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.
9 degrees per second, and if they were that low, why, in fact, I think it comes out to be about 75 to 80 feet, the ducks would have to be that low to be flying 60 miles an hour and go through that angle at that certain time. And they say they are not ducks. Now that's the only possibility we have, or the only idea of what they could be. They might be ducks reflecting the city lights, although it's still hard to believe that because just of all the circumstances, it just doesn't sound like ducks. A lot of people in Lubbock who were looking for these objects on these nights did see ducks. And when we were down there, they'd call us up and they'd say, 'I know what these lights are, they're ducks because I saw them and I could see the wings flapping and I could hear them honking and I could see their necks sticking out, and you're wasting our good taxpayers' money coming down here talking about it because they were ducks.' Now, but once again, there's about half the people that saw these objects again said they were not ducks because they said, 'We've lived in Lubbock all our life and we've seen ducks for the last 30 years and those were not ducks.' So we're up against a blank wall on this certain, this one case. Now we, uh, we've reached several general, or I shouldn't say reached any conclusions. There's two or three general facts about all of the sightings, the overall, uh, collection of sightings we have. One of them is that on our good sightings, there's absolutely no noise ever reported in connection with these objects, no matter how low they are. They may be, uh, reported as just being specks in the sky or down fairly low and there's absolutely no noise reported. And once again, we, uh, we don't know of any kind of a propulsion system that would, uh, that would do that. I mean, everything that we know of has some type of noise connected with it. Another thing is we've had a lot of radar returns, uh, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with a radar return. We've had two or three reports of that, but we've never been able to pin them down enough and get enough facts about them to make sure that they were both looking at the same thing. Uh, they have had a project on this down at, uh, Holloman. They've been very much interested in it because they've been seeing, uh, compare on a comparative basis, more of these things around the Holloman and White Sands area. They did track something down there with their cinetheodolites. Uh, they don't know what it is, and it could possibly be a slow-moving daylight meteor. Now, I'm not an astronomer, but I understand such things exist. Uh, they, they got pictures of it and they were able to track it. However, they saw about five, I think it was five or six of these things at once. Uh, it was right after they launched a missile and they had their, uh, Scania, cinetheodolites pointed up in the air and they saw these four or five things right behind the missile and they got the word to swing over on those and forget the missile. And they're a little bit doubtful as to whether or not all stations tracked the same object. So consequently, their readings are a little bit off, but they did come up, uh, with an altitude reading of about 150,000 feet. Uh, the speed was, uh, very great. They, they came up with a speed of about 3,500 miles an hour, but again, they won't back that up because they aren't, they aren't sure of the conditions that these readings were made under. Uh, that's the only time we've ever come really close to getting any, uh, any accurate data on these things. And I want to say again that it could be that there was a, a meteor in the daytime. Now, they have another type of, uh,
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.