Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/136



“And who released this big report, anyway?” another person added, picking up a copy of the Grudge Report and slamming it back down on the table.

Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten came back to ATIC with orders to set up a new project and report back to General Cabell when it was ready to go. But Cummings didn’t get a chance to do much work on the new revitalized Project Grudge—it was to keep the old name—because in a few days he was a civilian. He’d been released from active duty because he was needed back at Cal Tech, where he’d been working on an important government project before his recall to active duty.

The day after Cummings got his separation orders, Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten called me into his office. The colonel was chief of the Aircraft and Missiles branch and one of his many responsibilities was Project Grudge. He said that he knew that I was busy as group leader of my regular group but, if he gave me enough people, could I take Project Grudge? All he wanted me to do was to get it straightened out and operating; then I could go back to trying to outguess the Russians. He threw in a few comments about the good job I’d done straightening out other fouled-up projects. Good old “Rosy.” With my ego sufficiently inflated, I said yes.

On many later occasions, when I’d land at home in Dayton just long enough for a clean clothes resupply, or when the telephone would ring at 2:00 a.m. to report a new “hot” sighting and wake up the baby, Mrs. Ruppelt and I have soundly cussed my ego.

I had had the project only a few days when a minor flurry of good UFO reports started. It wasn’t supposed to happen because the day after I’d taken over Project Grudge I’d met the ex-UFO “expert” in the hall and he’d nearly doubled up with laughter as he said something about getting stuck with Project Grudge. He predicted that I wouldn’t get a report until the newspapers began to play up flying saucers again. “It’s all mass hysteria,” he said.

The first hysterical report of the flurry came from the Air Defense Command. On September 23, 1951, at seven fifty-five in the morning, two F-86’s on an early patrol were approaching