Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/157





While I was in Lubbock, Lieutenant Henry Metscher, who was helping me on Project Grudge, had been sorting out the many bits and pieces of information that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten had brought back from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and he had the answers.

The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling at a terrific speed because he couldn’t lock on to it turned out to be a 400-mile-an-hour conventional airplane. He’d just gotten fouled up on his procedures for putting the radar set on automatic tracking. The sighting by the two officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when Metscher showed how they’d seen a balloon.

The second radar sighting of the series also turned out to be a balloon. The frantic phone call from headquarters requesting a reading on the object’s altitude was to settle a bet. Some officers in headquarters had seen the balloon launched and were betting on how high it was.

The second day’s radar sightings were caused by another balloon and weather—both enhanced by the firm conviction that there were some mighty queer goings on over Jersey.

The success with the Fort Monmouth Incident had gone to our heads and we were convinced that with a little diligent digging we’d be knocking off saucers like an ace skeet-shooter. With all the confidence in the world, I attacked the Long Beach Incident, which I’d had to drop to go to Lubbock, Texas. But if saucers could laugh, they were probably zipping through the stratosphere chuckling to themselves, because there was no neat solution to this one.

In the original report of how the six F-86’s chased the highflying UFO over Long Beach, the intelligence officer who made