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
18 either over Kentucky or Tennessee. That's all they've been able to pin down, and they think that that might have been it. But..." (Question from audience) • "Is this still classified top secret, since Life is coming out with it?" • "No, uh, we've, we actually, we carry it as confidential, the overall project. We're trying to get it dropped down to restricted now because Life is going to come out with a lot of material we've given them that is classified, or was classified at one time. The only time this was classified top secret was right after it came out. We've been carrying this confidential. There are some aspects of it we'll have to keep classified as secret or maybe higher when we start listing Air Defense radar stations, possible tie-in with some of our latest developments and things like that. We'll have to keep that classified. But just, or just the details of a sighting, we're going to try to declassify to restricted because we've had trouble in the past on that. Some newspaper will call up and say, 'Big sighting up somewhere,' and we'll say, 'Yes, we've heard about it.' And they'll say, 'What's the results?' We'll say, 'We can't tell you about that, it's classified.' So immediately they come out with a big story about, 'The Air Force just picked up a spaceship somewhere and they won't tell us about it.' And that's the thing we're trying to get away from. I mean, we don't want to excite anybody on the project." • "There is one other area that's classified, and that's where we have reports on people. Yes, you know, their background to try to determine whether they're reliable or not. We run into one interesting bit of discussion on this classification because some people who say, 'Well, now, these could be from Russia,' which is true, they could be. 'Therefore, we're doing them a great service reporting them in our papers very carefully where they get plots,' which is true. But we feel that the papers, I mean, when they get one, are going to report it, and then they're going to come to us for what we know on it. And it's inevitable if the papers pick it up. So that's one reason we like this reporting channel that's established, that if anybody sights one of them, it's not too illogical for somebody if he sees something in the air to call the nearest Air Force base. I mean, it's one of the first things he would think of, 'Maybe they've got something in the air.' And we have found, though, just as an example of this T-33 case you mentioned, the reporters are right on hand to discuss this thing with the pilots when they landed, and took pictures of them." • "We found out that in the New York area, some paper, I couldn't tell you which one it is, monitors VHF, monitors all the air traffic in the area. And I don't know why they do it, but they do. And that's where they picked up that T-33 incident, was monitoring the air traffic. Now, I heard two different stories. One that the newspaper actually has a setup themselves to monitor it. Another one that they have two or three hams in the area alerted to call them if anything happens. But this T-33 pilot did call the tower and told them about it, and the newspapers were right on it. So, we found out one thing, and that is the
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.