DISCLOSURE / FILE
A declassified transcript of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's March 1952 briefing on the U.S. Air Force's reopened UFO investigation, the instruments it planned to field, and the roughly 20% of about 800 cases it could not explain.
DOW-UAP-D154, Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952
A declassified transcript of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's March 1952 briefing on the U.S. Air Force's reopened UFO investigation, the instruments it planned to field, and the roughly 20% of about 800 cases it could not explain.
Ruppelt, appointed project engineer when the Air Force reopened its UFO file around October 1951, walks an audience through about 800 reports on record: roughly 2% hoaxes, a large share misidentified objects, and about 20% he calls very good reports from very reliable people on which no conclusion can be drawn. He lays out concentrations around ports, Los Alamos, Albuquerque, White Sands, and Oak Ridge, the Lubbock case with its single hard measurement of 30 degrees per second, a Holloman cinetheodolite track read at roughly 150,000 feet and 3,500 miles an hour that the trackers would not stand behind, and the green fireballs studied by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz. The planned fixes are diffraction-grating cameras for guards at Sandia and White Sands, Air Defense Command radar-scope cameras, and a long-focal-length camera slaved to the radar spinner. His stated position is that the Air Force has no real proof that anything exists, cannot back the Scully or Keyhoe books, and needs physical data before it can say the sightings are all known objects seen under odd conditions.
We've gone through these reports and come up with the fact that about 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable people and are just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn.p.2
But the fact that they're silent is quite interesting because we, we have no knowledge of any type of power plant that would be completely silent.p.5
However, they did get their angular measurement across the sky, and it came out to be 30 degrees per second. Now, that's the only measurement we've got on these things.p.7
Another thing is we've had a lot of radar returns, uh, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with a radar return.p.9
These things have, the Air Defense Command radars tracked objects going anywhere from 1,000 up to about 3,500 miles an hour. We've never been able to determine, however, that these weren't malfunctions in the radar set or due to some type of atmospheric phenomena.p.11
Up till the present time, we've got no real proof that anything even exists. The only thing we've got are reports from very reliable people that do have a lot of details in them, but the details aren't the kind that we want.p.12
They may be from Mars, but if they are, we don't want to think they are. We don't want to think they're all balloons. I mean, we try to stay right in the middle of the road.p.14
I mean, we're not trying to hide anything, we're trying to get help.p.19
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OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF WAR 5000 DEFENSE PENTAGON WASHINGTON, DC 20301 -5000 INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952 This document is a transcript of a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt outlining the U.S. Air Force’s reorganized investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The presentation previews prospective technical methodologies, such as diffraction-grating photography and radar-scope synchronization, that were subsequently incorporated into Project Blue Book, a U.S. Air Force program active from 1952 to 1969 that investigated the nature and origin of UFOs. Ruppelt explains that out of approximately 800 historical cases reviewed by the Air Force, approximately 20% remained unexplained after technical analysis. These unresolved reports were sourced from credible military personnel, commercial pilots, and other qualified technical observers. He highlights geographic report concentrations around sensitive national security and nuclear weapons installations (including Los Alamos, Albuquerque, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories) and notes recurring anomalous characteristics, including silent high- speed flight and radar detections indicating unconfirmed air speeds between 1,000 and 3,500 miles per hour. Emphasizing that the Air Force found no conclusive evidence regarding the nature or origin of the phenomena, Ruppelt underscores the national security need for a systematic physical data collection effort to better evaluate these sightings. Beginning of transcript. This medium has been declassified in compliance with applicable executive orders, statutes, and regulations. (Recording test) ...for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men... (Recording test) ...addressing them was by voice straight at the microphone and my mouth separated from the microphone by a distance of about 15 inches. I expect that the speaker will put out approximately this volume. And I will now, as before, turn around slowly and address my words toward the blackboard. This I am now doing, talking straight into the blackboard as if I were drawing some diagrams. I'm then going to turn around slowly again now to face the audience. I am separated from the microphone by a somewhat greater distance, as if I were slightly leaning backwards. (Recording test) ...play around the zero, that's the desirable level. If, for example, we turn the gain down... Now, now. So you see it's just about wide open and that'll pick everything in the room up. See how it jumps and is... Now let's see if we play it back. (Conversation) • "I can't hear you." • "Is there anything already on that tape now?"
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2 • "Yeah, there are a few things on the tape." • "Why don't you say something?" • "...begin to appear in about 1947. You're possibly familiar with them to a certain extent following the newspaper reports. The first ones were sighted by a Kenneth Arnold in June of 1947 out in Idaho. Now, I'll refer to them as 'these things' because we have no idea what we're dealing with. The newspapers and radio played them up to a great degree at that time and consequently introduced a little bit of, probably a little bit of mass hysteria or something like that into the problem. They flared up for about, oh, spasmodically for about two years and then the things died down to a certain extent. The Air Force took over this project soon after the first sighting because the public demanded an explanation of these objects. In 19... August of 1949, the Air Force came out with a report, supposedly a final report on this, where they reached a few conclusions. Now they had some specialists in certain fields working on this problem, and you might be interested in knowing who they were. There's a Dr. J. A. Hynek, an astronomer at Ohio State, Dr. G. Valley of the Scientific Advisory Board, a Dr. Fitz of the Aeromedical, I believe he was a psychologist, the RAND Corporation, Air Weather Service, Cambridge Field Station, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Weather Bureau. All those people took the reports— they had about 300 reports at that time—they took the reports, read them over, came up with their conclusions. Although their conclusions varied to a certain extent, they all agreed that they didn't know exactly what they were. However, there were obviously no direct threat to the United States, so they didn't pay too much more attention to them. The Air Force came up with several conclusions in that report. One of them was it was a mild case of mass hysteria due to, we might say, war nerves; the war had just been over. Some of them were due to psychopathological people, or nuts, something like that trying to create an excitement or get publicity or pure do a pure hoax. And the other one was that they were due to misinterpretation of conventional objects. Well, since that time, several years has passed, and we've been able to go back and review these conclusions a little bit. We've been able to drop out all except the misinterpretation of conventional objects. Going back, we have approximately 800 cases now on record, and only about 2% of those are actual hoaxes or psychopathological people who just don't know what they see. The misinterpretation of known objects is still, of course, a large factor. I mean, that could possibly account for all of them. However, it's a little bit doubtful. We've gone through these reports and come up with the fact that about 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable people and are just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn. The mass hysteria factor has gone out because the newspapers haven't played this up for the last approximately three years. There's occasional flurries, but nothing to get excited about at all, and still the reports continue to come in. We dropped this project in 1949, as I said, as a special project and have been handling this information as regular intelligence material since that time.
