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 U.S. Air Force's reorganized UFO investigation. Ruppelt says that of about 800 cases reviewed, roughly 20 percent were good reports from reliable observers that stayed unexplained. He notes clusters of reports near Los Alamos, Albuquerque and Oak Ridge and describes the Lubbock lights and their photographs in detail. He also covers reporting directives, classification and the upcoming Life magazine article.
“Cooper”3 pages
17 may tend to take the mysteriousness and hysteria out of the thing and just get people to give us a few reports, you know, people with good common sense instead of all these nut letters that we get occasionally. Another thing, Colonel Kirkland referred to this newspaper clipping service, we hope to get that started before this Life magazine article comes out and keep it going over say a period of a year and see how the peaks in the newspaper publicity correspond with the peaks in this, in the reports that we get. We feel that after Life comes out, why then several other magazines will undoubtedly pick this stuff up. A True magazine is supposed to be coming out with an article sometime within the next couple months. It will be slanted the other way. It's going to be written by one of these science fiction writers, and it should give us no end of trouble. We haven't been able to get True to cooperate with us at all. I mean, I shouldn't say that, they probably would, but their type of magazine, I mean, they sell a sensational item, and they don't, they want to play it up. And then, I believe Look is also thinking about coming out with an article. So, magazines are going to follow Life and we'll probably run into a little bit of flak again on this thing. (Question from audience) • "Is it unlikely, or rather, is it likely that any of these magazines have facts or data which they would withhold just for the sake of being sensational?" • "Life magazine has a lot of information that we do not have on different sightings. They have some very good sightings too. I mean, they've called in some pretty important people around the United States. They won't, they're very hesitant to tell you who works for them as their consultants. But they have got some pretty good sightings that we have never heard of, and they're going to use those in their article, although they have checked those with us. The two or three old standbys that everybody always plays up, such as this Mantell case down in Kentucky where this guy got killed chasing one of them, supposedly, the one up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where the F-51 pilot fought with this thing for 15 minutes, and a few of those that are outstanding as far as the science fiction writers are concerned, Life is going to leave out. They're not going to dig those up again and rehash them again." (Question from audience) • "Was it ever established what caused Mantell's death and disintegration?" • "Well, they think, I mean, the official report is, and I tend to believe it, is that he didn't have any oxygen at all, and he just climbed up until he passed out and then the airplane went into a dive and just tore itself to pieces. I think that that probably, what he was chasing is still open to discussion. It was either, probably either Venus or one of these great big Skyhook balloons that General Mills puts up, because there was one lost in the area at the time, although they were never able to say where it was, except that it was
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. 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.