Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/135

 New York in time to get them to the Pentagon by 10:00 a.m., the time that had been set up for their report, so they chartered an airplane and flew to the capital to brief the general.

General Cabell presided over the meeting, and it was attended by his entire staff plus Lieutenant Cummings, Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten, and a special representative from Republic Aircraft Corporation. The man from Republic supposedly represented a group of top U.S. industrialists and scientists who thought that there should be a lot more sensible answers coming from the Air Force regarding the UFO’s. The man was at the meeting at the personal request of a general officer.

Every word of the two-hour meeting was recorded on a wire recorder. The recording was so hot that it was later destroyed, but not before I had heard it several times. I can’t tell everything that was said but, to be conservative, it didn’t exactly follow the tone of the official Air Force releases—many of the people present at the meeting weren’t as convinced that the “hoax, hallucination, and misidentification” answer was quite as positive as the Grudge Report and subsequent press releases made out.

Toward the end of the two-hour conference a general asked Lieutenant Cummings to review the activity of the UFO investigation for the past year and a half. Maybe it was just a lack of sleep, or maybe it was just Cummings, but the general got the straight answer—for all practical purposes the project was dead. Then Cummings proceeded to elaborate on the details, the attitude at ATIC, the opposition to his reorganizing the project, and the methods of processing reports. Lieutenant Cummings didn’t miss a point. He later told me that all of the generals and about three fourths of the full colonels present at the meeting turned the shade of purple normally associated with rage while a sort of sickly grin graced the faces of the remaining few. Then one of the generals on the purple-faced team glared at the sickly-grin team and cut loose.

The first thing the general wanted to know was, “Who in hell has been giving me these reports that every decent flying saucer sighting is being investigated?”

Then others picked up the questioning.

“What happened to those two reports that General —— sent in from Saudi Arabia? He saw those two flying saucers himself.”