Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/284

 for every one made by a man, but in the “Unknowns” the men beat out women ten to one.

There were two other factors we could never resolve, the frequency of the sightings and their geographical distribution. Since the first flurry of reports in July of 1947, each July brought a definite peak in reports; then a definite secondary peak occurred just before each Christmas. We plotted these peaks in sightings against high tides, world-wide atomic tests, the positions of the moon and planets, the general cloudiness over the United States, and a dozen and one other things, but we could never say what caused more people to see UFO’s at certain times of the year.

Then the UFO’s were habitually reported from areas around “technically interesting” places like our atomic energy installations, harbors, and critical manufacturing areas. Our studies showed that such vital military areas as Strategic Air Command and Air Defense Command bases, some A-bomb storage areas, and large military depots actually produced fewer reports than could be expected from a given area in the United States. Large population centers devoid of any major “technically interesting” facilities also produced few reports.

According to the laws of normal distribution, if UFO’s are not intelligently controlled vehicles, the distribution of reports should have been similar to the distribution of population in the United States—it wasn’t.

Our study of the geographical locations of sightings also covered other countries. The U.S. by no means had a curb on the UFO market.

In all of our “Unknown” reports we never found one measurement of size, speed, or altitude that could be considered to be even fairly accurate. We could say only that some of the UFO’s had been traveling pretty fast.

As far as radar was concerned, we had reports of fantastic speeds—up to 50,000 miles an hour—but in all of these instances there was some doubt as to exactly what caused the target. The highest speeds reported for our combination radar-visual sightings, which we considered to be the best type of sighting in our files, were 700 to 800 miles an hour.

We had never picked up any “hardware”—any whole saucers, pieces, or parts—that couldn’t be readily identified as being some-