DISCLOSURE / FILE
A declassified audio recording, transcribed here in numbered segments, of a March 1952 briefing in which the U.S. Air Force's newly appointed UFO project engineer, Edward J. Ruppelt, walks an audience through roughly 800 case files, the 20 percent he cannot explain, the Lubbock Lights, the green fireballs, and the camera and radar methods he plans to field.
DOW-UAP-PR160, Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952
A declassified audio recording, transcribed here in numbered segments, of a March 1952 briefing in which the U.S. Air Force's newly appointed UFO project engineer, Edward J. Ruppelt, walks an audience through roughly 800 case files, the 20 percent he cannot explain, the Lubbock Lights, the green fireballs, and the camera and radar methods he plans to field.
Ruppelt says the Air Force dropped its special project after an August 1949 report blamed mild mass hysteria, hoaxes, and misidentification, then reopened it about October 1951 with him as permanent project engineer (pages 187 to 274, 348 to 370). Of approximately 800 cases, about 2 percent are hoaxes or psychopathological reporters and about 20 percent are 'very good reports offered by very reliable people' on which no conclusion can be drawn (pages 292 to 326). He points to report concentrations around Los Alamos, Albuquerque, White Sands, and Oak Ridge, disc reports that are always silent, Air Defense Command radar tracks of 1,000 to about 3,500 mph with no matching visual, and one White Sands tracking reading of roughly 150,000 feet and 3,500 mph that the crews would not stand behind (pages 478 to 506, 813, 1795, 1864 to 1871, 2265). The planned fixes, diffraction-grating cameras for guards at Sandia and White Sands, radar scope cameras, and a long-focal-length camera slaved to a radar spinner, were 'still in the planning, or even in the talking stage' when the tape was made (pages 2186 to 2369); the release metadata dates the talk to March 26, 1952 in Boston, and the transcript itself names neither.
Now, I'll refer to them as these things because we have no idea what we're dealing with.p.150
However, due to or contrary to popular opinion these things are definitely not all balloons.p.680
One of them is that, on our good sightings, there's absolutely no noise ever reported to connect to these objects, no matter how low they are.p.1768
Another thing is we've had a lot of radar returns, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with the radar return.p.1795
Up until present time, we've got no real proof that anything even exists.p.2386
The official Air Force viewpoint is that we've got enough good reports from reliable people to be interested in this.p.2408
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 explain.p.2462
We don't want to think they're all balloons. I mean, we try to stay right in the middle of the road.p.2832
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This medium has been declassified in compliance with applicable executive order, statutes, and regulations.
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This medium has been declassified in compliance with applicable executive order, statutes, and regulations.
"Time 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."
"Time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
"Time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
"Time 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."
"Time 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 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 to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
"I expect that the speaker will put out approximately this volume. And I will now, as before, turn around slowly and address my words, the blackboard. This I am now doing, talking straight into the blackboard as if I'm going to turn around slowly again now to face the audience.
I am separated from the microphone by somewhat greater distance as if I were slightly leaning backwards."
"Line around the zero, that's the desirable level. If, for example, we turn the game down."
"Now, now. So you see it's just about wide open and I'm going to pick everything in the room up.
See how I'll jump to the end. Now let's see if we play it back."
"I can't hear you."
"This is rather than already not taking out."
"Yeah, there are a few things on the tape."
"Why don't you say something? I want me to start talking a little better, so I can say."
"What?"
"What?"
"I couldn't hear you."
"Again, to appear in about 1947, you're possibly familiar with them to a certain extent following the newspaper reports.
The first ones were cited by Kenneth Arnold in June 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 spasimonically for about two years and then the things were dying 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 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 was a Dr. A. J. Heineck in the astronomer at Ohio State,
Dr. G. Valley of the Scientific Advisory Board, a doctor fits the Aerometico, I believe he was a psychologist.
The Rain Corporation, the Air Weather Service, Cambridge Field Station, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Weather Bureau.