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19 newspapers surpass the Air Force in their intelligence channels. They're good. I mean, there's just no getting around it." (Inaudible talk about Mr. Davis and the President) • "Well, I actually, it goes a little further than that. I mean, it's a wonderful ally. I think the project has varied in its handling a lot just through a difference of opinion or, you know, changes in opinion. There's been great interest in it and then it would fall away, not too much interest, and then great interest. And that's officially too, as well as the public. We feel that by going right down the line and taking every case we get and trying to get additional facts and encouraging anybody and everybody to give us information, there are a lot of groups that are interested in this. There's a, I don't know whether any of you read the Time article a few weeks ago on the saucers. Well, there's a group out on the West Coast that's in their spare time trying to get all of these cases they can to work on. We feel that that group, if we're quite frank with them, would be very cooperative and help us. I mean, we're not trying to hide anything, we're trying to get help. You do have a problem and how far you go publicly, but I think possibly this Life type article will help if they, if they publish what we expect." End of recording; nothing follows.
Concatenated page-by-page transcript. Born-digital pages came through pdf.js; scanned pages were transcribed by Claude vision OCR. Pages marked unreadable failed multiple OCR retries (heavy redaction, microfilm artifacts, or blank separators) and are kept in place for audit.
OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF WAR 5000 DEFENSE PENTAGON WASHINGTON, DC 20301 -5000 INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952 This document is a transcript of a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt outlining the U.S. Air Force’s reorganized investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The presentation previews prospective technical methodologies, such as diffraction-grating photography and radar-scope synchronization, that were subsequently incorporated into Project Blue Book, a U.S. Air Force program active from 1952 to 1969 that investigated the nature and origin of UFOs. Ruppelt explains that out of approximately 800 historical cases reviewed by the Air Force, approximately 20% remained unexplained after technical analysis. These unresolved reports were sourced from credible military personnel, commercial pilots, and other qualified technical observers. He highlights geographic report concentrations around sensitive national security and nuclear weapons installations (including Los Alamos, Albuquerque, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories) and notes recurring anomalous characteristics, including silent high- speed flight and radar detections indicating unconfirmed air speeds between 1,000 and 3,500 miles per hour. Emphasizing that the Air Force found no conclusive evidence regarding the nature or origin of the phenomena, Ruppelt underscores the national security need for a systematic physical data collection effort to better evaluate these sightings. Beginning of transcript. This medium has been declassified in compliance with applicable executive orders, statutes, and regulations. (Recording test) ...for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men... (Recording test) ...addressing them was by voice straight at the microphone and my mouth separated from the microphone by a distance of about 15 inches. I expect that the speaker will put out approximately this volume. And I will now, as before, turn around slowly and address my words toward the blackboard. This I am now doing, talking straight into the blackboard as if I were drawing some diagrams. I'm then going to turn around slowly again now to face the audience. I am separated from the microphone by a somewhat greater distance, as if I were slightly leaning backwards. (Recording test) ...play around the zero, that's the desirable level. If, for example, we turn the gain down... Now, now. So you see it's just about wide open and that'll pick everything in the room up. See how it jumps and is... Now let's see if we play it back. (Conversation) • "I can't hear you." • "Is there anything already on that tape now?"
2 • "Yeah, there are a few things on the tape." • "Why don't you say something?" • "...begin to appear in about 1947. You're possibly familiar with them to a certain extent following the newspaper reports. The first ones were sighted by a Kenneth Arnold in June of 1947 out in Idaho. Now, I'll refer to them as 'these things' because we have no idea what we're dealing with. The newspapers and radio played them up to a great degree at that time and consequently introduced a little bit of, probably a little bit of mass hysteria or something like that into the problem. They flared up for about, oh, spasmodically for about two years and then the things died down to a certain extent. The Air Force took over this project soon after the first sighting because the public demanded an explanation of these objects. In 19... August of 1949, the Air Force came out with a report, supposedly a final report on this, where they reached a few conclusions. Now they had some specialists in certain fields working on this problem, and you might be interested in knowing who they were. There's a Dr. J. A. Hynek, an astronomer at Ohio State, Dr. G. Valley of the Scientific Advisory Board, a Dr. Fitz of the Aeromedical, I believe he was a psychologist, the RAND Corporation, Air Weather Service, Cambridge Field Station, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Weather Bureau. All those people took the reports— they had about 300 reports at that time—they took the reports, read them over, came up with their conclusions. Although their conclusions varied to a certain extent, they all agreed that they didn't know exactly what they were. However, there were obviously no direct threat to the United States, so they didn't pay too much more attention to them. The Air Force came up with several conclusions in that report. One of them was it was a mild case of mass hysteria due to, we might say, war nerves; the war had just been over. Some of them were due to psychopathological people, or nuts, something like that trying to create an excitement or get publicity or pure do a pure hoax. And the other one was that they were due to misinterpretation of conventional objects. Well, since that time, several years has passed, and we've been able to go back and review these conclusions a little bit. We've been able to drop out all except the misinterpretation of conventional objects. Going back, we have approximately 800 cases now on record, and only about 2% of those are actual hoaxes or psychopathological people who just don't know what they see. The misinterpretation of known objects is still, of course, a large factor. I mean, that could possibly account for all of them. However, it's a little bit doubtful. We've gone through these reports and come up with the fact that about 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable people and are just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn. The mass hysteria factor has gone out because the newspapers haven't played this up for the last approximately three years. There's occasional flurries, but nothing to get excited about at all, and still the reports continue to come in. We dropped this project in 1949, as I said, as a special project and have been handling this information as regular intelligence material since that time.
3 We've decided, about last October, we decided there possibly was enough material now to reopen this case. So we, the center, appointed a permanent project engineer, which I'm the project engineer, and we reviewed all this stuff. We took all the cases that we had, reworked them, filed them all in a neat file so we could tell what we had. We went through and cross-indexed all the material so that we could get an idea of the different factors that were involved in these reports. We came up with some results. I won't say they're outstanding results, I don't... we don't know what the results mean. But, uh, unfortunately, I didn't realize we were going to have such a large audience here, so we did bring these slides along. I don't know whether you can... any of you in the back room see this print? I'll pass it around and you can get an idea. This is a plot of the sightings in the United States. Now, this does not include the... we have sightings outside of the United States, but we're not too worried about those at the present time. We're more interested in the United States. I'll explain this a little bit to you since you can't see it. We have certain areas in the United States where there are concentrations. In Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, there are concentrations. Now, this is possibly due to two things. One of them is the fact that the people in that area knew that all the activity in this project was taking place in that area, and consequently, they were doing a little bit more reporting. Another thing is that all the experimental flying was being done around Wright Field, and we still have a lot of trouble with that. People call in and say, "I just saw a great big light go over at 5,000 miles an hour," it turns over... it turns out it's an airplane carrying a flare or something like that. So we've disregarded that concentration. However, around all the ports in the United States—San Francisco, Los Angeles, the coastal area around New York City, and New Orleans—there's concentrations. Around Los Alamos and the Albuquerque area, there's concentrations. Around White Sands, there's concentrations, and down here at Camp Hood, Texas. Now, this Camp Hood, Texas concentration was due to an outbreak of odd lights about two years ago. They never did determine exactly what the lights were. They were a special, we might say, a special type of report that haven't occurred again, and we haven't paid too much attention to that. But the ones around Oak Ridge and the ones around Albuquerque may possibly mean something, we don't know. The rest of the reports are pretty well scattered out around the United States. If you plot these reports up by years, they started in the West Coast, up around in the Northwest, around Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in 1947. The next year, they were... they tended to be on the East Coast to a certain extent, and from then on, they were just spread out all over the United States. There was no, no pattern. We've plotted the frequency of these reports again. You'll see that it doesn't vary too much year from, uh, from year to year. This large peak down here occurred right after the first sighting by this Arnold out in Idaho, and it was undoubtedly, a lot of it was due to mass hysteria or people wanting to get their names in the paper. However, you can see it tapered off, and it reaches a peak right in, let's see, this is June and July, and every year, almost, it reaches a peak in there. It's also peaked to a certain extent here in January and then again, there's a peak here in December.
