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.
8 develop them for two days because,' he said, 'I just thought in my own mind that I wouldn't even have an image because they were, what I saw was, I thought, was too dim to take a picture of, but I just took a chance.' So he took those pictures. He finally developed them and that's what he came out with. And he sold those, I believe he got $8 for the original set of prints from a newspaper. We had those prints over to the photo lab and they checked them out. I mean, they are an actual image, there's no doubt about that. He could have taken a black sheet of paper and just punched holes in it and faked them very easily, but he swears up and down he didn't do that. These things under a microscope show that the relative position of these things vary just a little bit in each picture. Well, it's doubtful if he took a piece of cardboard and just punched holes in it, if he would be smart enough to vary the holes, the position of the hole in each exposure. He'd probably just taken four shots of the same thing and maybe moved his camera to give him a little appearance of motion there. But the actual exposures or images are moved just a little bit in each exposure. Now again, that could come from the fact that maybe he tipped his paper as he took the picture, but we don't know. We've never been able to prove that they were faked. The density on the negative compares to the density of a bright star. In other words, we used the same exposure and the same film and went out and took a couple pictures of some bright planets, and it's, the density of the negative is just a little bit more than that of a bright planet at night. So, that's all we know about it. We haven't been able to... (Question from audience) • "Did you get two sets of lights in some cases rather than a smear?" • "No, sir, we haven't. I asked him about that and he said when he took the pictures, it looked like a straight line. He didn't notice two different formations. Now, I always hesitate to tell this because it could again be one big coincidence, but if you plot those points on a piece of, on an enlargement on a piece of graph paper and plot them out exactly, you'll see that as the consecutive, in the consecutive frames, one row of lights, the back row, will say, moves up to the first row, and then it moves on ahead in the third picture. Now, that doesn't make sense at all because of the fact that they're two different formations he took. The only two possibilities that we can think of, one of them is that it's still one great big hoax that the college professors just decided to see how much they could fool the people in Lubbock, Texas and they planted these pictures with the kid. The other thing is that there was, it was known that there was a duck flight on in the area at the time, that the ducks were flying across Lubbock. We tried, and the people in Lubbock tried to see whether or not you could take a picture of ducks at night just from the reflection of the city lights, and that's impossible. So if these pictures aren't true, or are not fakes, why then these pictures are not of ducks. We'll put it that way. The college professors won't believe the duck story at all. I mean, they say those were not ducks. We can, if they were ducks, they'd have to be at such and such an height to give that 30
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.