All those people took the reports, I believe they had about 300 reports at that time.
They took the reports and read them over, came up with their conclusions.
All their conclusions varied to a certain extent.
They all agreed that they didn't know exactly what they were, however they 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 that it was a mild case of mass hysteria due to warm, I'd say, warnings or just over.
Some of them were due to psychopathical people or not something like that, trying to create an excitement or get publicity or do a pure hoaxes.
And the other one was that they were due to misinterpretation of conventional objects.
Well, since that time several years has passed, 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.
You know 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.
Occasional florries, but nothing to get excited about at all and still report and continue to come in.
We dropped this project in 1949 as I said as a special project in giving this information as regular intelligence material since that time.
We've decided that about last October we decided that there possibly was enough material now to reopen this case.
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 and filed them all in a neat file so we could tell what we had.
We went through and crossed the index to all the material.
So we can 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.
We don't know what the results mean, but I'm lucky.
I didn't realize we're going to have such a large audience.
We didn't bring any slides along.
I don't know whether any in the back room see this print.
I'll pass it around and get an idea.
This is a plot of the sightings in the United States.
We have sightings outside of the United States.
We're not too worried about those at the present time or 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.
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 of all the experimental flying was being done around the right field.
And we still have a lot of trouble with that.
People calling and said I just saw a great big light go over 5,000 miles an hour.
It turns out it's an airplane carrying a flare or something like that.
So we've just regarded 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 Campwood, Texas.
Now this Campwood, Texas concentration was due to an outbreak of odd lights about two years ago.
And I 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.
Now if you plot these reports up by years, they started in the west coast, up around in the north west or on the Washington, Oregon, Idaho in 1947.
And next year they tended to be on the east coast to a certain extent.
And from then on they were just spread out all the United States.
There was no pattern.
We plotted the frequency of these reports again.
You'll see that it doesn't vary too much year from year to year.
Now this large peak down here, 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 people wanting to get their names in the paper.
However you see it tapered off and it reaches a peak.
Right in, see this is June and July and every year almost it reaches a peak in there. It's also a peak to a certain extent here in January.
And then again there's a peak here in December.
Now there's actually no direct pattern to that but there's enough of a pattern.
It plans to seat it down 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 4950 and 51 there was very little newspaper publicity.
And the reports from 4950 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 that there was nothing to it so they just couldn't make any reports.
However, military has continued to make reports.
I shouldn't say military and a few airlines pilots are covering these two years.
They'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 her old letter and said I saw something so we've had disregarded.
This segment right here represents some type of an astronomical body.
I mean you could say it was that 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 our disc or spherical shaped objects.
We've lumped those together because 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 of you 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.
They could be weather balloons.
However, due to or contrary to popular opinion these things are definitely not all balloons.
These are shapes of just report as oval shapes.
It's difficult to tell if 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 six tenths of one percent of all 800 reports.
And that is reports of groups of lights going through the sky.
We've had quite a bit of difficulty with those because the reports are usually from pretty good sources
and they'll see anywhere from six to twenty lights in a formation going streaking across the sky.
Well it's almost impossible if that would, that you would find six meteors together.
I understand it's possible to see two of them together that it would appear to be in formation
but no more than that.
Certain percentage one percent are reported to be balloons.
Now these are balloons that we've not been able to establish the origin.
In other words we don't, they're just balloons floating over the United States
and they're probably meteorological balloons that have gotten balloons from some station
and have burst when they were supposed to.
Two and a half percent resemble actual aircraft.
We've made quite a bit of a 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 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 we've common knowledge that any bright light traveling through the air will burn
an image in your eye and you'll have some persistence there
and it will appear to be elongated when actually it's just a round source of light.
That's some of the shapes that we've had.
Now down in 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 and they just go over at a great rate of speed.
But the fact that they're silent is quite interesting
because we have no knowledge of any type of power plant
that would be completely silent.