4 Now there's actually no direct pattern to that, but there's enough of a pattern that it plants a seed of doubt in your mind. You sort of wonder why this thing should run a cycle like that. In these two years, '47 and '48, there was a lot of newspaper publicity. However, in '49, '50, and '51, there was very little newspaper publicity, and the reports from '49, '50, and '51 are mostly from military sources. The civilians have dropped out because possibly they didn't know where to report this stuff or they weren't interested in it. The Air Force came out and said there was nothing to it, so they just quit making reports. However, military has continued to make reports. I should say military and a few airline pilots are covered in these two years. We've taken the reported shapes. We have a lot of questions. People say, "Well, what are people reporting?" So we've broken it down into shapes. In this segment here, there were no shapes reported. Somebody just called in or wrote a letter and said, "I saw something," so we've had to disregard it. This segment right here represents some type of an astronomical body. I mean, you could say it was either a bright light in the sky or a streak of light that could have been a meteor. We've lumped all those together. In this section are disc or spherical shaped objects. We've lumped those together because it's... we don't believe that people can tell if they're seeing a disc or a sphere unless they should happen to see it both on the bottom view and edgewise to determine it's a disc. So we've lumped those all together. Some of these could be balloons. I mean, there's no doubt about that, that they could be weather balloons. However, due to, or contrary to popular opinion, these things are not, are definitely not all balloons. These are shapes that are just reported as oval shapes. It's difficult to tell what they are. Miscellaneous is almost anything. Vapor trails probably actually were vapor trails of aircraft. There's one small segment in here, which is only 6/10 of 1% of all 800 reports, and that is reports of groups of lights going through the sky. Now we've had quite a bit of difficulty with those because the reports are usually from pretty good sources, and they'll see, oh, anywhere from 6 to 20 lights in a formation going streaking across the sky. Well, it's almost impossible that that would, that you would find six meteors together. I understand it's possible to see two of them together that would appear to be in formation, but no more than that. A certain percentage, 1%, are reported to be balloons. Now, these are balloons that we've not been able to establish the origin of. In other words, we don't, they're just balloons floating over the United States, and they're probably meteorological balloons that have gotten loose from some station and haven't burst when they were supposed to. About two and a half percent resemble actual aircraft. We've had quite a bit of discussion as to whether or not these objects could possibly be some highly developed aircraft type that the Soviets have. We've almost been able to throw that out because of the small percentage of reports that even mention any shape due to aircraft, that would resemble aircraft. This percentage here are reported to be rockets or cigar-shaped objects. Now, once again, we've gone into that quite thoroughly and have found that, and it's common knowledge, that any bright light traveling through the air will burn an image in your eye and will, you'll have some persistence there, and it will appear to be elongated when actually it's just a round source of light.
5 So that's some of the shapes that we've had. Now, getting back to this disc or spherical shaped objects, these things are always silent. I mean, if we want to assume that this object we're dealing with is a disc-shaped thing, these are always silent, and they're usually highly maneuverable. Although lately, the reports that have been coming in have neglected to put this 90-degree turn business in; they just go over at a great rate of speed. But the fact that they're silent is quite interesting because we, we have no knowledge of any type of power plant that would be completely silent. These are the types of people that send in our reports. This segment here are civilians, and most of these reports came in when the project was first initiated back in 1947 and '48. This black segment here are reports from military sources, and they are, we've put them in as just ground officers, not usually not flying officers, or at least the reports are not made from the air. We have a small segment here of radar returns that we've been unable to explain. This section right here are reports from civilian pilots who were airborne at the time of the sighting. This segment in here especially is the one that we're very interested in. They're reports from airline pilots, from tower operators, and balloon observers. Now, these balloon observers are normally people like the General Mills crews that launch these high-altitude balloons. And here we have technically trained personnel such as scientists, engineers, and so forth. This segment, as I said, are the ones that we're very much interested in. Now, airline pilots are, we consider very reliable because they're very, well, they don't like to stick their neck out and make one of these reports unless they're absolutely sure they saw something. They received some very unfavorable publicity during this last rash of reports, or the first one, I should say in '47 and '48, and they absolutely refuse to give us reports unless they're completely sold that they saw something. I've talked to quite a few of the pilots, and one of them made the statement if he looked out his window and saw a V-2 rocket or something like that flying wingtip to wingtip with him over Spokane, he wouldn't tell anybody about it. I mean, he'd never report it to the Air Force because or to anybody because they just say he was crazy and probably ground him. So that's the big difficulty we have in getting reports from airline pilots. We do hear through the grapevine that they see an awful lot of odd things that they don't report, especially over in the Near East, Iran, and the Middle East, I should say, Iran, Palestine, Egypt, in those runs. Now, we haven't been able to pin that down as fact. That's just a rumor that we've picked up in talking to other airline pilots who've heard other airline pilots say that, but we've never been able to pin it down. However, it would be very interesting to find out, and we're making attempts, although we've run up against a lot of trouble because, as I said, the pilots just don't want publicity and they won't make those reports. This segment in here have been reported by Air Force pilots, and they're aerial sightings. A lot of these have been balloons. We've had a lot of trouble with the balloons in that a pilot meeting a balloon in the air isn't familiar with what that balloon's going to do. I mean, he's familiar with meeting another airplane, and he's already made up his mind as to what the rate of closure should be and different things like that. He'll usually assume that the, when he meets a balloon, that it's instead of a balloon, it's some object about 30 or 40 feet in
6 diameter, and judging the rate of closure, he assumes it's going at a very terrific speed. But we've been able in some cases to actually show how that pilot was misled and that it was actually a balloon. However, we don't, we don't try to say that everything was a balloon. In other words, if a balloon was launched in the area, we try to definitely pin that down. We can get the time of launch of the balloon, the rate of ascent, the winds aloft, we can plot out the path of that balloon and plot out the pilot's path and show by various lines of sight how he actually did see the balloon. In the past, it's been a practice to say, "Well, there was a balloon launched within 100 miles, consequently the pilot must have seen the balloon." We don't want to try that because it's, well, we just want to have more proof before we say that it's a balloon. And the Air Force has gotten into a lot of trouble in the past by very loosely tying up these balloons with the sightings. We have some photographs of these objects that, we have quite a few photographs, I should say. A lot of them are definitely either hoaxes or else they're flaws in the negative and the people that have found this print have looked at it and said, "Ah, I took a picture of the sky and I didn't see this flying saucer, although here's a picture of it," and they'll send it into us. It's not too difficult to examine those under a microscope and find out that the image is due to an imperfection in the negative. However, we have a few photographs that are very difficult to evaluate. This is one of them right here. It was taken in