Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/279

 similar in all respects except that the color was a brilliant blue-white.

With the disappearance of the fireball, the counter once more settled down to a steady click per second. They added that once before they had detected a similar increase in the frequency of the clicks but had seen nothing in the sky.

In telling their story, both astronomers stressed the point that their data were open to a great deal of criticism, mainly because of the limited instrumentation they had used. We agreed. Still their work tended to support the findings of the more elaborate and systematic radiation investigations.

The gods who watch over the UFO project were smiling about this time, because one morning I got a call from a colonel on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He was going to be in our area that morning and planned to stop in to see me.

He arrived in a few minutes and turned out to be none other than the colonel who had headed the group which had investigated UFO’s and radiation at the eastern laboratory. He repeated his story. It was the same as I had heard from the scientist, with a few insignificant changes. The colonel had no records of his group’s operations, but knew who had them. He promised to get a wire off to the person immediately, which he did.

The answer was a bit disappointing. During the intervening months the data had been scattered out among the members of the colonel’s group, and when the group broke up, so did its collection of records.

So all we had to fall back on was the colonel’s word, but since he now was heading a top-priority project at Wright, it would be difficult not to believe him.

After obtaining the colonel’s story, we collected all available data concerning known incidents in which there seemed to be a correlation between the visual sighting of UFO’s and the presence of excess atomic radiation in the area of the sightings.

There was one last thing to do. I wanted to take the dates and times of all the reported radiation increases and check them against all sources of UFO reports. This project would take a lot of leg work and digging, but I felt that it would offer the most positive and complete evidence we could assemble as to whether or not a correlation existed.