Now 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 1947-48.
This black segment here are reports from military sources.
There we've put them in as just ground officers,
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 as a one we're very interested in,
there are 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 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 from very unfavorable publicity during this last rash of reports
for the first time. I should say in '47, '48, and '80.
Absolutely refused 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
that the field looked out his window and saw a V2 rocket or something like that flying wind tip to wind tip
whether he overspoke can. He wouldn't tell anybody about it.
I mean he never reported the Air Force because nobody, because they just say it was crazy and probably ground him.
So that's a big difficulty we have in getting reports from airline pilots.
We do hear through the great vine that they see an awful lot of odd things and that they don't report,
especially over in the Near East Iran and Middle East, they should say Iran, Palestine, Egypt, and 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
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 in their aerial sightings.
A lot of these have been balloons. We've had a lot of trouble with the balloons in it.
A pilot meeting a balloon in the air isn't familiar with what that balloon is going to do.
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 when he meets a balloon, instead of a balloon,
it's some object about 30 or 40 feet in diameter and judging the rate of closure, he assumes it's going at a very terrific speed.
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 try to say that everything was a balloon. In other words, if a balloon was lost in the area,
we try to definitely pin that down. We can get the time to launch the balloon, the rate of ascent, the winds are lost.
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 a past, it's been a practice to say,
"Well, there was a balloon launch within 100 miles. Consequently, the pilot must have seen a balloon."
We don't want to try that because it's what we just want to have more proof before we say that it's a balloon.
The Air Force has gotten into a lot of trouble in the past by very loosely tying up these balloons with recidance.
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 grin have looked at it and said, "I took a picture of the sky,
and I didn't see this flying saucer, although here's a picture of it, and I'll send it in to us."
It's not too difficult to examine the emulsion through a microscope and find out that the image is due to the 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 hatched around quite a bit, and there's a little bit of dollars to 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.
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,
and that was August 25th.
They happened to be discussing meteors, so they were sitting there looking up in the sky,
and all of a sudden this bunch of lights went over.
They looked at each other and said, "What was that?" Nobody seemed to know.
About a half an hour later, while they were still discussing the lights,
they said they wished something like that would go over again, and it did.
All together, in a period of five or six nights, they observed twelve of these things that went over.
They assumed that it was some kind of a missile at the Air Force who had been developing,
and being nosy, they thought they'd find out what this...
Well, they reached this conclusion after they saw it first too,
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 or measure the angles on the houses and things in their backyards
so they could tell the anglers thing went through, and they tied it with a stopwatch.
They also set up a baseline, ninety degrees to the path,
and these things always came over the same path, and roughly the same time every night,
so they knew about what was going on.
They set up this baseline and got each end with two-way radios,
and some homemade...
You might call them field lights or angle measuring devices,
and try to get an altitude.
They were unsuccessful on that.
However, they did get their angular measurement across the sky,
and it came out to be thirty degrees per second.
That's the only measurement we've got on these things.
We didn't hear about it until 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 a professor of...
The movie is headed a 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 in Aurora,
and a doctor of mathematics,
and he had an astronomer who actually 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, they found out that it wasn't one of our missiles,
and 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.
In these pictures, well, incidentally, before that,
they put a couple of pieces in a 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," or "I didn't see it,"
and they got a lot of publicity.
Consequently, everybody in Lubbock, Texas,
was sitting on the 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.
This is one formation.
It went over, and this is another formation.
His story is that he saw one go over,
and all of a sudden it dawned on him,
while he was trying to get a picture.
He was a fairly good amateur photographer.
He took these with a Kodak 35.
He shot them 1/10 of a second at 3/5 on a plus-next 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 1/10 of a second.
This is the first formation that went over,
and this is the second formation.
We've tried every way that we know of to prove
that these pictures are a fate.
