Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/221

 the traffic controllers who operated the radar at Washington National Airport weren’t just out of radar school. Every day the lives of thousands of people depended upon their interpretation of the radar targets they saw on their scopes. And you don’t get a job like this unless you’ve spent a good many years watching a luminous line paint targets on a good many radarscopes. Targets caused by inversions aren’t rare—in the years that these men had been working with radar they had undoubtedly seen every kind of target, real or false, that radar can detect. They had told the Bolling AFB intelligence officer that the targets they saw were caused by the radar waves’ bouncing off a hard, solid object. The Air Force radar operator at Andrews backed them up; so did two veteran airline pilots who saw lights right where the radar showed a UFO to be.

Then on top of all this there were the reports from the Washington area during the previous two weeks—all good—all from airline pilots or equally reliable people.

To say the least, the sighting at Washington National was a jolt.

Besides trying to figure out what the Washington National UFO’s were, we had the problem of what to tell the press. They were now beginning to put on a squeeze by threatening to call a congressman—and nothing chills blood faster in the military. They wanted some kind of an official statement and they wanted it soon. Some people in intelligence wanted to say just, “We don’t know,” but others held out for a more thorough investigation. I happened to be in this latter category. Many times in the past I had seen what first seemed to be a good UFO report completely fall apart under a thorough investigation. I was for stalling the press and working all night if necessary to go into every aspect of the sighting. But to go along with the theme of the Washington National Sightings—confusion—there was a lot of talk but no action and the afternoon passed with no further investigation.

Finally about 4:00 p.m. it was decided that the press, who still wanted an official comment, would get an official “No comment” and that I would stay in Washington and make a more detailed investigation.

I called Lieutenant Andy Flues, who was in charge of Project Blue Book while I was gone, to tell him that I was staying over