Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/313

 has the interest. There hasn’t been too much about them in the newspapers because of the present Air Force policy of silence, but they’re with us. That the interest is still with us is attested to by the fact that in late 1953 Donald Keyhoe’s book about UFO’s, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, immediately appeared on best seller lists. The book was based on a few of our good UFO reports that were released to the press. To say that the book is factual depends entirely upon how one uses the word. The details of the specific UFO sightings that he credits to the Air Force are factual, but in his interpretations of the incidents he blasts way out into the wild blue yonder.

During the past two years the bulk of the UFO activity has taken place in Europe. I might add here that I have never seen any recent official UFO reports or studies from other countries; all of my information about the European Flap came from friends. But when these friends are in the intelligence branches of the U. S. Air Force, the RAF, and the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the data can be considered at least good.

The European Flap started in the summer of 1953, when reports began to pop up in England and France. Quality-wise these first reports weren’t too good, however. But then, like a few reports that occurred early in the stateside Big Flap of 1952, sightings began to drift in that packed a bit of a jolt. Reports came in that had been made by personal friends of the brass in the British and French Air forces. Then some of the brass saw them. Comers of mouths started down.

In September several radar sites in the London area picked up unidentified targets streaking across the city at altitudes of from 44,000 to 68,000 feet. The crews who saw the targets said, “Not weather,” and some of these crews had been through the bloody Battle of Britain. They knew their radar.

In October the crew of a British European Airways airliner reported that a “strange aerial object” had paced their twin-engined Elizabethan for thirty minutes. Then on November 3, about two-thirty in the afternoon, radar in the London area again picked up targets. This time two Vampire jets were scrambled and the pilots saw a “strange aerial object.” The men at the radar site saw it too; through their telescope it looked like a “flat, white-coloured tennis ball.”