I've talked to the kid, and in fact, I've 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 who sold these pictures, too, why they're really good photos,
but if you'll just confess to the OSI, well, I will drop it."
But he said, "No." He said, "These are pictures of something
of flu over love of Texas on..."
Well, this was... He's had to be taken on 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."
He signed a sworn statement for us, so he had to drop it right there.
I mean, we've got no way to... Yes, sir.
This picture's checked with the observations of this file.
No, sir, I was going to just mention that.
The college professors say that these pictures are fake.
I mean, they won't believe them at all.
I say the things that they saw, they know are too dim to ever take a picture of.
Now, we cross-checked with the kid on that, and he said...
Well, he said, "That's right."
He said, "After I took these pictures, I didn't develop them for two days."
Because he said, "I just thought, mowin' mind it, that I wouldn't even have an image,
because they were... What I saw was... I thought it 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 the photo. I haven't 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
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
varied just a little bit in each picture.
Well, it's doubtful if he took a piece of cardboard and just punched holes.
And if he would be smart enough to bury the holes, the position of the hole in each exposure,
he'd probably just taken four shots 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 to 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 fakes.
The density on the negative compares to the density of a bright star.
In other words, we used the same exposure to the same film and went out
and took a couple pictures from the bright planet.
And 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...
Do you plan to get two sets of lights in some cases other than a man?
No, sir, we haven't. We asked him about that.
He said he took the pictures and 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... I mean, a large amount of piece of graph paper
and plot them out exactly, you'll see that as the consecutive frames,
one raw light's 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 the fact that there are two different formations he took.
I'll just place them into the microscope up to the second row. The same as the first row?
Yes, sir. I had the plot here if you'd be interested in seeing a little later on.
We haven't been able to reach any conclusions at all.
There's only two possibilities that we can think of.
Here are the plots of those.
Only two possibilities that we can think of.
One of them is that it's still one great big hoax, but the college professors just decided to see how much they could fool the people in love with Texas,
and they planted these pictures with the kid.
The other thing is it was known that there was a duck flight on any 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 are true, are not fakes, well, then these pictures are not a duck, so we'll put it that way.
The college professors won't believe the ducks story at all.
If they were ducks, they'd have to be at such and such a height to give that 30 degrees per second.
If they were that low, 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 a 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 to follow a circumstance, 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 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 see their necks sticking out in here wasting our good taxpayers money coming down here talking about it, because they were ducks.
Now, once again, there's about half the people that saw these objects against it, 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 one case.
Now, we've reached several general... I shouldn't say reach any conclusions.
There's two or three general facts about all of the sightings, overall collection of sightings that we have.
One of them is that, on our good sightings, there's absolutely no noise ever reported to connect to these objects, no matter how low they are.
They may be reported as just being specks in the sky or down story low, and there's absolutely no noise reported.
And once again, we don't know of any kind of a propulsion system 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, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with the 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.
They've had a project on this down at Holland, and they've been very much interested in it because they've been seeing them.
On a comparative basis, more of these things around the Holland and White Sands area, they did track something down there with their synths, the other lines.
They don't know what it is, and it could possibly be a slow-moving daylight medium.
I'm not an astronomer, but I understand such things exist.
They got pictures of it and they were able to track it.
However, they saw about five or six of these things at once.
It was right after they launched a missile, and they had their Scania synanthial lights pointed up in the air, and they saw these four or five things right behind a 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 track the same object.
So consequently, their readings are a little bit off, but they did come up with an altitude reading of about 150,000 feet.
The speed was very great. They came up to the speed of about 3,500 miles an hour, but again, they won't back that up because they aren't sure of the conditions that these readings were made under.
That's the only time we've ever come really close to getting any accurate data on these things, and I want to say again that it could be that it was a meteor in a daytime.
Now, they have another type of phenomenon or object or something floating around down that area, and that's these green fireballs.
I don't know if you've been reading about that in a paper, but there's a doctor, 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 similar to a meteor, except that they have a definite flat trajectory.
