Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/282

 World War II, and the other had been one of the fathers of the H-bomb. Another of the panel members is now the chief civilian adviser to one of our top military commanders, and another was an astronomer whose unpublished fight to get the UFO recognized is respected throughout scientific circles. There was a man who is noted for his highly theoretical physics and mathematics, and another who had pioneered operations research during World War II. The sixth member of the panel had been honored by the American Rocket Society and the International Astronautical Federation for his work in moving space travel from the Buck Rogers realm to a point of near reality and who is now a rocket expert.

It was an impressive collection of top scientific talent.

During the first two days of the meeting I reviewed our findings for the scientists. Since June 1947, when the first UFO report had been made, ATIC had analyzed 1,593 UFO reports. About 4,400 had actually been received, but all except 1,593 had been immediately rejected for analysis. From our studies, we estimated that ATIC received reports of only 10 per cent of the UFO sightings that were made in the United States, therefore in five and a half years something like 44,000 UFO sightings had been made.

Of the 1,593 reports that had been analyzed by Project Blue Book, and we had studied and evaluated every report in the Air Force files, we had been able to explain a great many. The actual breakdown was like this: