Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/295

 comment was that no airplane could do what the UFO's were doing.

Balloons came under suspicion, but the lab eliminated them just as quickly by studying the kind of a reflection given off by a balloon—it is a steady reflection since a balloon is spherical. Then, to further scuttle the balloon theory, clusters of balloons are tied together and don’t mill around. Of course, the lone UFO that took off to the east by itself was the biggest argument against balloons.

Newhouse told an intelligence officer from the Western Air Defense Forces that he had held his camera still and let this single UFO fly through the field of view, so the people in the lab measured its angular velocity. Unfortunately there were no clouds in the sky, nor was he able to include any of the ground in the pictures, so our estimates of angular velocity had to be made assuming that the photographer held his camera still. Had the lone UFO been 10 miles away it would have been traveling several thousand miles an hour.

After studying the movies for several weeks, the Air Force photo lab at Wright Field gave up. All they had to say was, “We don’t know what they are but they aren’t airplanes or balloons, and we don’t think they are birds.”

While the lab had been working on the movies at Wright Field, Major Fournet had been talking to the Navy photo people at Anacostia; they thought they had some good ideas on how to analyze the movies, so as soon as we were through with them I sent them to Major Fournet and he took them over to the Navy lab.

The Navy lab spent about two months studying the films and had just completed their analysis. The men who had done the work were on hand to brief the panel of scientists on their analysis after the panel had seen the movies.

We darkened the room and I would imagine that we ran each film ten times before every panel member was satisfied that he had seen and could remember all of the details. We ran both films together so that the men could compare them.

The Navy analysts didn’t use the words “interplanetary spacecraft” when they told of their conclusions, but they did say that the UFO’s were intelligently controlled vehicles and that they