Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/181

 bought this idea, and Major Dewey J. Fournet got the additional duty of manager of the Pentagon branch. In the future all Pentagon inquiries went to Major Fournet, and if he couldn’t answer them he would call me. The arrangement was excellent because Major Fournet took a very serious interest in UFO’s and could always be counted on to do a good job.

Sometime in February 1952 I had a visit from two Royal Canadian Air Force officers. For some time, I learned, Canada had been getting her share of UFO reports. One of the latest ones, and the one that prompted the visit by the RCAF officers, occurred at North Bay, Ontario, about 250 miles north of Buffalo, New York. On two occasions an orange-red disk had been seen from a new jet fighter base in the area.

The Canadians wanted to know how we operated. I gave them the details of how we were currently operating and how we hoped to operate in the future, as soon as the procedures that were now in the planning stages could be put into operation. We agreed to try to set up channels so that we could exchange information and tie in the project they planned to establish with Project Grudge.

Our plans for continuing liaison didn’t materialize, but through other RCAF intelligence officers I found out that their plans for an RCAF-sponsored project failed. A quasi-official UFO project was set up soon after this, however, and its objective was to use instruments to detect objects coming into the earth’s atmosphere. In 1954 the project was closed down because during the two years of operation they hadn’t officially detected any UFO’s. My sources of information stressed the word “officially.”

During the time that I was chief of the UFO project, the visitors who passed through my office closely resembled the international brigade. Most of the visits were unofficial in the sense that the officers came to ATIC on other business, but in many instances the other business was just an excuse to come out to Dayton to get filled in on the UFO story. Two RAF intelligence officers who were in the U.S. on a classified mission brought six single-spaced typed pages of questions they and their friends wanted answered. On many occasions Air Force intelligence officers who were stationed in England, France, and Germany, and who returned to the U.S. on business, took back