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

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develop them for two days because,' he said, 'I just thought in my own mind that I
wouldn't even have an image because they were, what I saw was, I thought, was too dim
to take a picture of, but I just took a chance.' So he took those pictures. He finally
developed them and that's what he came out with. And he sold those, I believe he got $8
for the original set of prints from a newspaper. We had those prints over to the photo lab
and they checked them out. I mean, they are an actual image, there's no doubt about that.
He could have taken a black sheet of paper and just punched holes in it and faked them
very easily, but he swears up and down he didn't do that. These things under a microscope
show that the relative position of these things vary just a little bit in each picture. Well,
it's doubtful if he took a piece of cardboard and just punched holes in it, if he would be
smart enough to vary the holes, the position of the hole in each exposure. He'd probably
just taken four shots of the same thing and maybe moved his camera to give him a little
appearance of motion there. But the actual exposures or images are moved just a little bit
in each exposure. Now again, that could come from the fact that maybe he tipped his
paper as he took the picture, but we don't know. We've never been able to prove that they
were faked. The density on the negative compares to the density of a bright star. In other
words, we used the same exposure and the same film and went out and took a couple
pictures of some bright planets, and it's, the density of the negative is just a little bit more
than that of a bright planet at night. So, that's all we know about it. We haven't been able
to...
(Question from audience)
• "Did you get two sets of lights in some cases rather than a smear?"
• "No, sir, we haven't. I asked him about that and he said when he took the pictures, it
looked like a straight line. He didn't notice two different formations. Now, I always
hesitate to tell this because it could again be one big coincidence, but if you plot those
points on a piece of, on an enlargement on a piece of graph paper and plot them out
exactly, you'll see that as the consecutive, in the consecutive frames, one row of lights,
the back row, will say, moves up to the first row, and then it moves on ahead in the third
picture. Now, that doesn't make sense at all because of the fact that they're two different
formations he took. The only two possibilities that we can think of, one of them is that it's
still one great big hoax that the college professors just decided to see how much they
could fool the people in Lubbock, Texas and they planted these pictures with the kid. The
other thing is that there was, it was known that there was a duck flight on in the area at
the time, that the ducks were flying across Lubbock. We tried, and the people in Lubbock
tried to see whether or not you could take a picture of ducks at night just from the
reflection of the city lights, and that's impossible. So if these pictures aren't true, or are
not fakes, why then these pictures are not of ducks. We'll put it that way. The college
professors won't believe the duck story at all. I mean, they say those were not ducks. We
can, if they were ducks, they'd have to be at such and such an height to give that 30