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

war.gov · 1952 · 19 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 14 …The, uh, headquarters had called in and hadn't explained anything. They just said, 'Get on…
  • p. 16 …There is a directive from Headquarters, USAF, that establishes a reporting procedure. Now, we felt for…
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degrees per second, and if they were that low, why, in fact, I think it comes out to be
about 75 to 80 feet, the ducks would have to be that low to be flying 60 miles an hour and
go through that angle at that certain time. And they say they are not ducks. Now that's the
only possibility we have, or the only idea of what they could be. They might be ducks
reflecting the city lights, although it's still hard to believe that because just of all the
circumstances, it just doesn't sound like ducks. A lot of people in Lubbock who were
looking for these objects on these nights did see ducks. And when we were down there,
they'd call us up and they'd say, 'I know what these lights are, they're ducks because I saw
them and I could see the wings flapping and I could hear them honking and I could see
their necks sticking out, and you're wasting our good taxpayers' money coming down
here talking about it because they were ducks.' Now, but once again, there's about half the
people that saw these objects again said they were not ducks because they said, 'We've
lived in Lubbock all our life and we've seen ducks for the last 30 years and those were
not ducks.' So we're up against a blank wall on this certain, this one case.
Now we, uh, we've reached several general, or I shouldn't say reached any conclusions. There's
two or three general facts about all of the sightings, the overall, uh, collection of sightings we
have. One of them is that on our good sightings, there's absolutely no noise ever reported in
connection with these objects, no matter how low they are. They may be, uh, reported as just
being specks in the sky or down fairly low and there's absolutely no noise reported. And once
again, we, uh, we don't know of any kind of a propulsion system that would, uh, that would do
that. I mean, everything that we know of has some type of noise connected with it. Another thing
is we've had a lot of radar returns, uh, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with a
radar return. We've had two or three reports of that, but we've never been able to pin them down
enough and get enough facts about them to make sure that they were both looking at the same
thing. Uh, they have had a project on this down at, uh, Holloman. They've been very much
interested in it because they've been seeing, uh, compare on a comparative basis, more of these
things around the Holloman and White Sands area. They did track something down there with
their cinetheodolites. Uh, they don't know what it is, and it could possibly be a slow-moving
daylight meteor. Now, I'm not an astronomer, but I understand such things exist. Uh, they, they
got pictures of it and they were able to track it. However, they saw about five, I think it was five
or six of these things at once. Uh, it was right after they launched a missile and they had their,
uh, Scania, cinetheodolites pointed up in the air and they saw these four or five things right
behind the missile and they got the word to swing over on those and forget the missile. And
they're a little bit doubtful as to whether or not all stations tracked the same object. So
consequently, their readings are a little bit off, but they did come up, uh, with an altitude reading
of about 150,000 feet. Uh, the speed was, uh, very great. They, they came up with a speed of
about 3,500 miles an hour, but again, they won't back that up because they aren't, they aren't sure
of the conditions that these readings were made under. Uh, that's the only time we've ever come
really close to getting any, uh, any accurate data on these things. And I want to say again that it
could be that there was a, a meteor in the daytime. Now, they have another type of, uh,

Cases discussed

About this file

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.