Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/34

 heat than light. Out of this avalanche of print and talk, the full, factual, true story of UFO’s has emerged only on rare occasions. The general public, for its interest in UFO’s, has been paid off in misinformation.

Many civilian groups must have sensed this, for while I was chief of Project Blue Book I had dozens of requests to speak on the subject of UFO’s. These civilian requests had to be turned down because of security regulations.

I did give many official briefings, however, behind closed doors, to certain groups associated with the government—all of them upon request.

The subject of UFO’s was added to a regular series of intelligence briefings given to students at the Air Force’s Command and Staff School, and to classes at the Air Force’s Intelligence School.

I gave briefings to the technical staff at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Los Alamos laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was built. The theater where this briefing took place wouldn’t hold all of the people who tried to get in, so the briefing was recorded and replayed many times. The same thing happened at AEC’s Sandia Base, near Albuquerque.

Many groups in the Pentagon and the Office of Naval Research requested UFO briefings. Civilian groups, made up of some of the nation’s top scientists and industrialists, and formed to study special military problems, worked in a UFO briefing. Top Air Force commanders were given periodic briefings.

Every briefing I gave was followed by a discussion that lasted anywhere from one to four hours.

In addition to these, Project Blue Book published a classified monthly report on UFO activity. Requests to be put on distribution for this report were so numerous that the distribution had to be restricted to major Air Force Command Headquarters.

This interest was not caused by any revolutionary information that was revealed in the briefings or reports. It stemmed only from a desire to get the facts about an interesting subject.

Many aspects of the UFO problem were covered in these official briefings. I would give details of many of the better reports we received, our conclusions about them, and how those conclusions were reached. If we had identified a UFO, the audience was told how the identification was made. If we concluded that the answer