They're reported to be a brilliant, greenish, blue color, and they don't explode.
They appear to be very low about a third or a fourth of 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.
It indicates that they're down low in the atmosphere, and there should be a terrific explosion when they get down low enough to explode.
Again, we don't know what they are. They actually exist. There's no doubt about it.
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 we all follow the same path." There's a definite flat trajectory right across the -- well, parallel to the Earth's surface.
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, hit on or something like that, they'll rack the airliner up and just about toss everybody out of the seats
because they think they're going to have a hit on collision with this whatever it may be.
Inbridge labs have been working on that for two years, and they came up with no conclusions whatsoever to what they might be,
so I understand that we're going to take it over again and see if we can possibly come up with some idea.
We've talked to Dr. Kaplan's -- LaPaz's idea is that they come from Russia.
He said that they're using some kind of a self-destruction missile, and they're zeroing in on Los Alamos.
No, that's a good story. I mean, it sounds really exciting, and there's a possibility.
I mean, we can't say that it isn't because we don't know what it is.
We've talked to Dr. Kaplan quite a bit on his subject, probably knowing it from the University of California.
He thinks that they're either some kind of possibly a new meaner that we are not familiar with,
or some phenomenon that's related to the Aurora. He claims that he can duplicate this color in his lab,
and I'm not sure of just exactly how he does it.
I believe he uses -- well, I don't know. I won't say I've done 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, as I say, that is a definite division of these things.
I mean, they definitely exist, and our problem is to find out -- really find out what they are.
If there's some kind of phenomenon, then we can turn it over to astronomers and let them take it.
If they should happen to come from Russia, well, then we better start finding out what they're trying to do on it.
How many of you should bring my reports to you?
Oh, we have quite a few, sir. I'd hate to say, I mean, I couldn't take exactly a number, but they started out -- I believe in 49, if they, sir.
There was a big outbreak of them in 49, and they seemed to appear in January -- or in December and January, in that period between the years.
And they coincide with a meteor shower, but the current pet town -- I don't remember the name of it.
But for a long time, they try to tie them in with that meteor shower.
But just recently, now, within the last year, they begin to occur more over the whole year instead of coming at one time.
OSI -- Dr. LaPoth 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 want us the fires 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 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 -- I shouldn't say he says -- he knows that we can take a very expensive 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, we'll just point the camera at it and take a picture.
And he says that he can take the reading and match him up with -- either by knowing objects or match him up in his lab and tell us what the composition is of this object that's emitting his light.
Now, we haven't -- just strictly in a 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 -- we'll get some decent pictures of these objects.
Another thing that we've done is recently we briefed Air Defense Command on this whole project and have got their cooperation with their radar scope cameras.
As I mentioned before, we have had quite a few unknown radar returns.
These things are the Air Defense Command, radar is 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 a radar set or do some type of atmospheric phenomena.
We -- we've tried to get the weather charts at the time -- or weather conditions at the time this phenomena has occurred.
And trying to correlate that data and show that due to certain type of weather condition that they had, this type of return.
Now, we haven't had too much luck -- 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, and before we just had the radar observers' interpretation of what he saw in his scope, we think that with pictures, probably we can do a little bit more with this.
Now, another step further in that, and we haven't done anything on this except talk about it, and it may get into the point where we're going to do this.
And that is -- try to put in a long focal length camera, try to match a local -- long focal length camera with the radar spinner.
So the time -- whenever this radar operator gets a return, all you have 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, funny return, we'll say, and usually we turn on a scope, and if we get an image, no matter how big the image is, on a photographic plate or on a film at the same time,
well, 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 we're even picking anything up.
But that's the next step, and it's still in the planning, or even in the talking stage right now.
That's about the main thing we're going to try to do as far as future plans is concerned.
We want to get -- try to get some concrete data to say that these things exist.
