Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/292

 motion of the reported UFO’s, Fournet told the panel how he and any previous analysis by Project Blue Book had been disregarded and how those reports that could have been caused by any one of the many dozen known objects—balloons, airplanes, astronomical bodies, etc., were sifted out. This sifting took quite a toll, and the study ended up with only ten or twenty reports that fell into the “Unknown” category. Since such critical methods of evaluation had been used, these few reports proved beyond a doubt that the UFO’s were intelligently controlled by persons with brains equal to or far surpassing ours.

The next step in the study, Fournet explained, was to find out where they came from. “Earthlings” were eliminated, leaving the final answer—spacemen.

Both Dewey and I had been somewhat worried about how the panel would react to a study with such definite conclusions. But when he finished his presentation, it was obvious from the tone of the questioning that the men were giving the conclusions serious thought. Fournet’s excellent reputation was well known.

On Friday morning we presented the feature attractions of the session, the Tremonton Movie and the Montana Movie. These two bits of evidence represented the best photos of UFO’s that Project Blue Book had to offer. The scientists knew about them, especially the Tremonton Movie, because since late July they had been the subject of many closed-door conferences. Generals, admirals, and GS-16’s had seen them at “command performances,” and they had been flown to Kelly AFB in Texas to be shown to a conference of intelligence officers from all over the world. Two of the country’s best military photo laboratories, the Air Force lab at Wright Field and the Navy’s lab at Anacostia, Maryland, had spent many hours trying to prove that the UFO’s were balloons, airplanes, or stray light reflections, but they failed—the UFO’s were true unknowns. The possibility that the movie had been faked was considered but quickly rejected because only a Hollywood studio with elaborate equipment could do such a job and the people who filmed the movies didn’t have this kind of equipment.

The Montana Movie had been taken on August 15, 1950, by Nick Mariana, the manager of the Great Falls baseball team. It showed two large bright lights flying across the blue sky in an