Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/320

 limit their comment to a large laugh followed by an, “It can’t be.” But “It can’t be’s” are dangerous, if for no other reason than history has proved them so.

Not more than a hundred years ago two members of the French Academy of Sciences were unseated because they supported the idea that “stones had fallen from the sky.” Other distinguished members of the French Academy examined the stones, “It can’t be—stones don’t fall from the sky,” or words to that effect. “These are common rocks that have been struck by lightning.”

Today we know that the “stones from the sky” were meteorites.

Not more than fifty years ago Dr. Simon Newcomb, a world-famous astronomer and the first American since Benjamin Franklin to be made an associate of the Institute of France, the hierarchy of world science, said, “It can’t be.” Then he went on to explain that flight without gas bags would require the discovery of some new material or a new force in nature.

And at the same time Rear Admiral George W. Melville, then Chief Engineer for the U. S. Navy, said that attempts to fly heavier-than-air vehicles was absurd.

Just a little over ten years ago there was another “it can’t be.” Ex-President Harry S. Truman recalls in the first volume of The Truman Memoirs what Admiral William D. Leahy, then Chief of Staff to the President, had to say about the atomic bomb. “That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done,” he is quoted as saying. “The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”

Personally, I don’t believe that “it can’t be.” I wouldn’t class myself as a “believer,” exactly, because I’ve seen too many UFO reports that first appeared to be unexplainable fall to pieces when they were thoroughly investigated. But every time I begin to get skeptical I think of the other reports, the many reports made by experienced pilots and radar operators, scientists, and other people who know what they’re looking at. These reports were thoroughly investigated and they are still unknowns. Of these reports, the radar-visual sightings are the most convincing. When a ground radar picks up a UFO target and a ground observer sees a light where the radar target is located, then a jet interceptor is scrambled to intercept the UFO and the pilot also sees the light and gets a radar lock on only to have the UFO almost im-