Up until 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 Stullier Kehoe 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 -- as a balloon, or as 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 at the present time, we have enough faith in these people that have been turning into reports to say that we don't exactly believe that.
I mean, we're going to have to get more proof before we can say that everything that's being seen as 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 explain.
I mean, you can't say that looks like me. 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 have made these reports are well-established airline pilots. I mean, old pilots have had a lot of flying time. The people who have released these General Mills balloons have seen something.
The people of white sands have seen very odd things. It's Dr. LaPaz himself has seen a couple things floating over the mountains down to Mexico that he couldn't explain.
We've got about 20% of our reports are like that, but we can't go up to them and say, "No, this can't be your nuts." That would be our only answer on those.
You're just crazy, but you can't go up to anybody and tell them that. They've seen something that we don't know what it is.
Now, well, some of the big questions that enter our mind on this is one, the no sound business. If it actually exists and there's some type of proposal, but there's no sound, what could it possibly be?
Another big question is, and it's getting in the lines of psychology, why or how could a person look up at night or in a dusk? We'll say, or even in a daytime and see some of these things at their report.
All right, along those lines, we had the same time these pictures were taken down, love up within two or three days that time, two women were driving along in a car. And all of a sudden, they looked out over the Texas planes and they saw this object that they described as being top shaped, like when these old-fashioned tops were put to string around and pull, and it was silver, and it was hovering along over the prairie, and they drove up where they approached, and as they approached it, why the thing began to take off like that?
Well, 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 firem whyser, 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 up 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 love up pictures were taken?
In fact, it's the same night, a garden's wife from the Sandia Basin, 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 it looked a lot like a flying wing-type bear craft.
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 has 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 him to him.
And he said, "Yeah," he said, "That's what I saw," but he said, "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 love up.
So, I mean, 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, driving nuts after so long a time with them, we try to keep going.
Well, that's about all that I had.
The performance stated, do you get out of the radar this time?
It varies, it varies quite a bit. Usually high speed, and by high speed, I mean, anything over a thousand miles an hour.
For a while, we thought we had to pin down, or our radar people did, because the return always went over the station.
It came in, went through the ground clutter, cracked the door of the station, and went out the other side.
Now, they claimed that that was an indication of something, I'm not sure, interfering with a station or something like that.
But, lately, they haven't been doing that. I mean, they'll come in to the end of the range, and they'll maybe make it turn and go out.
Now we had one indication of who's real average.
And this GCA operator was sitting there looking at his scope, and all of a sudden he saw these two objects come in.
They were coming in about four or five hundred miles an hour, and at the same time as 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, which is 47."
So the tower just called the tower, said, "There's no other airplanes out there." And the radar man said, "Yes, there is."
The tower just called the blind and said, "You two unidentified airplanes, you're on a collision course with a 47."
Just they said that these two returns made a turn.
Now, once again, we got coincidence, or we actually got something.
See, I mean, it...
So that's about the only conclusion we can draw, but that's some of the things we run into.
I mean, 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.
We try to keep away from them, we try to stay right and straighten their own, and we don't want to 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 New Jersey.
Around...
See, I'm on a standing hook in Fort Monmouth.
They're not too long ago.
These piles, the T33, chase something.
Just about ten minutes later, all the radar stations in that area began to pick these objects up, going back and forth all over the skies.
And we thought, "Well, this is it." So we tore up there to find out what the story sounded real fine.
T33 piles saw this big dis-shaped thing over there, and he took out after and he couldn't catch it.
And then the radar stations began 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 normal weather balloon. It had been launched in Fort Monmouth.
And they were a little bit mixed up with their rate of clothing and stuff like that, 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 kernels, 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.
It turned out the reason they couldn't lock it in is they were just too excited and got a little bit followed up on their procedures.
And from then on, why they were picking up weather balloons with these radar reflectors hanging on and everything else.
And the students, incidentally, turned out they were mostly student radar operators picking this stuff up.
