The Secret Ruppelt Tape: Battelle's Hidden UFO Connection/ What was Project Stork?

The Secret Ruppelt Tape: Battelle’s Hidden UFO Connection

UFO Talker returns with the premiere episode of Season 5—and we are beginning the new season with one of our most revealing historical investigations.

Michael Ryan and Christine Scott examine a remarkable recording from a confidential 1952 meeting featuring Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Rather than hearing Ruppelt speaking for the press or writing years later for the public, we hear him discussing the UFO problem directly with a largely military audience while the investigation was still unfolding.

The recording reveals that the Air Force had already rejected several easy explanations for the UFO phenomenon. Ruppelt discusses reliable reports that remained unexplained, concentrations of sightings near sensitive locations such as Los Alamos, White Sands and Oak Ridge, and the reluctance of airline pilots to report unusual objects because they feared ridicule or damage to their careers.

The most important clue comes when another participant asks Ruppelt about the Air Force’s relationship with the Battelle Memorial Institute. That brief exchange leads us into the largely forgotten story of Project STORK, Battelle’s scientific and intelligence work for the Air Force, and the statistical study that eventually became Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14.

We also investigate the mysterious role of Battelle scientist Howard C. Cross and the January 9, 1953 memorandum later found in the files of Project Blue Book consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek. That document shows Cross making recommendations about how the Air Force should investigate unidentified aerial objects—and what Project STORK should disclose to the forthcoming CIA scientific panel.

Was Battelle simply providing independent scientific assistance, or could its long history of classified government research have placed it much deeper inside the UFO mystery than the public realizes? There is no proof that Battelle was deliberately used to conceal UFO information, but its involvement raises important questions about private contractors, missing records and investigations conducted beyond the reach of the original Project Blue Book office.

This Season 5 premiere also includes UFO news, Canadian civil-aviation anomaly reports from CADORS, an important announcement about UFO Talker coming to 101.3 FM CJAI Island Radio, and details about the podcast’s new every-other-Wednesday release schedule.

The entire fifth season of UFO Talker is dedicated to the memory of Michael’s journalism professor and mentor, Frank Thayer. The episode also remembers respected Canadian UFO researcher Harry Tokarz.  Read Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 here   The Anomalous Coalition is here.  The Link for the UFO Experiencer meetup in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia is here. 

Listen to UFO Talker every  Saturday night at 10:00 p.m. on 101.3 FM CJAI Island Radio.

Visit: https://www.ufotalker.ca
Email: ufotalker@bell.net
YouTube: Search UFO Talker Network

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:04

You are listening to the UFO Talker Podcast. Come with us as we explore UFOs from the past and the present. With insightful discussions, interviews, and reviews, we will add our voice to the mysteries that have been seen in our skies and oceans for all of human history. Now, here's our host, Michael Ryan.

SPEAKER_03 0:28

Welcome everybody to the podcast. This is season five, episode two, coming to you from Studio 7H, overlooking the beautiful Trent River here in Ontario, Canada.

SPEAKER_04 0:41

And I'm Christine Scott coming to you from Studio 9H in the beautiful warehouse district in Regina, Saskatchewan.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

And on today's show, we examine a remarkable 1952 audio recording of Project Blue Book Chief Captain Edward J. Rapelt, and we uncover the little known role of Battel Memorial Institute in the U.S. Air Force's UFO investigations. Well, Christine, here we are back in season five. The sound of the coffee pouring, the smell of the cherry bomb coffee in the air. And I've got a large cup here. Fall is in the air here.

SPEAKER_04 1:28

It sure is. I've been raking. As I told you this morning, I get up and I rake.

SPEAKER_03 1:34

I know, I know. Raking. That's a lot of people wouldn't know what that means, but we have uh trees that change colors, believe it or not, and they shed all their leaves, which does cause a lot of raking. But we're back, season five. Who who would have thunk it so many years ago? And uh we're back from the summer. You'll have to forgive us if we're a bit rusty. I know I'm a bit rusty because I thought I have a show when I woke up. Oh, yeah, I've got that show. But um, we have a juicy, juicy show today. I read it at the top there, and it's just really interesting stuff that I didn't know that until I looked into it. Um really good, really good. But we'll get into that a uh a bit later. We have a lot of internal business to take care of after this uh being this taking the summer off. So one thing we want to talk about is a fairly big change to UFO Talker. So after the last four seasons, uh we have released a new episode every Wednesday religiously at 3 a.m. in the Eastern time zone. And what we have decided to do is cut that back a little bit. So we are now going to release a new show every other Wednesday. So today will be the first true show, and then next week there'll be nothing, and then the show the Wednesday after that there'll be a new show, and so on. And why we have done this is for a few reasons. One of which is it's a lot of work. It's uh a great, very time consuming. And uh I felt last season, not that any of those shows were bad, but I felt I was always on the cusp of uh not being able to keep it to the standard that the listeners have come to expect. So I thought this would relieve a little bit of pressure uh in doing that. And also this leads us into the next thing, and people say, Well, you should cut that back. So in the summer, um we uh posted our first YouTube videos, and what started out as just a summer replacement show so that people would not miss us on uh pr on UFO Talker. We started a show on YouTube called That Human Said What? And that's the way you have to say it. You can't read it any other way. And I believe there's four or five episodes on YouTube right now, and also we have a mini uh UFO documentary up there, and there's another one about to come out shortly, and you can find those on YouTube if you search UFO Talker Network, and I advise you to go do that and uh listen to that human said what it's definitely different than UFO Talker, it covers a lot of the same uh topics, just slightly differently, and I think a lot more uh conversational. Wouldn't you say that, Christine?

SPEAKER_04 4:54

Yeah, yeah. And we also had our special guest, uh Al helping us out on a few of them.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

I know, I know. I and I'm gonna say right here and now that I think Al will be on every episode of That Human Said What?

SPEAKER_04 5:08

I hope so. We sure have a lot of fun with those.

SPEAKER_03 5:11

Yes, yeah, we've we've lucked out again because the three of us do have, I think, a chemistry, and uh it's very interesting. I I really enjoy um doing them. And also, if that wasn't enough news, ladies and gentlemen, uh our podcast is about to be carried on an FM radio station.

SPEAKER_04 5:36

Yeah. Uh or insyndication, baby.

SPEAKER_03 5:39

Yeah, the cool factor has just gone way up.

SPEAKER_04 5:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:43

And so every Saturday uh night at 10 p.m. here in kind of southeastern Ontario, we are going to be heard on CJAI 101.3 FM, and that's mainly kind of in the Kingston, Napanee, uh, Ontario region. But that is so cool, and we are looking forward to hearing from lots of people in that area with their uh UFO stories for sure. So, Christine, there's also been um a little bit of sad news over the summer. Um, I've lost two people that I definitely want to mention. On May 29th, uh Harry Tokars passed away. Now, Harry Tokars, along with Larry Fenwick and uh Joseph Muscat, they founded QForn, which stands for the Canadian UFO Research Network, and they were very, very big in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They did a lot of excellent, excellent, outstand, outstanding research in mainly in Ontario in those years. And oddly enough, in my college days, about 500 million years ago, I had a uh college-based UFO TV show, and I interviewed these three gentlemen way back then, and uh over the years I lost touch with them. But uh Harry Tokars, I actually reconnected with about two or three years ago, and we've had many phone calls, lots and lots of emails over that time. Uh, he's a wealth of unbelievable UFO, Canadian UFO knowledge, and also specifically uh UFOs in Ontario. And I literally begged him many times to come on the show because um I said it in a respectful way, but I said, you know, once you guys are gone, this a lot of this information will be lost forever. And uh I almost got him on, but he he just wouldn't. He'd been in a bad uh uh bicycle car accident about five years ago, and he had a lot of uh medical issues that he felt he wouldn't be able to be himself on a on a talk show. But I just wanted to mention him, that's a terrible loss. And also I have mentioned this before, especially on the uh UFO Talker Facebook page. I lost my journalism professor and mentor, Frank Thayer. He passed away on June 28th. And wow, that really hit me in a way I I didn't think so. It's one of those people you think will always be there. He was beyond great in college on many, many levels, and I was actually able to connect up with Frank in the last uh couple of years, and he just right where we left off, he started up, you know, being a mentor again and knowing exactly who I was. Now I always wondered if that could have been true because he had thousands and thousands of students over the years, and uh, but he talked as if he remembered. Be but anyways, it was good to feel that way. But um, I deeply uh miss him. I'll talk about him a little bit later in the show as well. So now we're gonna do some UFO shows uh and conferences. There's a couple of really good ones here. There's gonna be a UFO experiencer meetup at the Margaret Henniger Public Library in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia on October 17th. And that will be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Uh it's very, very good. I'm gonna put a link, of course, to that in our uh show notes. And also on Sunday, October 4th, the Anomalous Coalition is presenting a live stream event that features uh physicist Dr. Jim Salaga, Paul Heineck, and is hosted by Leslie Keene.

SPEAKER_08 9:59

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 9:59

Yeah, yeah, that'll be interesting. Now the group is going to talk about experiencers, interdimensionals, and other high strangeness. Um, and definitely I'll be putting a link to this in the show notes. It didn't mention anything about a price. I couldn't find out whether this was free or not, but uh it's only online, so uh you'll be able to see it from anywhere in the world. But uh just check it out to be sure. I couldn't find a price, I couldn't find anything about money, but it would be great if it was free. Because uh definitely it's worth listening to Leslie Keene and Paul Heineck. I'm not I'm not sure I'm not familiar with uh Jim Salaga, but um I'm sure it will be great. And of course, what UFO talker episode would be complete without some UFO news? And I believe you have some news, Christine.

