Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/197

 they watched the scope, the target leveled out for a few seconds, went into a high-speed dive, and again leveled out at 55,000 feet. When they lost the target, it was heading southeast somewhere near Riverside, California.

During the sighting my caller told me that when the UFO was only about ten miles from the radar site two of the crew had gone outside but they couldn’t see anything. But, he explained, even the high-flying jets that they had been tracking hadn’t been leaving vapor trails.

The first thing I asked when the Hughes test engineer finished his story was if the radar set had been working properly. He said that as soon as the UFO had left the scope they had run every possible check on the radar and it was O.K.

I was just about to ask my caller if the target might not have been some experimental airplane from Edwards AFB when he second-guessed me. He said that after sitting around looking at each other for about a minute, someone suggested that they call Edwards. They did, and Edwards’ flight operations told them that they had nothing in the area.

I asked him about the weather. The target didn’t look like a weather target was the answer, but just to be sure, the test crew had checked. One of his men was an electronics-weather specialist whom he had hired because of his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of radar under certain weather conditions. This man had looked into the weather angle. He had gotten the latest weather data and checked it, but there wasn’t the slightest indication of an inversion or any other weather that would cause a false target.

Just before I hung up I asked the man what he thought he and his crew had picked up, and once again I got the same old answer: “Yesterday at this time any of us would have argued for hours that flying saucers were a bunch of nonsense but now, regardless of what you’ll say about what we saw, it was something damned real.”

I thanked the man for calling and hung up. We couldn’t make any more of an analysis of this report than had already been made, it was another unknown.

I went over to the MO file and pulled out the stack of cards behind the tab “High-Speed Climb.” There must have been at