Phoenix, Arizona, on the 7th of July, 1947. This has been hashed around quite a bit, and there's a little bit of doubt as to the, whether or not this was purposely faked, but we've never been able to prove it. This picture is probably the most interesting one that we've ever received, mainly because we went into the background of this thing a lot more. This was taken in Lubbock, Texas last September. Now, this Lubbock case is probably the most interesting one, the whole case is the most interesting one we've ever had. These five college professors from Texas Tech were sitting out in the backyard one evening, in what was it, August, yes, August 25th, and they happened to be discussing meteors and so they were sitting there looking up in the sky, and all of a sudden this bunch of lights went over. And so one of them, they looked at each other and said, "What was that?" Nobody seemed to know. And so, about a half an hour later, why they were still discussing the lights and they said they wished that something like that would go over again, and it did. So, for, well, altogether in a period of, I believe it was five or six nights, they observed 12 of these things that went over. Well, they assumed that it was some kind of a missile that the Air Force had been developing, and being nosy, they thought they'd find out what this, well, they reached this conclusion after they saw the first two, that they'd find out what these missiles were. So they set up their own measuring, crude measuring systems. They were able to set up a, or measure the angles on the houses and things in their backyards so they could tell the angle this thing went through, and they timed it with a stopwatch. They also set up a baseline 90 degrees to the path—and incidentally, these things always came over the same path and at roughly the same time every night, so they knew about what was going on. They set up this baseline and got at each end with two-way radios and some homemade, well, you might call them theodolites or measuring, angle measuring devices, and tried to get an altitude. Well, they were unsuccessful on
7 that. However, they did get their angular measurement across the sky, and it came out to be 30 degrees per second. Now, that's the only measurement we've got on these things. We didn't hear about it till about a month after it happened, and I went down and spent quite a bit of time with these people. At first, we thought it was just one big hoax, that they were just out to get some publicity, but on investigating these people and talking to them, we found out that there was, the professor of, I believe he's head of the physics department at Texas Tech, a gentleman who was head of the petroleum engineering department at Texas Tech, a gentleman who'd spent the last five years in Alaska studying the aurora, and a doctor of mathematics, and they had an astronomer who actually who didn't see these, although he was in on the investigation. Well, after they found out the Air Force was interested in it, they took an entirely different view. I mean, when they found out that it wasn't one of our missiles, then they began to wonder what it was, but the thing had happened and it was finished and they couldn't get any more information for us. Now these pictures, well, incidentally, before that, they put a couple of pieces in the local newspaper to try to determine who else had seen these things, and they put their names in the paper so that people could write to them and say, "I saw it" or "I didn't see it," and they got a lot of publicity. Consequently, everybody in Lubbock, Texas was sitting out at night waiting for these things to go over. And a college freshman at Texas Tech had his camera ready when they went over one night, and this is the picture that he got. Now these are, this is one formation that went over and this is another formation. He, his story is that he saw one go over and all of a sudden it dawned on him, "Well, I might try to get a picture." He was a fairly good amateur photographer. He took these with a Kodak 35. He shot them at 1/10th of a second at F3.5 on Plus-X film. He tracked them, and consequently, we don't know whether this blur is due to the movement of the object or the movement of his camera since he shot them at 1/10th of a second. This is the first formation that went over, and this is the second formation. Now, we've tried every way that we know of to prove that these pictures are faked. I've talked to the kid, and in fact, I talked to him twice. We've had OSI talk to him about three times, and the final, last time, they got him alone and they said, "Now look, we'll let you back out on this if you want to. We'll never tell anybody. As far as the newspaper's concerned and everybody you've sold these pictures to, why they're really good photos, but if you'll just confess to the OSI, why we'll drop it." But he said, "No," he said, "these are pictures of something that flew over Lubbock, Texas on..." Well, this was, these happened to be taken on the 31st of August. He said, "I don't know what they are, but," he said, "I took the pictures and that's all I know," and he signed a sworn statement for us, so we had to drop it right there. I mean, we've got no way to... (Question from audience) • "Do these pictures check with the observations of those five?" • "No, sir. I was going to just mention that. The college professors say that these pictures are faked. I mean, they won't believe them at all. They say the things that they saw, they know were too dim to ever take a picture of. Now, we cross-checked with the kid on that, and he said, he said, 'That's right.' He said, 'After I took these pictures,' he said, 'I didn't
8 develop them for two days because,' he said, 'I just thought in my own mind that I wouldn't even have an image because they were, what I saw was, I thought, was too dim to take a picture of, but I just took a chance.' So he took those pictures. He finally developed them and that's what he came out with. And he sold those, I believe he got $8 for the original set of prints from a newspaper. We had those prints over to the photo lab and they checked them out. I mean, they are an actual image, there's no doubt about that. He could have taken a black sheet of paper and just punched holes in it and faked them very easily, but he swears up and down he didn't do that. These things under a microscope show that the relative position of these things vary just a little bit in each picture. Well, it's doubtful if he took a piece of cardboard and just punched holes in it, if he would be smart enough to vary the holes, the position of the hole in each exposure. He'd probably just taken four shots of the same thing and maybe moved his camera to give him a little appearance of motion there. But the actual exposures or images are moved just a little bit in each exposure. Now again, that could come from the fact that maybe he tipped his paper as he took the picture, but we don't know. We've never been able to prove that they were faked. The density on the negative compares to the density of a bright star. In other words, we used the same exposure and the same film and went out and took a couple pictures of some bright planets, and it's, the density of the negative is just a little bit more than that of a bright planet at night. So, that's all we know about it. We haven't been able to... (Question from audience) • "Did you get two sets of lights in some cases rather than a smear?" • "No, sir, we haven't. I asked him about that and he said when he took the pictures, it looked like a straight line. He didn't notice two different formations. Now, I always hesitate to tell this because it could again be one big coincidence, but if you plot those points on a piece of, on an enlargement on a piece of graph paper and plot them out exactly, you'll see that as the consecutive, in the consecutive frames, one row of lights, the back row, will say, moves up to the first row, and then it moves on ahead in the third picture. Now, that doesn't make sense at all because of the fact that they're two different formations he took. The only two possibilities that we can think of, one of them is that it's still one great big hoax that the college professors just decided to see how much they could fool the people in Lubbock, Texas and they planted these pictures with the kid. The other thing is that there was, it was known that there was a duck flight on in the area at the time, that the ducks were flying across Lubbock. We tried, and the people in Lubbock tried to see whether or not you could take a picture of ducks at night just from the reflection of the city lights, and that's impossible. So if these pictures aren't true, or are not fakes, why then these pictures are not of ducks. We'll put it that way. The college professors won't believe the duck story at all. I mean, they say those were not ducks. We can, if they were ducks, they'd have to be at such and such an height to give that 30
