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

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that. However, they did get their angular measurement across the sky, and it came out to be 30
degrees per second. Now, that's the only measurement we've got on these things. We didn't hear
about it till 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, the
professor of, I believe he's head of the 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 the aurora, and a doctor of mathematics, and they had an
astronomer who actually who 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, when they found out that it wasn't one of our missiles, then 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. Now these pictures, well, incidentally, before that, they put a couple of pieces in the 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 it" or "I didn't see it," and they got a lot
of publicity. Consequently, everybody in Lubbock, Texas was sitting out at 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. Now these are, this is one formation that
went over and this is another formation. He, his story is that he saw one go over and all of a
sudden it dawned on him, "Well, I might try to get a picture." He was a fairly good amateur
photographer. He took these with a Kodak 35. He shot them at 1/10th of a second at F3.5 on
Plus-X 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 at 1/10th of a second.
This is the first formation that went over, and this is the second formation. Now, we've tried
every way that we know of to prove that these pictures are faked. I've talked to the kid, and in
fact, I 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 you've sold these pictures
to, why they're really good photos, but if you'll just confess to the OSI, why we'll drop it." But he
said, "No," he said, "these are pictures of something that flew over Lubbock, Texas on..." Well,
this was, these happened to be taken on the 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," and he signed a sworn statement for us,
so we had to drop it right there. I mean, we've got no way to...
(Question from audience)
• "Do these pictures check with the observations of those five?"
• "No, sir. I was going to just mention that. The college professors say that these pictures
are faked. I mean, they won't believe them at all. They say the things that they saw, they
know were too dim to ever take a picture of. Now, we cross-checked with the kid on that,
and he said, he said, 'That's right.' He said, 'After I took these pictures,' he said, 'I didn't