Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/283



By using the terms “Known,” “Probable,” and “Possible,” we were able to differentiate how positive we were of our conclusions. But even in the “Possible” cases we were, in our own minds, sure that we had identified the reported UFO.

And who made these reports? Pilots and air crews made 17.1 per cent from the air. Scientists and engineers made 5.7 per cent, airport control tower operators made an even 1.0 per cent of the reports, and 12.5 per cent of the total were radar reports. The remaining 63.7 per cent were made by military and civilian observers in general.

The reports that we were interested in were the 26.94 per cent or 429 “Unknowns,” so we had studied them in great detail. We studied the reported colors of the UFO’s, the shapes, the directions they were traveling, the times of day they were observed, and many more details, but we could find no significant pattern or trends. We did find that the most often reported shape was elliptical and that the most often reported color was white or “metallic.” About the same number of UFO’s were reported as being seen in daytime as at night, and the direction of travel equally covered the sixteen cardinal headings of the compass.

Seventy per cent of the “Unknowns” had been seen visually from the air; 12 per cent had been seen visually from the ground; 10 per cent had been picked up by ground or airborne radar; and 8 per cent were combination visual-radar sightings.

In the over-all total of 1,593 sightings women made two reports