DOW-UAP-D154, Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952

This document is a transcript of a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt outlining the U.S. Air Force’s reorganized investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The presentation previews prospective technical methodologies, such as diffraction-grating photography and radar-scope synchronization, that were subsequently incorporated into Project Blue Book, a U.S. Air Force program active from 1952 to 1969 that investigated the nature and origin of UFOs. Ruppelt explains that out of approximately 800 historical cases reviewed by the Air Force, approximately 20% remained unexplained after technical analysis. These unresolved reports were sourced from credible military personnel, commercial pilots, and other qualified technical observers. He highlights geographic report concentrations around sensitive national security and nuclear weapons installations (including Los Alamos, Albuquerque, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories) and notes recurring anomalous characteristics, including silent high-speed flight and radar detections indicating unconfirmed air speeds between 1,000 and 3,500 miles per hour. Emphasizing that the Air Force found no conclusive evidence regarding the nature or origin of the phenomena, Ruppelt underscores the national security need for a systematic physical data collection effort to better evaluate these sightings.

OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF WAR
5000 DEFENSE PENTAGON
WASHINGTON, DC 20301-5000
INTE LLIGENCE
AND SECURITY
Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952
This document is a transcript of a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt
outlining the U.S. Air Force’s reorganized investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
The presentation previews prospective technical methodologies, such as diffraction-grating
photography and radar-scope synchronization, that were subsequently incorporated into Project
Blue Book, a U.S. Air Force program active from 1952 to 1969 that investigated the nature and
origin of UFOs. Ruppelt explains that out of approximately 800 historical cases reviewed by the
Air Force, approximately 20% remained unexplained after technical analysis. These unresolved
reports were sourced from credible military personnel, commercial pilots, and other qualified
technical observers. He highlights geographic report concentrations around sensitive national
security and nuclear weapons installations (including Los Alamos, Albuquerque, and Oak Ridge
National Laboratories) and notes recurring anomalous characteristics, including silent high-
speed flight and radar detections indicating unconfirmed air speeds between 1,000 and 3,500
miles per hour. Emphasizing that the Air Force found no conclusive evidence regarding the
nature or origin of the phenomena, Ruppelt underscores the national security need for a
systematic physical data collection effort to better evaluate these sightings.
Beginning of transcript.
This medium has been declassified in compliance with applicable executive orders, statutes, and
regulations.
(Recording test) ...for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all
good men to come to the aid of their country. Now is the time for all good men...
(Recording test) ...addressing them was by voice straight at the microphone and my mouth
separated from the microphone by a distance of about 15 inches. I expect that the speaker will
put out approximately this volume. And I will now, as before, turn around slowly and address my
words toward the blackboard. This I am now doing, talking straight into the blackboard as if I
were drawing some diagrams. I'm then going to turn around slowly again now to face the
audience. I am separated from the microphone by a somewhat greater distance, as if I were
slightly leaning backwards.
(Recording test) ...play around the zero, that's the desirable level. If, for example, we turn the
gain down... Now, now. So you see it's just about wide open and that'll pick everything in the
room up. See how it jumps and is... Now let's see if we play it back.
(Conversation)
• "I can't hear you."
• "Is there anything already on that tape now?"

• "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.
2

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.
3

Now there's actually no direct pattern to that, but there's enough of a pattern that it plants a seed
of doubt in your mind. You sort of wonder why this thing should run a cycle like that. In these
two years, '47 and '48, there was a lot of newspaper publicity. However, in '49, '50, and '51, there
was very little newspaper publicity, and the reports from '49, '50, and '51 are mostly from
military sources. The civilians have dropped out because possibly they didn't know where to
report this stuff or they weren't interested in it. The Air Force came out and said there was
nothing to it, so they just quit making reports. However, military has continued to make reports. I
should say military and a few airline pilots are covered in these two years.
We've taken the reported shapes. We have a lot of questions. People say, "Well, what are people
reporting?" So we've broken it down into shapes. In this segment here, there were no shapes
reported. Somebody just called in or wrote a letter and said, "I saw something," so we've had to
disregard it. This segment right here represents some type of an astronomical body. I mean, you
could say it was either a bright light in the sky or a streak of light that could have been a meteor.
We've lumped all those together. In this section are disc or spherical shaped objects. We've
lumped those together because it's... we don't believe that people can tell if they're seeing a disc
or a sphere unless they should happen to see it both on the bottom view and edgewise to
determine it's a disc. So we've lumped those all together. Some of these could be balloons. I
mean, there's no doubt about that, that they could be weather balloons. However, due to, or
contrary to popular opinion, these things are not, are definitely not all balloons.
These are shapes that are just reported as oval shapes. It's difficult to tell what they are.
Miscellaneous is almost anything. Vapor trails probably actually were vapor trails of aircraft.
There's one small segment in here, which is only 6/10 of 1% of all 800 reports, and that is reports
of groups of lights going through the sky. Now we've had quite a bit of difficulty with those
because the reports are usually from pretty good sources, and they'll see, oh, anywhere from 6 to
20 lights in a formation going streaking across the sky. Well, it's almost impossible that that
would, that you would find six meteors together. I understand it's possible to see two of them
together that would appear to be in formation, but no more than that. A certain percentage, 1%,
are reported to be balloons. Now, these are balloons that we've not been able to establish the
origin of. In other words, we don't, they're just balloons floating over the United States, and
they're probably meteorological balloons that have gotten loose from some station and haven't
burst when they were supposed to. About two and a half percent resemble actual aircraft. We've
had quite a bit of discussion as to whether or not these objects could possibly be some highly
developed aircraft type that the Soviets have. We've almost been able to throw that out because
of the small percentage of reports that even mention any shape due to aircraft, that would
resemble aircraft. This percentage here are reported to be rockets or cigar-shaped objects. Now,
once again, we've gone into that quite thoroughly and have found that, and it's common
knowledge, that any bright light traveling through the air will burn an image in your eye and
will, you'll have some persistence there, and it will appear to be elongated when actually it's just
a round source of light.
4

So that's some of the shapes that we've had. Now, getting back to this disc or spherical shaped
objects, these things are always silent. I mean, if we want to assume that this object we're dealing
with is a disc-shaped thing, these are always silent, and they're usually highly maneuverable.
Although lately, the reports that have been coming in have neglected to put this 90-degree turn
business in; they just go over at a great rate of speed. But the fact that they're silent is quite
interesting because we, we have no knowledge of any type of power plant that would be
completely silent.
These are the types of people that send in our reports. This segment here are civilians, and most
of these reports came in when the project was first initiated back in 1947 and '48. This black
segment here are reports from military sources, and they are, we've put them in as just ground
officers, not usually not flying officers, or at least the reports are not made from the air. We have
a small segment here of radar returns that we've been unable to explain. This section right here
are reports from civilian pilots who were airborne at the time of the sighting. This segment in
here especially is the one that we're very interested in. They're reports from airline pilots, from
tower operators, and balloon observers. Now, these balloon observers are normally people like
the General Mills crews that launch these high-altitude balloons. And here we have technically
trained personnel such as scientists, engineers, and so forth.
This segment, as I said, are the ones that we're very much interested in. Now, airline pilots are,
we consider very reliable because they're very, well, they don't like to stick their neck out and
make o