Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952

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.