Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/262

 at the radar station saw a “dark, cigar-shaped object” right where the radar had the UFO pinpointed.

What these people saw is a mystery to this day.

Late in September I made a trip out to Headquarters, ADC to brief General Chidlaw and his staff on the past few months’ UFO activity.

Our plans for periodic briefings, which we had originally set up with ADC, had suffered a bit in the summer because we were all busy elsewhere. They were still giving us the fullest co-operation, but we hadn’t been keeping them as thoroughly read in as we would have liked to. I’d finished the briefing and was eating lunch at the officers’ club with Major Verne Sadowski, Project Blue Book’s liaison officer in ADC Intelligence, and several other officers. I had a hunch that something was bothering these people. Then finally Major Sadowski said, “Look, Rupe, are you giving us the straight story on these UFO’s?”

I thought he meant that I was trying to spice things up a little, so I said that since he had copies of most of our reports and had read them, he should know that I was giving them the facts straight across the board.

Then one of the other officers at the table cut in, “That’s just the point, we do have the reports and we have read them. None of us can understand why Intelligence is so hesitant to accept the fact that something we just don’t know about is flying around in our skies—unless you are trying to cover up something big.”

Everyone at the table put in his ideas. One radar man said that he’d looked over several dozen radar reports and that his conclusion was that the UFO’s couldn’t be anything but interplanetary spaceships. He started to give his reasons when another radar man leaped into the conversation. This man said that he’d read every radar report, too, and that there wasn’t one that couldn’t be explained as a weather phenomenon—even the radar-visual sightings. In fact, he wasn’t even convinced that we had ever gotten such a thing as radar-visual sighting. He wanted to see proof that an object that was seen visually was the same object that the radar had picked up. Did we have it?

I got back into the discussion at this point with the answer. No, we didn’t have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of proof needed. But we did have reports where the radar