Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/281





By early January 1953 the scientists who were to be members of our panel of experts had been contacted and had agreed to sit in judgment of the UFO. In turn, we agreed to give them every detail about the UFO. We had our best reports for them to read, and we were going to show them the two movies that some intelligence officers considered as the “positive proof”—the Tremonton Movie and the Montana Movie.

When this high court convened on the morning of January 12, the first thing it received was its orders; one of three verdicts would be acceptable:

1.	All UFO reports are explainable as known objects or natural phenomena; therefore the investigation should be permanently discontinued.

2.	The UFO reports do not contain enough data upon which to base a final conclusion. Project Blue Book should be continued in hopes of obtaining better data.

3.	The UFO’s are interplanetary spacecraft.

The written verdict, the group was told, would be given to the National Security Council, a council made up of the directors of all U.S. intelligence agencies, and thence it would go to the President of the United States—if they should decide that the UFO’s were interplanetary spacecraft.

Because of military regulations, the names of the panel members, like the names of so many other people associated with the UFO story, cannot be revealed. Two of the men had made names for themselves as practical physicists—they could transform the highest theory for practical uses. One of these men had developed the radar that pulled us out of a big hole at the beginning of