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

3
We've decided, about last October, we decided there possibly was enough material now to reopen
this case. So we, the center, appointed a permanent project engineer, which I'm the project
engineer, and we reviewed all this stuff. We took all the cases that we had, reworked them, filed
them all in a neat file so we could tell what we had. We went through and cross-indexed all the
material so that we could get an idea of the different factors that were involved in these reports.
We came up with some results. I won't say they're outstanding results, I don't... we don't know
what the results mean.
But, uh, unfortunately, I didn't realize we were going to have such a large audience here, so we
did bring these slides along. I don't know whether you can... any of you in the back room see this
print? I'll pass it around and you can get an idea. This is a plot of the sightings in the United
States. Now, this does not include the... we have sightings outside of the United States, but we're
not too worried about those at the present time. We're more interested in the United States. I'll
explain this a little bit to you since you can't see it. We have certain areas in the United States
where there are concentrations. In Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, there are concentrations. Now,
this is possibly due to two things. One of them is the fact that the people in that area knew that all
the activity in this project was taking place in that area, and consequently, they were doing a little
bit more reporting. Another thing is that all the experimental flying was being done around
Wright Field, and we still have a lot of trouble with that. People call in and say, "I just saw a
great big light go over at 5,000 miles an hour," it turns over... it turns out it's an airplane carrying
a flare or something like that. So we've disregarded that concentration. However, around all the
ports in the United States—San Francisco, Los Angeles, the coastal area around New York City,
and New Orleans—there's concentrations. Around Los Alamos and the Albuquerque area, there's
concentrations. Around White Sands, there's concentrations, and down here at Camp Hood,
Texas. Now, this Camp Hood, Texas concentration was due to an outbreak of odd lights about
two years ago. They never did determine exactly what the lights were. They were a special, we
might say, a special type of report that haven't occurred again, and we haven't paid too much
attention to that. But the ones around Oak Ridge and the ones around Albuquerque may possibly
mean something, we don't know. The rest of the reports are pretty well scattered out around the
United States.
If you plot these reports up by years, they started in the West Coast, up around in the Northwest,
around Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in 1947. The next year, they were... they tended to be on
the East Coast to a certain extent, and from then on, they were just spread out all over the United
States. There was no, no pattern.
We've plotted the frequency of these reports again. You'll see that it doesn't vary too much year
from, uh, from year to year. This large peak down here occurred right after the first sighting by
this Arnold out in Idaho, and it was undoubtedly, a lot of it was due to mass hysteria or people
wanting to get their names in the paper. However, you can see it tapered off, and it reaches a
peak right in, let's see, this is June and July, and every year, almost, it reaches a peak in there. It's
also peaked to a certain extent here in January and then again, there's a peak here in December.