Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/289

 needed, and 23 per cent thought that the UFO’s were a much more serious problem than most people recognized.

None of the astronomers, even during a friendly discussion, admitted that he thought the UFO’s could be interplanetary' vehicles. All of those who were interested would only go so far as to say, “We don’t know what they are, but they’re something real.”

During the past few years I have heard it said that if the UFO’s were really “solid objects” our astronomers would have seen them. Our study shed some light on this point—astronomers have seen UFO’s. None of them has ever seen or photographed anything resembling a UFO through his telescope, but 11 per cent of the forty-five men had seen something that they couldn’t explain. Although, technically speaking, these sightings were no better than hundreds of others in our files as far as details were concerned, they were good because of the caliber of the observer. Astronomers know what is in the sky.

It is interesting to note that out of the representative cross section of astronomers, five of them, or 11 per cent, had sighted UFO’s. For a given group of people this is well above average. To check this point, the astronomer who was making our study picked ninety people at random—people he met while traveling— and got them into a conversation about flying saucers. These people were his “control group,” to borrow a term from the psychologists. Although the percentage of people who were interested in UFO’s was higher for the control group than for the group of astronomers, only 41 per cent of the astronomers were interested while 86 per cent of the control group were interested; 11 per cent of the astronomers had seen UFO’s, while only about 1 per cent of the control group had seen one. This seemed to indicate that as a group astronomers see many more UFO’s than the average citizen.

When I finished my briefing, it was too late to start the question-and-answer session, so the first day’s meeting adjourned. But promptly at nine o’clock the next morning the group was again gathered, and from the looks of the list of questions some of them had, they must have been thinking about UFO’s all night.

One of the first questions was about the results of photography taken by the pairs of huge “meteorite patrol” cameras that are