Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/285

 thing very earthly. We had a contract with a materials-testing laboratory, and they would analyze any piece of material that we found or was sent to us. The tar-covered marble, aluminum broom handle, cow manure, slag, pieces of plastic balloon, and the what-have-you that we did receive and analyze only served to give the people in our material lab some practice and added nothing but laughs to the UFO project.

The same went for the reports of “contacts” with spacemen. Since 1952 a dozen or so people have claimed that they have talked to or ridden with the crews of flying saucers. They offer affidavits, pieces of material, photographs, and other bits and pieces of junk as proof. We investigated some of these reports and could find absolutely no fact behind the stories.

We had a hundred or so photos of flying saucers, both stills and movies. Many were fakes—some so expert that it took careful study by photo interpreters to show how the photos had been faked. Some were the crudest of fakes, automobile hub caps thrown into the air, homemade saucers suspended by threads, and just plain retouched negatives. The rest of the still photos had been sent in by well-meaning citizens who couldn’t recognize a light flare of flaw in the negative, or who had chanced to get an excellent photo of a sundog or mirage.

But the movies that were sent into us were different In the first place, it takes an expert with elaborate equipment to fake a movie. We had or knew about four strips of movie film that fell into the “Unknown” category. Two were the cinetheodolite movies that had been taken at White Sands Proving Ground in April and May of 1950, one was the Montana Movie and the last was the Tremonton Movie. These later two had been subjected to thousands of hours of analysis, and since we planned to give the panel of scientists more thorough reports on them on Friday, I skipped over their details and went to the next point I wanted to cover-theories.

Periodically throughout the history of the UFO, people have come up with widely publicized theories to explain all UFO reports. The one that received the most publicity was the one offered by Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard University. Dr. Menzel, writing in Time, Look, and later in his Flying Saucers, claimed that all UFO reports could be explained as various types of light