Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/204



I said that our philosophy was that the fireball could have been two meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across the airfield at Goose AFB. Granted a meteor doesn’t come within feet of an airplane or make a 90-degree turn, but these could have been optical illusions of some kind. The crew of the C-54, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators didn’t recognize the UFO’s as meteors because they were used to seeing the normal shooting stars that are most commonly seen.

But the colonel had some more questions. “What are the chances of having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling the same direction, only five minutes apart?”

I didn’t know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather small, I had to admit.

Then he asked, “What kind of an optical illusion would cause a meteor to appear to make a 90-degree turn?”

I had asked our Project Bear astronomer this same question, and he couldn’t answer it either. So the only answer I could give the colonel was, “I don’t know.”

I felt as if I were on a witness stand being cross-examined, and that is exactly where I was, because the colonel cut loose.

“Why not assume a point that is more easily proved?” he asked. “Why not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators did know what they were talking about? Maybe they had seen spectacular meteors during the hundreds of hours that they had flown at night and the many nights that they had been on duty in the tower. Maybe the ball of fire had made a 90-degree turn. Maybe it was some kind of an intelligently controlled craft that had streaked northeast across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an hour.

“Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?” the colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.

This last comment started a lively discussion, and I was able to retreat. The colonel had been right in a sense—we were being conservative, but maybe this was the right way to be. In any scientific investigation you always assume that you don’t have enough proof until you get a positive answer. I didn’t think that we had a positive answer—yet.

The colonel’s comments split the group, and a hot exchange of