Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/256



The FEAF intelligence officers had checked every possible angle but they could offer nothing to account for the sighting.

There were lots of opinions, weather targets for example, but once again the chances of a weather target’s being in exactly the same direction as a bright star and having the star appear to move with the false radar target aren’t too likely-to say the least. And then the same type of thing had happened twice before inside of a month’s time, once in California and once in Michigan.

As one of the men at the briefing I gave said, “It’s incredible, and I can’t believe it, but those boys in FEAF are in a war—they’re veterans—and by damn, I think they know what they’re talking about when they say they’ve never seen anything like this before.”

I could go into a long discourse on the possible explanations for this sighting; I heard many, but in the end there would be only one positive answer—the UFO could not be identified as something we knew about. It could have been an interplanetary spaceship. Many people thought this was the answer and were all for sticking their necks out and establishing a category of conclusions for UFO reports and labeling it spacecraft. But the majority ruled, and a UFO remained an unidentified flying object.

On my next trip to the Pentagon I spent the whole day talking to Major Dewey Fournet and two of his bosses, Colonel W. A. Adams and Colonel Weldon Smith, about the UFO subject in general. One of the things we talked about was a new approach to the UFO problem—that of trying to prove that the motion of a UFO as it flew through the air was intelligently controlled.

I don’t know who would get credit for originating the idea of trying to analyze the motion of the UFO’s. It was one of those kinds of ideas that are passed around, with everyone adding a few modifications. We’d been talking about making a study of this idea for a long time, but we hadn’t had many reports to work with; but now, with the mass of data that we had accumulated in June and July and August, the prospects of such a study looked promising.

The basic aim of the study would be to learn whether the motion of the reported UFO’s was random or ordered. Random motion is an unordered, helter-skelter motion very similar to a swarm of gnats or flies milling around. There is no apparent pattern or purpose to their flight paths. But take, for example,