Documents / Official release
This 1952 memorandum for record, filed in the Project Blue Book case files, covers a trip to Washington by Col D. L. Bower and Capt E. J. Ruppelt. On 21 July they met MATS Air Weather Service and Flight Service at Andrews AFB to ask for help identifying balloons and aircraft, and proposed a CAA reporting letter. At the Pentagon the next day they worked on an Air Intelligence Digest issue and on public information arrangements. They also fielded press and presidential inquiries about the Saturday night radar sighting over Washington.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
aerial objects. Dished in with this was a great deal of confusion on the recent sighting by radar over Washington Municipal Airport on Saturday night. 5. The first thing in the morning Col Bower and Capt Ruppelt visited the Digest Office. The visit was rather brief and they proceeded to the office of Lt Col Peaberg, in the office of the Deputy for Estimates. Col Peaberg stated that under the reorganization of the Directorate of Intelligence, Major Fournet at AFOIN-2B3 would no longer be the contact man in Washington for unidentified object reports. A new agency handling this coordination is under the Topical Intelligence Division and the Current Intelligence Branch. Col Bower and Lt Col Peaberg also visited the Office of Public Information of the Air Force. It was there decided that ATIC would send a monthly status report to these people. This status report would be either a classified copy which they could disseminate the information they felt was not classified or a special unclassified report. In addition to this, various things will be send to these people such as memorandums for record that we feel would be of interest, etc. ## While 6. /Capt Ruppelt was in the Digest Office, he received a call from Mr. Al Chop from the PIO. Mr. Chop stated that the Washington Daily News wished to speak to Capt Ruppelt but he was advised that this could not be done due to existing regulations and that Mr. Chop would have to go through D/I channels to get permission for this interview. Mr. Chop called back and said that the PIO had contacted Gen Ackerman and that Gen Ackerman said in light of the fact that there had already been publicity that the Daily News could speak to Capt Ruppelt. He was advised however that it could not be a personal interview due to the time element involved and that they would contact him by telephone. Capt Ruppelt called the Daily News and talked to one of the reporters. He stated that he had been
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 4 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.