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

2
• "Yeah, there are a few things on the tape."
• "Why don't you say something?"
• "...begin to appear in about 1947. You're possibly familiar with them to a certain extent
following the newspaper reports. The first ones were sighted by a Kenneth Arnold in June
of 1947 out in Idaho. Now, I'll refer to them as 'these things' because we have no idea
what we're dealing with. The newspapers and radio played them up to a great degree at
that time and consequently introduced a little bit of, probably a little bit of mass hysteria
or something like that into the problem. They flared up for about, oh, spasmodically for
about two years and then the things died down to a certain extent. The Air Force took
over this project soon after the first sighting because the public demanded an explanation
of these objects. In 19... August of 1949, the Air Force came out with a report, supposedly
a final report on this, where they reached a few conclusions. Now they had some
specialists in certain fields working on this problem, and you might be interested in
knowing who they were. There's a Dr. J. A. Hynek, an astronomer at Ohio State, Dr. G.
Valley of the Scientific Advisory Board, a Dr. Fitz of the Aeromedical, I believe he was a
psychologist, the RAND Corporation, Air Weather Service, Cambridge Field Station, and
the U.S. Department of Commerce Weather Bureau. All those people took the reports—
they had about 300 reports at that time—they took the reports, read them over, came up
with their conclusions. Although their conclusions varied to a certain extent, they all
agreed that they didn't know exactly what they were. However, there were obviously no
direct threat to the United States, so they didn't pay too much more attention to them.
The Air Force came up with several conclusions in that report. One of them was it was a mild
case of mass hysteria due to, we might say, war nerves; the war had just been over. Some of them
were due to psychopathological people, or nuts, something like that trying to create an
excitement or get publicity or pure do a pure hoax. And the other one was that they were due to
misinterpretation of conventional objects.
Well, since that time, several years has passed, and we've been able to go back and review these
conclusions a little bit. We've been able to drop out all except the misinterpretation of
conventional objects. Going back, we have approximately 800 cases now on record, and only
about 2% of those are actual hoaxes or psychopathological people who just don't know what they
see. The misinterpretation of known objects is still, of course, a large factor. I mean, that could
possibly account for all of them. However, it's a little bit doubtful. We've gone through these
reports and come up with the fact that about 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable
people and are just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn.
The mass hysteria factor has gone out because the newspapers haven't played this up for the last
approximately three years. There's occasional flurries, but nothing to get excited about at all, and
still the reports continue to come in. We dropped this project in 1949, as I said, as a special
project and have been handling this information as regular intelligence material since that time.