9 degrees per second, and if they were that low, why, in fact, I think it comes out to be about 75 to 80 feet, the ducks would have to be that low to be flying 60 miles an hour and go through that angle at that certain time. And they say they are not ducks. Now that's the only possibility we have, or the only idea of what they could be. They might be ducks reflecting the city lights, although it's still hard to believe that because just of all the circumstances, it just doesn't sound like ducks. A lot of people in Lubbock who were looking for these objects on these nights did see ducks. And when we were down there, they'd call us up and they'd say, 'I know what these lights are, they're ducks because I saw them and I could see the wings flapping and I could hear them honking and I could see their necks sticking out, and you're wasting our good taxpayers' money coming down here talking about it because they were ducks.' Now, but once again, there's about half the people that saw these objects again said they were not ducks because they said, 'We've lived in Lubbock all our life and we've seen ducks for the last 30 years and those were not ducks.' So we're up against a blank wall on this certain, this one case. Now we, uh, we've reached several general, or I shouldn't say reached any conclusions. There's two or three general facts about all of the sightings, the overall, uh, collection of sightings we have. One of them is that on our good sightings, there's absolutely no noise ever reported in connection with these objects, no matter how low they are. They may be, uh, reported as just being specks in the sky or down fairly low and there's absolutely no noise reported. And once again, we, uh, we don't know of any kind of a propulsion system that would, uh, that would do that. I mean, everything that we know of has some type of noise connected with it. Another thing is we've had a lot of radar returns, uh, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with a radar return. We've had two or three reports of that, but we've never been able to pin them down enough and get enough facts about them to make sure that they were both looking at the same thing. Uh, they have had a project on this down at, uh, Holloman. They've been very much interested in it because they've been seeing, uh, compare on a comparative basis, more of these things around the Holloman and White Sands area. They did track something down there with their cinetheodolites. Uh, they don't know what it is, and it could possibly be a slow-moving daylight meteor. Now, I'm not an astronomer, but I understand such things exist. Uh, they, they got pictures of it and they were able to track it. However, they saw about five, I think it was five or six of these things at once. Uh, it was right after they launched a missile and they had their, uh, Scania, cinetheodolites pointed up in the air and they saw these four or five things right behind the missile and they got the word to swing over on those and forget the missile. And they're a little bit doubtful as to whether or not all stations tracked the same object. So consequently, their readings are a little bit off, but they did come up, uh, with an altitude reading of about 150,000 feet. Uh, the speed was, uh, very great. They, they came up with a speed of about 3,500 miles an hour, but again, they won't back that up because they aren't, they aren't sure of the conditions that these readings were made under. Uh, that's the only time we've ever come really close to getting any, uh, any accurate data on these things. And I want to say again that it could be that there was a, a meteor in the daytime. Now, they have another type of, uh,
10 phenomena or object or something floating around down that area, and that's these green fireballs. Now, I don't know whether you've been reading about that in the paper, but there's a Dr., uh, Lincoln LaPaz down in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico who's been making a big deal out of these green fireballs. They appear to be, uh, similar to a meteor except that they have a definite flat trajectory. Uh, they're reported to be a brilliant, uh, greenish-blue color, and they, uh, they don't explode. I mean, they appear to be very low at, uh, about a third or a fourth the size of a full moon and they're very low and they just go out like that, they don't explode. Now Dr. LaPaz's theory on this thing is that if it's a normal meteor, there should be a terrific explosion because of the size of these things, uh, indicates that they're down low in the atmosphere and there should be a terrific explosion when they, uh, when they get down low enough to explode. It's, uh, again, we don't know what they are. I mean, they actually exist. There's no doubt about it. I mean, it's not anybody's imagination because they've been reported by, well, Dr. LaPaz himself has seen one, and we've had some very fine reports and they all, uh, follow the same path. There's a definite flat trajectory right across the, uh, well, parallel to the Earth's surface. Uh, they, they go out with no explosion and they're a brilliant bright green. Now, airline pilots have seen them and maybe if they meet them head-on or something like that, they'll rack the airliner up, just about toss everybody out of the seats because they think they're going to have a head-on collision with this, uh, whatever it may be. Now Cambridge, uh, labs have been working on that for two years and they came up with no conclusions whatsoever as to what they might be. So, I understand that we're going to take it over again and see if we can't possibly come up with, uh, some idea. Uh, we've talked to, uh, well, Dr. Kaplan's idea, or, uh, LaPaz's idea is that they come from Russia. And he said that they're using some kind of a self-destruction missile that and they're zeroing in on, uh, Los Alamos. Now that's a good story. I mean, it, it, uh, sounds real exciting and and there's a possibility. I mean, we can't say that it isn't because we don't know what it is. Uh, we've talked to Dr. Kaplan quite a bit on this subject, uh, probably, probably know him from the, uh, University of California. Uh, he thinks that they're either some kind of a, possibly a new meteor that we are not familiar with, or, uh, some phenomena that's related to the aurora. Uh, he, he claims that he can duplicate this color in his lab and I, I'm not, uh, sure of just exactly how he does it. I believe he uses, uh, well, I don't know, I won't say. I've got a report but I don't want to quote something I don't know about. But anyway, he can duplicate this color, and he believes that that's what it is. Now, uh, as I say, that is a definite division of these things. I mean, they, they definitely exist and our problem is to find out, really find out what they are. If they're some kind of phenomena, why then we can turn it over to the astronomers and let them take it. Uh, if they should happen to come from Russia, why then we better start finding out what they're trying to do on it. (Question from audience) • "How many of these green light reports do you have?" • "We have quite a few, sir. I'd hate to say, I mean, I couldn't tell you exactly a number, but they started out in, I believe, '49. Yes, sir. There was a big outbreak of them in '49, and
11 they seem to appear in January or in December and January, in that period between the years. And they coincide with a meteor shower that occurs at that time. I don't believe I know, remember the name of it is, but for a long time, they tried to tie them in with that meteor shower, but just recently now, within the last year, they've begun to occur more on a, over the whole year instead of coming at at one time. OSI, Dr. LaPaz worked for OSI in '49 on these and they tried to come up with a conclusion, they couldn't. They've also spent a lot of time trying to find any fragments and have never been successful. I mean, they've been able to triangulate these things and get a heck of a lot of reports on people who have seen them or seen one of them and then work their triangulation like they do on large meteors, but they've never been able to find any parts. They wanted us to fire to pick up, put a dust collector on a B-29 and try to fly through the area right after these things occurred, try to pick up any dust that they might have left in the upper atmosphere, but they didn't find anything at all that would indicate that anything unusual was going on. So, we're up against a stone wall on these things too. I mean, all we've got is just people's ideas. We've got no proof as to what they actually may be. Now, we've, one of our approaches on this thing is going to be the use of diffraction gratings on cameras. This is Dr. Kaplan's idea. He