The 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, well, they saw everything.
Well, at first, it appeared to be a very good sighting. It just all broke down. We get enough facts.
Now, maybe they'll all turn out to do that, but so far, we've gotten off a lot of them that we can't even come close to explaining.
I guess that's about all I had.
If you got any questions, well, we'd be very happy to discuss any aspect of this whole thing with you folks.
Have you seen yourself in there?
No, sir, I haven't.
How about the thing you saw?
Oh, I still have something on there.
But it was just a large meteor, one of these green fireballs or something.
I think it was one of these green fireballs, Don, Texas.
But that's all that I have ever seen.
But I'm at the risk of repeating just some of these points.
One is, Lieutenant Rupelle mentioned, of around 800 cases that we have in our files.
We know that that's only a portion of the sightings that they have 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.
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 the case of their own pilots.
I wonder if there isn't something peculiar.
For example, I was talking to some people from inside the other day and they were telling me about a radar bomb scoring run of a B-29 out at St. Louis.
They were following a B-29 into the initial point.
The operator noticed this plane flying or an object.
They're 48,000 feet. The B-29 was 25,000 feet. They immediately thought, well, that's possible.
Double harmonics or something. He explained it away in his own mind.
Then the blip started descending on a collision course.
A quick check revealed that it was descending at an array of something like a thousand miles an hour.
We got a little more concerned and still thought, well, possibly this is either in the radar or in some atmospheric condition.
But then when the thing broke off, made a turn, and then another turn took a course and disappeared.
They just don't know what it is.
We found on these radar sightings that you just left pretty much outside.
You can't really dig in. You haven't got anything.
Because there's so many of them that can be explained as 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.
Gee, there was a case written up in a textbook. Exactly what had been reported to us.
A hovering object 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 pretty thoroughly written up.
So we found that whole area of sightings, we just left without any answers.
One point that was not brought out is our relationship with Battelle.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention it.
It's different than that image. Battelle Memorial Institute.
They are one of the contractors who do work for us.
They always find it.
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.
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 massive report that we don't have.
And if any of them are worth following up, we can.
But our problem is the problem of seeing is just getting facts.
We don't have enough facts to do anything other than explain that 80% of these roughly are known objects.
We can't definitely prove. But say 60, definitely. I mean, there's no question in our mind. It was a plane or something else.
Then these are rough figures. Say 20% that maybe they could have been a plane, a balloon, or a meteor.
And then there's a 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? A feasibility of what?
The unknown. We're stuck there.
I don't know if all the intelligence officers or their bases and units have been alerted on this.
They're very important to everything alert.
Is the military generally alerted?
Yes, we should have brought that out early. There is a directive from headquarters U.S. that establishes a reporting procedure.
Now, we've 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've 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?
That's going back into the environment.
Yes, and it shouldn't be out.
Now, Lieutenant Rupelt, in getting around on these cases, of course, there's a lot of missionary work.
I mean, when he heads a base, I mean, he breathes pretty thoroughly on our problem.
And the places he's had, 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 the directives in the world.
I'm just thinking of my own case. I knew folks were interested from this association of it, but no.
So any official channel, I've never heard of those any answers.
How about the ground observed a chord?
I have 100,000 people that may have been quite interested now.
Are they about it?
They are, to a certain extent.
So 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 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 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 may tend to take the mysteriousness and hysteria out of the thing
and just get people to give us a few reports in a, well, people with good common sense
instead of all these nut letters that we get occasionally.
Another thing, Colonel Kirk will refer 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 the reports that we get.
We feel that after life comes out, while then several other magazines will undoubtedly pick this stuff up.
A true magazine is supposed to be coming out of 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 knowing of trouble.
We haven't been able to get true to cooperate with this at all.
I mean, I shouldn't say that.
They probably would, but they're a type of magazine.
I mean, they sell a sensational items and they don't, they want to play it up.
