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.
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
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.