says that we can, and I mean, I shouldn't say he says, we know that we can take a very inexpensive camera and put a diffraction grating on it and give them to these guards around Sandia and White Sands and all these places where the guards are outdoors 24 hours a day. And every time they see something that's unusual, just point the camera at it and take a picture, and then he says that he can take the reading and match them up either by known objects or match them up in his lab and tell us what the composition is of this object that's emitting this light. Now, we haven't, that's just strictly in the planning stage now, we haven't done very much except Dr. Kaplan is now trying to figure out the cheapest camera that he can build for us and the most rugged camera so these guards can throw it around and still get some decent pictures of these objects. Another thing that we've done is recently we've briefed the Air Defense Command on this whole project and have got their cooperation in with their radar scope cameras. As I mentioned before, we have had quite a few unknown radar returns. These things have, the Air Defense Command radars tracked objects going anywhere from 1,000 up to about 3,500 miles an hour. We've never been able to determine, however, that these weren't malfunctions in the radar set or due to some type of atmospheric phenomena. We've tried to get the weather charts at the time or weather conditions at the time this phenomena has occurred and try to correlate that data and show that due to a certain type of weather condition that they had this type of return. Now, we haven't had too much luck on that angle, so now we're going to try to get radar scope cameras and get pictures of this stuff, and then we'll know. Before, we just had the radar observer's interpretation of what he saw on the scope. We think that with pictures, probably we can do a little bit more with this. Now, another step further than that, and we haven't done anything on this except talk about it, and it may get into the point where we are going to
12 do this, and that is try to put in a long focal length camera, try to match this, a long focal length camera with the radar spinner, so that whenever this radar operator gets a return, all he has to do is poke a button and this camera will take a picture of the area of the sky that the radar spinner is pointing at. And in that, if we get that far, and if we get a bad or funny return, we'll say, an unusual return on a scope, and if we get an image, no matter how big the image is, on the photographic plate or on the film at the same time, why then we can say that this radar operator was actually picking up something. I mean, that would be a great help to us now because we don't know for sure if they're even picking anything up. But that's the next step and it's still in the planning or even it's in the talking stage right now. That's about the main thing we're going to try to do as far as future plans are concerned. We want to get, try to get some concrete data to say that these things exist. Up till the present time, we've got no real proof that anything even exists. The only thing we've got are reports from very reliable people that do have a lot of details in them, but the details aren't the kind that we want. I mean, they don't give us enough data as to the possible performance or anything else that we might need on these objects. The official Air Force viewpoint is that we've got enough good reports from reliable people to be interested in this. We can't back up any of these books by Scully or Keyhoe and say that we know that they're from Venus or that we know they're from Russia or that we even know they exist. I mean, there's a possibility that everything that's being reported is some, is a balloon or is a meteor or ducks or anything you can think of that somebody just saw them from an odd angle or under odd lighting conditions and they look like something else. But it's at the present time, we have enough faith in these people that have been turning in the reports to say that we don't exactly believe them. I mean, we're going to have to get more proof before we can say that everything that's being seen is some known object just viewed under different circumstances. I could go on for a long time telling you about the good reports we've had. I'd say about 20% of the 800 or 900 reports that we now have just cannot be explained. I mean, you can't say that looks like a meteor. You can't say that that could be a balloon if there's a balloon in the area because it just doesn't tie up. And most of these people that have made these reports are well- established airline pilots, I mean, old pilots who've had a lot of flying time, the people that released these General Mills balloons have seen something, the people at White Sands have seen very odd things, this Dr. LaPaz himself has seen a couple things floating over the mountains down in New Mexico that he didn't, he couldn't explain. And we've got about 20% of our reports are like that, that we just, we can't go up to them and say, 'Now you can't, this can't be, you're nuts.' I mean, that would be our only answer on those. 'You're just crazy.' But you can't go up to anybody and tell them that. I mean, they're, they've seen something and we don't know what it is. Now, some of the big questions that enter our mind on this is one, the no sound business. If it actually exists and there's no, there's some type of propulsion but there's no sound, what could it possibly be? Another big question is, and it's getting into the lines of psychology, why or how could a person look up at night or in the dusk, we'll say, or even in the daytime and see some of
13 these things that they report? Now, right along those lines, we had, the same time these pictures were taken down in Lubbock, within two or three days of that time, two women were driving along in a car, and all of a sudden they looked out over the Texas plains and they saw this object that they described as being top-shaped, like one of these old-fashioned tops you put a string around and pull, and it was silver and it was hovering along over the prairie. And they drove up, well, they approached it, and as they approached it, why the thing began to take off like that. Well, now we checked on these women and found out that they were just as reliable as your wives or anybody else. I mean, they didn't have any reputation of being habitual liars or stretching stories or anything like that. They were just good old Texas farm wives is all they were. And we questioned them, but that's their story. I mean, they said, 'That's what we saw. We don't know what it was. We're leaving it up to the Air Force to tell us what we saw.' Well, Thunder, we can't tell them. And once again, it goes down back to the point, how much can people imagine? At the same time these Lubbock pictures were taken, in fact, it's the same night, a guard and his wife from the Sandia base in Albuquerque were sitting out in their backyard, and all of a sudden they looked up and they saw this big dark shape go over. And they said that it was, it looked a lot like a flying wing type aircraft, and it was down about 150 feet and it just scared the dickens out of them because it was so low. And they could see little exhaust flames on the back of the airplane. Well, we checked them again and once again, we found out that they're just good, normal people. I mean, the guy's been a guard at Sandia for a good number of years, so he's reliable to that extent. I mean, they don't usually hire psychopathic cases to guard places like Sandia. And just out of curiosity, we sent these pictures down to that guy, and the OSI showed them to him and he said, 'Yeah,' he said, 'that's what I saw, but,' he said, 'it was, these little lights are the exhaust stacks that I saw.' And it happened on the same night that these pictures were taken, just about two hours before these people saw this thing at Lubbock. So, I mean it, it's probably a coincidence, but again, you can't say it's a coincidence. I mean, we can't get enough facts to ever pin it down, but it's one of those things that's just very interesting to work on. I mean, it'll drive you nuts after a certain amount of time, but then we try to keep going on it. That's about all that I had. If you've got any questions, well, we'd be very happy to discuss any aspect of this whole thing with you folks. (Question from audience) • "What sort of performance data do you get out of these radar returns?" • "Uh, it varies. It varies quite a bit. Usually high speed. When I say high speed, I mean anything over 1,000 miles an hour. Uh, they, for a while, we we thought we had it pinned down or our radar people did because the return always went over the station. It came in, went through the ground clutter, practically directly over the station and went out the other side. Now they claim that that was an indication of, uh, something, I'm not sure, uh, interference in their station or something like that. But lately, we, they haven't been doing that. I mean, they'll, they'll come in to the, uh, into the range and they'll maybe make a turn and go out. Now we had one interesting case from New Spay Library and, uh, this