And then I believe Lukas also thinking about coming out of an article.
So magazines are going to follow life and we probably will run into a little bit of flight again on this thing.
Is it unlikely that any of these magazines have facts that we would say?
Or 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 are very hesitant to tell you who works for them as their consults.
But they have got some pretty good sightings that we have never heard of.
And they're going to use those in our article, although they have checked those with us.
The two or three old stand boys that everybody always plays up, such as this Mantell case down in Kentucky,
where this guy got killed chasing one of them, supposedly.
You know, 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.
Was it ever established? What caused Mantell's death and disintegration?
They think, I mean, the official report, 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 the dive and just tore itself to pieces.
I think that probably what he was chasing is still open to discussion.
It was either, probably, either Venus or one of these great big skyhope balloons that General Mills put us up.
Because there was one lost in the area to time, although they were never able to say where it was accepted.
It was either over Kentucky or Tennessee. That's all they've been able to pin down.
And they think that that might have been yet.
But...
Is this still classified on top, secret?
No, sir, it isn't. That's another...
No, we actually, we carried this confidential overall project.
We're trying to get it down and restricted now because life is going to come out with a lot of material we've given them that is classified.
There was classified at one time.
The only time this was classified top, secret, was where I came out.
We've been carrying this confidential.
There's some aspects that we'll have to keep classified as secret or maybe higher.
When we start listing air-defense radar stations,
a possible tie-in with some of our latest developments and things like that.
We'll have to keep that classified, but just...
On just the details of a sighting, we're going to try to declassify to restrict it.
Because we've had trouble in the past on that guy.
Some newspaper will call up and say big sighting up somewhere.
And we'll say, "Yes, we've heard about it."
And we'll say, "What's the results?"
We'll say, "Well, we can't tell you about that. It's classified."
So immediately they came out with a big story about it.
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.
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, trying to determine whether or not we're not.
We're running the one interesting bit of discussion on this classification.
Because there are some people who say, "Well, now, these could be from Russia," which is true.
It could be, "Therefore, we're doing them a great service reporting in our papers, very carefully.
They can get quads."
Which is true.
But we feel that the papers, and when they get one, are going to report it,
then they're going to come to us for what we know on it.
It's inevitable if the papers pick it up.
So that's one reason we like this reporting channel.
It's established that if anybody cites one, it's not too illogical for somebody to see something in the air,
to call a nearest Air Force base.
I mean, it's one of the first things I would think of.
Maybe they've got something in the air.
We have found, though, just as an example of this T-33 case you mentioned,
that the reporters were right on hand to discuss this thing with 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 is,
VHF monitors all the air traffic in the area, and I don't know why they do it, but they do.
And that's the way they picked up that T-33 incident was monitoring the air traffic.
Now, I heard two different stories.
One of the newspaper actually has a set up themselves to monitor.
Another one that they have two or three hands in the area alerted to call them if anything happens.
But this T-33 pilot did call a tower and told them about it, and newspapers are right there.
So we found out one thing that is the newspapers surpass the Air Force
and their intelligence channels.
They're good.
I mean, they're just no getting around.
They're good.
They're good.
So we can't let them join us.
That's about our policy.
Well, it actually goes a little further than that.
I mean, it's a wonderful ally.
I think the project, his variant is handling a lot just through the difference in opinion,
or changes in opinion.
There's been great interest in it, and then it will fall away, and not too much interest,
and great interest in that.
And that's officially too, as well as 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.
I don't know whether any of you read the time article a few weeks ago on the Sussex.
There was a group out on the West Coast that's, in a spare time, trying to get all of these cases to work on.
But we feel that that group, who quite frank with them, would be very cooperative and helpless.
I mean, we're not trying to hide anything.
We're trying to get help.
You do have a problem on how far you go publicly, but I think possibly this lifetime article will help.
This medium has been declassified in compliance with applicable executive order statutes and regulations.