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

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these things that they report? Now, right along those lines, we had, the same time these pictures
were taken down in Lubbock, within two or three days of that time, two women were driving
along in a car, and all of a sudden they looked out over the Texas plains and they saw this object
that they described as being top-shaped, like one of these old-fashioned tops you put a string
around and pull, and it was silver and it was hovering along over the prairie. And they drove up,
well, they approached it, and as they approached it, why the thing began to take off like that.
Well, now we checked on these women and found out that they were just as reliable as your
wives or anybody else. I mean, they didn't have any reputation of being habitual liars or
stretching stories or anything like that. They were just good old Texas farm wives is all they
were. And we questioned them, but that's their story. I mean, they said, 'That's what we saw. We
don't know what it was. We're leaving it up to the Air Force to tell us what we saw.' Well,
Thunder, we can't tell them. And once again, it goes down back to the point, how much can
people imagine? At the same time these Lubbock pictures were taken, in fact, it's the same night,
a guard and his wife from the Sandia base in Albuquerque were sitting out in their backyard, and
all of a sudden they looked up and they saw this big dark shape go over. And they said that it
was, it looked a lot like a flying wing type aircraft, and it was down about 150 feet and it just
scared the dickens out of them because it was so low. And they could see little exhaust flames on
the back of the airplane. Well, we checked them again and once again, we found out that they're
just good, normal people. I mean, the guy's been a guard at Sandia for a good number of years,
so he's reliable to that extent. I mean, they don't usually hire psychopathic cases to guard places
like Sandia. And just out of curiosity, we sent these pictures down to that guy, and the OSI
showed them to him and he said, 'Yeah,' he said, 'that's what I saw, but,' he said, 'it was, these
little lights are the exhaust stacks that I saw.' And it happened on the same night that these
pictures were taken, just about two hours before these people saw this thing at Lubbock. So, I
mean it, it's probably a coincidence, but again, you can't say it's a coincidence. I mean, we can't
get enough facts to ever pin it down, but it's one of those things that's just very interesting to
work on. I mean, it'll drive you nuts after a certain amount of time, but then we try to keep going
on it. That's about all that I had. If you've got any questions, well, we'd be very happy to discuss
any aspect of this whole thing with you folks.
(Question from audience)
• "What sort of performance data do you get out of these radar returns?"
• "Uh, it varies. It varies quite a bit. Usually high speed. When I say high speed, I mean
anything over 1,000 miles an hour. Uh, they, for a while, we we thought we had it pinned
down or our radar people did because the return always went over the station. It came in,
went through the ground clutter, practically directly over the station and went out the
other side. Now they claim that that was an indication of, uh, something, I'm not sure, uh,
interference in their station or something like that. But lately, we, they haven't been doing
that. I mean, they'll, they'll come in to the, uh, into the range and they'll maybe make a
turn and go out. Now we had one interesting case from New Spay Library and, uh, this