14 GCA operator was, uh, sitting there looking in his scope and all of a sudden he saw these two objects come in. They were coming in about 4 or 500 miles an hour. And at the same time a C-47 was coming in, he was going to land his 47. Well, he noticed they were on a collision course, so he called the tower and said, 'Tell those two unidentified airplanes they're on a collision course with this 47.' So the tower just called in the blind... The tower said there's no other airplanes out there. The radar man said, 'Yes, there is.' The tower just called in the blind and said, 'Uh, you two unidentified airplanes, you're on a collision course with a 47.' And just as they said that, these two returns made a turn. Now, once again, have we got coincidence or have we actually got something? See, I mean it, uh... Do they speak English? ... So, that's about the only conclusion we can draw, they must speak English. But, uh, that's some of the things we run into. We run into a lot of that kind of stuff where we'll have a lot of small situations that all build up into a big one. And it might be just a coincidence. It might be, we may put our imagination into it unconsciously. Only we, we try to keep away from that. We try to stay right in the straight and narrow. I mean, we don't want to, uh, be influenced either way on this thing. They may be from Mars, but if they are, we don't want to think they are. We don't want to think they're all balloons. I mean, we try to stay right in the middle of the road. Now, we had a real interesting one from, uh, New Jersey, uh, around Sandy Hook and Fort Monmouth here not too long ago. These pilots in a T-33 chased something, and about 10 minutes later, all our radar stations in that area begin to pick these objects up going back and forth all over the skies. And we thought, 'Boy, this is it.' So we tore up there to find out, and boy, the story sounded real fine. These T-33 pilots saw this great big disc-shaped thing over there and he took out after it and he couldn't catch it. And then the radar stations begin to pick up these signals and they were clocking speeds up to 3,500 miles an hour and everything else. Well, it turned out that the pilots had seen a big balloon. It was larger than a normal weather balloon, had been launched at Fort Monmouth. And they were a little bit mixed up with their rate of closure and stuff like that and had seen a balloon. And the radar crews, the first radar crew had picked up a, probably just an ordinary aircraft, but they were giving a demonstration to a bunch of colonels and the operators got a little bit flustered on the whole thing and they couldn't lock in this automatic tracking, so they assumed the thing must be going about 3,500 miles an hour. And it turned out the reason they couldn't lock it in is they were just too excited and got a little bit fouled up on their procedures. And from then on, why they were picking up weather balloons, uh, with these radar reflectors hanging on them and everything else, and the students, incidentally, it turned out they were mostly student radar operators picking this stuff up. The, uh, headquarters had called in and hadn't explained anything. They just said, 'Get on your radar scopes and look for these mysterious objects floating around.' Well, that's all it took for these kids because, boy, they saw everything. Well, what at first appeared to be a very good sighting just all broke down when we get enough facts. Now
15 maybe they'll all turn out to do that, but so far, we've got an awful lot of them that we can't even come close to explaining." • "I'd like to, at the risk of repeating, just sum up some of these points. One is, Lieutenant Ruppelt mentioned around 800 cases that we have in our files. We know that that's only a portion of the sightings that have been made. Those are the ones that have managed to be reported to some military base and then through channels get to us. You can read local newspapers almost anywhere in the country, and if you read them over a period of time, you'll find stories on these things that we have not heard of. We've even heard of them in military organizations that have not been reported because I think it's almost a case of the airline pilots that wonder if there isn't something peculiar. For example, I was talking to some people from SAC the other day, and they were telling me about a radar bomb scoring run of a B-29 out at St. Louis. And they were following the B-29 in to the initial point. The operator noticed this plane flying or an object at 48,000 feet. The B-29 was at 25,000 feet. He immediately thought, 'Well, that's possible.' I mean, double harmonics or something, and anyway, he explained it away in his own mind. Well, then the blip started descending on a collision course, and a quick check revealed that it was descending at a rate of something like 1,000 miles an hour. He got a little more concerned, still thought, 'Well, possibly this is either in the radar or in some atmospheric condition.' Well then when the thing broke off and made a turn and then another turn and took the course and disappeared, they just don't know what it is. We find on these radar sightings that you're just left pretty much outside. I mean, you can't really dig in. You haven't got anything because there's so many of them that can be explained as there's a possibility that it is something either in the atmosphere or in the set. We had one good one not too long ago, and one of our electronics people pulled out a textbook and, gee, there was a case written up in the textbook exactly what had been reported to us. A hovering object that made a rapid rate of ascent and then took off on a course. Well, such a thing has occurred apparently because of weather phenomena, been reported and pretty thoroughly written up. So we find that whole area of sightings, I mean we're just left without any answers. One point that was not brought out is our relationship with Battelle." • "Oh, yes, I forgot to mention... Battelle Memorial Institute. They're one of the contractors who do work for us and... (inaudible) ...They're always silent. They became interested in this when we pointed out to them one day that here's an area in which we've had a lot of problems, and we're looking for help. We don't know the answers. So, one of the things that they hope to do for us is make available to us people who are specialists in various areas. So if we get a case that calls for an astronomer, we can quickly get an astronomer to work on it. Another thing is possibly a clipping service that will bring in a mass of reports we don't have, and if any of them are worth following up, we can. But our problem is just getting facts. We don't have enough facts to do anything other than explain that 80% of these, roughly, are known objects, or possibly. As a matter of fact,
16 they're not 80% definitely proved, but say 60 definitely. I mean, there's no question in our mind it was a plane or something else. And then, these are rough figures, say 20% that maybe could have been a plane, a balloon, or a meteor. And then there's that 20% like the green fireballs and the lights that we just do not have an answer for. Now, one thing that people have suggested, 'Well, how about a feasibility study?' Well, you, a feasibility of what? The unknown. We're stuck there." (Question from audience) • "Have all the intelligence officers of the bases and units been alerted on this and they report everything, or is the military generally alerted to this?" • "Yes, we, we should have brought that out early. There is a directive from Headquarters, USAF, that establishes a reporting procedure. Now, we felt for a long time, like most directives, particularly if there's no activity on it, people forget about it. I mean, it gets stuck off in the file. We've also felt that it was not a very good one. It had a lot of weak points in it. So we prepared a new directive, and in the meantime suggested that they go ahead and remind all of these people that there is a reporting procedure set up so that it would bring reports in. And the new directive has just recently been coordinated, I believe, hasn't it? It's going back to DOI right now." • "And it should be out. Now, Lieutenant Ruppelt, in getting around on these cases, of course, does a lot of missionary work because when he hits a base, I mean, he briefs them pretty thoroughly on our problem. And the places he's hit, I'm sure, are well aware of how it's done. I'm equally sure there are a number of these places that just don't know. They probably have a directive somewhere." • "I was just thinking of my own case. I knew you folks were interested from this association or others, but no still any efficient channel that never heard that there's any interest from..." • "How about the ground observer corps? They have 100,000 people, don't they? And they're quite active now, but I haven't..." • "We, they are to a certain extent, sir. We've talked about that quite a bit, and we don't know whether it's worth alerting those people. Now, they're not now on a 24-hour basis. They will, they hope to get them on a 24-hour basis soon. But, we don't know exactly how far to go. I mean, we're afraid maybe if we alert that number of people, then everybody in the United States will get excited again. That's the thing we're trying to keep out of this thing is this excitement business. Now, in two weeks, a week from this coming Friday, Life is coming out with an article on these objects, and we've been working closely with Life, and they're supposedly are going to print what we told them to. I hope they do. They're going to put it on a factual basis. I mean, just about like this briefing. In other words, there may be something to it, but we don't know. And we feel that that report
