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

11
they seem to appear in January or in December and January, in that period between the
years. And they coincide with a meteor shower that occurs at that time. I don't believe I
know, remember the name of it is, but for a long time, they tried to tie them in with that
meteor shower, but just recently now, within the last year, they've begun to occur more on
a, over the whole year instead of coming at at one time. OSI, Dr. LaPaz worked for OSI
in '49 on these and they tried to come up with a conclusion, they couldn't. They've also
spent a lot of time trying to find any fragments and have never been successful. I mean,
they've been able to triangulate these things and get a heck of a lot of reports on people
who have seen them or seen one of them and then work their triangulation like they do on
large meteors, but they've never been able to find any parts. They wanted us to fire to
pick up, put a dust collector on a B-29 and try to fly through the area right after these
things occurred, try to pick up any dust that they might have left in the upper atmosphere,
but they didn't find anything at all that would indicate that anything unusual was going
on. So, we're up against a stone wall on these things too. I mean, all we've got is just
people's ideas. We've got no proof as to what they actually may be. Now, we've, one of
our approaches on this thing is going to be the use of diffraction gratings on cameras.
This is Dr. Kaplan's idea. He says that we can, and I mean, I shouldn't say he says, we
know that we can take a very inexpensive camera and put a diffraction grating on it and
give them to these guards around Sandia and White Sands and all these places where the
guards are outdoors 24 hours a day. And every time they see something that's unusual,
just point the camera at it and take a picture, and then he says that he can take the reading
and match them up either by known objects or match them up in his lab and tell us what
the composition is of this object that's emitting this light. Now, we haven't, that's just
strictly in the planning stage now, we haven't done very much except Dr. Kaplan is now
trying to figure out the cheapest camera that he can build for us and the most rugged
camera so these guards can throw it around and still get some decent pictures of these
objects. Another thing that we've done is recently we've briefed the Air Defense
Command on this whole project and have got their cooperation in with their radar scope
cameras. As I mentioned before, we have had quite a few unknown radar returns. These
things have, the Air Defense Command radars tracked objects going anywhere from
1,000 up to about 3,500 miles an hour. We've never been able to determine, however, that
these weren't malfunctions in the radar set or due to some type of atmospheric
phenomena. We've tried to get the weather charts at the time or weather conditions at the
time this phenomena has occurred and try to correlate that data and show that due to a
certain type of weather condition that they had this type of return. Now, we haven't had
too much luck on that angle, so now we're going to try to get radar scope cameras and get
pictures of this stuff, and then we'll know. Before, we just had the radar observer's
interpretation of what he saw on the scope. We think that with pictures, probably we can
do a little bit more with this. Now, another step further than that, and we haven't done
anything on this except talk about it, and it may get into the point where we are going to