The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects eBook

Edward J. Ruppelt
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 471 pages of information about The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects eBook

Edward J. Ruppelt
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 471 pages of information about The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

Ever since the new Project Grudge had been organized, we hadn’t had to deal with any large-scale publicity about UFO’s.  Occasionally someone would bring in a local item from some newspaper about a UFO sighting, but the sightings never rated more than an inch or two column space.  But on February 19, 1952, the calm was broken by the story of how a huge ball of fire paced two B-29’s in Korea.  The story didn’t start a rash of reports as the story of the first UFO sighting did in June 1947, but it was significant in that it started a slow build-up of publicity that was far to surpass anything in the past.

This Korean sighting also added to the growing official interest in Washington.  Almost every day I was getting one or two telephone calls from some branch of the government, and I was going to Washington at least once every two weeks.  I was beginning to spend as much time telling people what was going on as I was doing anything about it.  The answer was to get somebody in the Directorate of Intelligence in the Pentagon to act as a liaison officer.  I could keep this person informed and he could handle the “branch office” in Washington.  Colonel Dunn bought this idea, and Major Dewey J. Fournet got the additional duty of manager of the Pentagon branch.  In the future all Pentagon inquiries went to Major Fournet, and if he couldn’t answer them he would call me.  The arrangement was excellent because Major Fournet took a very serious interest in UFO’s and could always be counted on to do a good job.

Sometime in February 1952 I had a visit from two Royal Canadian Air Force officers.  For some time, I learned, Canada had been getting her share of UFO reports.  One of the latest ones, and the one that prompted the visit by the RCAF officers, occurred at North Bay, Ontario, about 250 miles north of Buffalo, New York.  On two occasions an orange-red disk had been seen from a new jet fighter base in the area.

The Canadians wanted to know how we operated.  I gave them the details of how we were currently operating and how we hoped to operate in the future, as soon as the procedures that were now in the planning stages could be put into operation.  We agreed to try to set up channels so that we could exchange information and tie in the project they planned to establish with Project Grudge.

Our plans for continuing liaison didn’t materialize, but through other RCAF intelligence officers I found out that their plans for an RCAF-sponsored project failed.  A quasi-official UFO project was set up soon after this, however, and its objective was to use instruments to detect objects coming into the earth’s atmosphere.  In 1954 the project was closed down because during the two years of operation they hadn’t officially detected any UFO’s.  My sources of information stressed the word “officially.”

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The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.