17 may tend to take the mysteriousness and hysteria out of the thing and just get people to give us a few reports, you know, people with good common sense instead of all these nut letters that we get occasionally. Another thing, Colonel Kirkland referred to this newspaper clipping service, we hope to get that started before this Life magazine article comes out and keep it going over say a period of a year and see how the peaks in the newspaper publicity correspond with the peaks in this, in the reports that we get. We feel that after Life comes out, why then several other magazines will undoubtedly pick this stuff up. A True magazine is supposed to be coming out with an article sometime within the next couple months. It will be slanted the other way. It's going to be written by one of these science fiction writers, and it should give us no end of trouble. We haven't been able to get True to cooperate with us at all. I mean, I shouldn't say that, they probably would, but their type of magazine, I mean, they sell a sensational item, and they don't, they want to play it up. And then, I believe Look is also thinking about coming out with an article. So, magazines are going to follow Life and we'll probably run into a little bit of flak again on this thing. (Question from audience) • "Is it unlikely, or rather, is it likely that any of these magazines have facts or data which they would withhold just for the sake of being sensational?" • "Life magazine has a lot of information that we do not have on different sightings. They have some very good sightings too. I mean, they've called in some pretty important people around the United States. They won't, they're very hesitant to tell you who works for them as their consultants. But they have got some pretty good sightings that we have never heard of, and they're going to use those in their article, although they have checked those with us. The two or three old standbys that everybody always plays up, such as this Mantell case down in Kentucky where this guy got killed chasing one of them, supposedly, the one up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where the F-51 pilot fought with this thing for 15 minutes, and a few of those that are outstanding as far as the science fiction writers are concerned, Life is going to leave out. They're not going to dig those up again and rehash them again." (Question from audience) • "Was it ever established what caused Mantell's death and disintegration?" • "Well, they think, I mean, the official report is, and I tend to believe it, is that he didn't have any oxygen at all, and he just climbed up until he passed out and then the airplane went into a dive and just tore itself to pieces. I think that that probably, what he was chasing is still open to discussion. It was either, probably either Venus or one of these great big Skyhook balloons that General Mills puts up, because there was one lost in the area at the time, although they were never able to say where it was, except that it was
18 either over Kentucky or Tennessee. That's all they've been able to pin down, and they think that that might have been it. But..." (Question from audience) • "Is this still classified top secret, since Life is coming out with it?" • "No, uh, we've, we actually, we carry it as confidential, the overall project. We're trying to get it dropped down to restricted now because Life is going to come out with a lot of material we've given them that is classified, or was classified at one time. The only time this was classified top secret was right after it came out. We've been carrying this confidential. There are some aspects of it we'll have to keep classified as secret or maybe higher when we start listing Air Defense radar stations, possible tie-in with some of our latest developments and things like that. We'll have to keep that classified. But just, or just the details of a sighting, we're going to try to declassify to restricted because we've had trouble in the past on that. Some newspaper will call up and say, 'Big sighting up somewhere,' and we'll say, 'Yes, we've heard about it.' And they'll say, 'What's the results?' We'll say, 'We can't tell you about that, it's classified.' So immediately they come out with a big story about, 'The Air Force just picked up a spaceship somewhere and they won't tell us about it.' And that's the thing we're trying to get away from. I mean, we don't want to excite anybody on the project." • "There is one other area that's classified, and that's where we have reports on people. Yes, you know, their background to try to determine whether they're reliable or not. We run into one interesting bit of discussion on this classification because some people who say, 'Well, now, these could be from Russia,' which is true, they could be. 'Therefore, we're doing them a great service reporting them in our papers very carefully where they get plots,' which is true. But we feel that the papers, I mean, when they get one, are going to report it, and then they're going to come to us for what we know on it. And it's inevitable if the papers pick it up. So that's one reason we like this reporting channel that's established, that if anybody sights one of them, it's not too illogical for somebody if he sees something in the air to call the nearest Air Force base. I mean, it's one of the first things he would think of, 'Maybe they've got something in the air.' And we have found, though, just as an example of this T-33 case you mentioned, the reporters are right on hand to discuss this thing with the pilots when they landed, and took pictures of them." • "We found out that in the New York area, some paper, I couldn't tell you which one it is, monitors VHF, monitors all the air traffic in the area. And I don't know why they do it, but they do. And that's where they picked up that T-33 incident, was monitoring the air traffic. Now, I heard two different stories. One that the newspaper actually has a setup themselves to monitor it. Another one that they have two or three hams in the area alerted to call them if anything happens. But this T-33 pilot did call the tower and told them about it, and the newspapers were right on it. So, we found out one thing, and that is the
19 newspapers surpass the Air Force in their intelligence channels. They're good. I mean, there's just no getting around it." (Inaudible talk about Mr. Davis and the President) • "Well, I actually, it goes a little further than that. I mean, it's a wonderful ally. I think the project has varied in its handling a lot just through a difference of opinion or, you know, changes in opinion. There's been great interest in it and then it would fall away, not too much interest, and then great interest. And that's officially too, as well as the public. We feel that by going right down the line and taking every case we get and trying to get additional facts and encouraging anybody and everybody to give us information, there are a lot of groups that are interested in this. There's a, I don't know whether any of you read the Time article a few weeks ago on the saucers. Well, there's a group out on the West Coast that's in their spare time trying to get all of these cases they can to work on. We feel that that group, if we're quite frank with them, would be very cooperative and help us. I mean, we're not trying to hide anything, we're trying to get help. You do have a problem and how far you go publicly, but I think possibly this Life type article will help if they, if they publish what we expect." End of recording; nothing follows.