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

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GCA operator was, uh, sitting there looking in his scope and all of a sudden he saw these
two objects come in. They were coming in about 4 or 500 miles an hour. And at the same
time a C-47 was coming in, he was going to land his 47. Well, he noticed they were on a
collision course, so he called the tower and said, 'Tell those two unidentified airplanes
they're on a collision course with this 47.' So the tower just called in the blind... The
tower said there's no other airplanes out there. The radar man said, 'Yes, there is.' The
tower just called in the blind and said, 'Uh, you two unidentified airplanes, you're on a
collision course with a 47.' And just as they said that, these two returns made a turn. Now,
once again, have we got coincidence or have we actually got something? See, I mean it,
uh... Do they speak English? ... So, that's about the only conclusion we can draw, they
must speak English. But, uh, that's some of the things we run into. We run into a lot of
that kind of stuff where we'll have a lot of small situations that all build up into a big one.
And it might be just a coincidence. It might be, we may put our imagination into it
unconsciously. Only we, we try to keep away from that. We try to stay right in the straight
and narrow. I mean, we don't want to, uh, be influenced either way on this thing. They
may be from Mars, but if they are, we don't want to think they are. We don't want to think
they're all balloons. I mean, we try to stay right in the middle of the road. Now, we had a
real interesting one from, uh, New Jersey, uh, around Sandy Hook and Fort Monmouth
here not too long ago. These pilots in a T-33 chased something, and about 10 minutes
later, all our radar stations in that area begin to pick these objects up going back and forth
all over the skies. And we thought, 'Boy, this is it.' So we tore up there to find out, and
boy, the story sounded real fine. These T-33 pilots saw this great big disc-shaped thing
over there and he took out after it and he couldn't catch it. And then the radar stations
begin to pick up these signals and they were clocking speeds up to 3,500 miles an hour
and everything else. Well, it turned out that the pilots had seen a big balloon. It was larger
than a normal weather balloon, had been launched at Fort Monmouth. And they were a
little bit mixed up with their rate of closure and stuff like that and had seen a balloon.
And the radar crews, the first radar crew had picked up a, probably just an ordinary
aircraft, but they were giving a demonstration to a bunch of colonels and the operators
got a little bit flustered on the whole thing and they couldn't lock in this automatic
tracking, so they assumed the thing must be going about 3,500 miles an hour. And it
turned out the reason they couldn't lock it in is they were just too excited and got a little
bit fouled up on their procedures. And from then on, why they were picking up weather
balloons, uh, with these radar reflectors hanging on them and everything else, and the
students, incidentally, it turned out they were mostly student radar operators picking this
stuff up. The, uh, headquarters had called in and hadn't explained anything. They just
said, 'Get on your radar scopes and look for these mysterious objects floating around.'
Well, that's all it took for these kids because, boy, they saw everything. Well, what at first
appeared to be a very good sighting just all broke down when we get enough facts. Now