they could cause; but the consensus was that a good radar operator could spot inversion-caused targets, and the traffic controllers who operated the radar at Washington National Airport weren’t just out of radar school. ”

“ The controller looked down at his scope and the target was beginning to pick up speed and move southwest. He yelled at two of his men to run outside and take a look. In a second or two one of them shouted back that they could both see a large bluish-white light moving toward Rapid City. The controller looked down at his scope—the target was moving toward Rapid City. As all three parties watched the light and kept up a steady cross conversation of the description, the UFO swiftly made a wide sweep around Rapid City and returned to its original position in the sky. ”

“ But the biggest argument against the object’s being a balloon was the fact that the pilot pulled in behind it; it was directly off the nose of his airplane, and although he followed it for more than a minute, it pulled away from him. Once you line up an airplane on a balloon and go straight toward it you will catch it in a matter of seconds, even in the slowest airplane. There have been dogfights with UFO’s where the UFO’s turned out to be balloons, but the pilots always reported that the UFO “made a pass” at them. In other words, they rapidly caught up with the balloon and passed it. ”

“ For a while after the Arnold sighting the term “flying saucer” was used to describe all disk-shaped objects that were seen flashing through the sky at fantastic speeds. Before long, reports were made of objects other than disks, and these were also called flying saucers. Today the words are popularly applied to anything seen in the sky that cannot be identified as a common, everyday object. Thus a flying saucer can be a formation of lights, a single light, a sphere, or any other shape ”

“ The several hundred engineers and scientists who make up their staff run from experts on soils to nuclear physicists. They would make these people available to me to assist Project Grudge on any problem that might arise from a UFO report. They did not have a staff astronomer or psychologist, but they agreed to get them for us on a subcontract basis. Besides providing experts in every field of science, they would make two studies for us; a study of how much a person can be expected to see and remember from a UFO sighting, and a statistical study of UFO reports. ”

“ The weather station at Bolling AFB said that there were no balloons in the area, but as a double check the weather people looked at their records of high-altitude winds. It couldn’t have been a balloon because none of the winds up to 65,000 feet were blowing from west to east—and to be able to see a light on a balloon, it has to be well below 65,000 feet; the man from CIA told me that they had even considered the possibility that the UFO was a meteor and that the “jump” had been due to some kind of an atmospheric distortion. But the light had been in sight too long to be a meteor. ”

“ Radar, of course, will give an accurate measurement of speed and altitude, I pointed out, but radar is not infallible. There is always the problem of weather. To get accurate radar data on a UFO, it is always necessary to prove that it wasn’t weather that was causing the target. Radar is valuable, and we wanted radar reports, I said, but they should be considered only as a parallel effort and shouldn’t take the place of visual sightings. ”

“ On many occasions Air Force intelligence officers who were stationed in England, France, and Germany, and who returned to the U.S. on business, took back stacks of unclassified flying saucer stones. One civilian intelligence agent who frequently traveled between the U.S. and Europe also acted as the unofficial courier for a German group—transporting hot newspaper and magazine articles about UFO’s that I’d collected. In return I received the latest information on European sightings-sightings that never were released and that we never received at ATIC through official channels. ”

“ Just before leaving for Dayton, I called Major Dewey Fournet in the Pentagon and asked him to do some checking.
Monday morning the machete went to the materials lab at Wright-Patterson. The question we asked was, “Is there anything unusual about this machete? Is it magnetized? Is it radioactive? Has it been heated?” No knife was ever tested so thoroughly for so many things. As in using a Geiger counter to check the area over which the UFO had hovered in the Florida woods, our idea was to investigate every possible aspect of the sighting. ”

“ To keep my promise of no publicity, I’ll call him the “scientist.”
The rumor version of the UFO-radiation story that had been kicking around in Air Force and scientific circles for so long had been correct in detail but it was by no means complete. The scientist said that after the initial sighting had taken place word was spread at the research lab that the next time the instruments registered abnormal amounts of radiation, some of the personnel were to go outside immediately and look for some object in the sky. ”