Documents / Hearing transcript
This declassified transcript, released by the Office of the Under Secretary of War, records a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt on the Air Force's reorganized UFO investigation. Ruppelt reports that about 20% of roughly 800 cases remain unexplained and notes clusters of reports near Los Alamos, Albuquerque and Oak Ridge. He discusses the Lubbock lights photographs, the Phoenix 1947 photograph and the Mantell case. He concludes that the Air Force has no firm evidence about what the objects are.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/26/52, Boston, Massachusetts. 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.
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
Hearing transcript, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 19 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.