SPEAKER_04 10:54

We have some interesting news coming out of Tehran. And uh there's a lot of stuff, as we all know, going on in the Middle East right now. And Tehran uh was the site of a big 1976 UFO sighting. And as the headline puts it, 50 years after the 1976 UFO sighting, another another mystery object hovers over Tehran. Uh videos were recorded on September 20th show what appears to be a low-flying object moving or hovering in the night sky. Multiple videos showed a mysterious object with bright multicolored lights hovering over Tehran. Uh they've surfaced on social media and they led to all kinds of speculation. Videos were reportedly recorded September 20th to show what appears to be a low-flying object moving in the night sky. A post on the social media platform X claimed the sighting took place near the Azadegan Expressway in Tehran. There's no information yet about the object's size, location, altitude, speed. Uh, the Iranian authorities have not issued any statement identifying the object or treating it as a threat. But what's really interesting is, of course, we all know what's going on. There's heightened tensions between Iran, the United States, and Israel. And people are then, people are wondering, what could these lights be? Are they, is it a military drone? Is it multiple drones flying together? People say, are the lights come from a kite or another object being viewed from a distance? But the interesting thing is the date, because they were filmed September 20th. Iran and the U.S. exchanged fresh warnings on September 20th as tensions soared in the region. Iran's military warned it could retaliate against U.S. bases and American interests in the region if the country came under attack, according to Reuters. Um, and the U.S. State Department has also warned travelers about possible flight cancellations, airspace closures, and other disruptions in the region. So what is it? Is it military? Are they drones? But the the pr all sides of the press have been pretty transparent about military action.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

It's funny. I I've watched the video. Yeah. It doesn't look like your typical UFO video because it's a lot, it looks like a lot of Christmas tree lights has that kind of look. It it just I don't I don't of course I don't know what it was, but it kind of looks like it might be some kind of odd military drone or some kind of psychological warfare unit, or it's hard to say what it is, right? It's yeah, it's it's kind of interesting. Uh oddly enough, in the 50s, that whole area, there was a lot of UFO reports that came from that area in the 50s. It's definitely an area rich with these orb sightings recently by the military. Uh it's it's definitely unique and kind of makes you think, that's for sure. Now it's the that part of the show where we give out a shout-out to a small town or city where we have listeners. And today's city we have picked because it is where Frank Thayer lived. And so he lived for many of the last years of his life in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and the population is 111,385 people. It's in southern New Mexico, close to the Mexican uh border, and it is surrounded by lots of mountains, including the uh Donna Anna Mountains and the Oregon Mountains. And of course, as normal, I haven't done this for a while, but I've watched a few videos, and boy, it is a nice place, and they have a lot of nice stats. It just looks like a great place to live. It's the mountains are in the background. It looks um definitely uh spectacular.

SPEAKER_04 15:04

Has this is this the first New Mexico town we've done?

SPEAKER_03 15:07

I think we may have done one other, but it's not many, I know that.

SPEAKER_04 15:12

But you know why this one is also cut out for UFO Talker?

SPEAKER_03 15:16

I think so, but you tell us.

SPEAKER_04 15:18

The city's major employer is the federal government at White Sands Test Facility and White Sands Missile Range. And then Spaceport America has corporate offices in Las Cruces, 89 kilometers to the north. It has completed several successful crewed suborbital flights, and the city is also the headquarters for Virgin Galactic. Wow. Yeah, didn't know that. I didn't either. The world's first company to offer suborbital spaceflights. And of course, it's the home of New Mexico State University.

SPEAKER_03 15:53

Yes, yes. So that's Frank uh taught there.

SPEAKER_04 15:56

There was, well, Pat Garrett, as in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, uh had something to do there. There's supposed to be a chili festival, supposed to be a lot about chilies. I thought I found reference to that, but yes, green chili.

SPEAKER_03 16:09

Yeah, it's a big, big thing there.

SPEAKER_04 16:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:12

Um, also one of the Apollo astronauts, he was either from there or he lived there. I think it was Frank Gorman. Frank Gorman. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 16:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:20

Yeah, a lot of people a lot of authors.

SPEAKER_04 16:22

Oh, and Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, used to live there.

SPEAKER_03 16:27

Yeah. And there is um many authors. Now, unfortunately, none of them I have read. One of them you may know, it's a woman called Patricia Ryan. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:41

No, she she's a mystery novelist. And the playwright Mark Metoff, who wrote Children of a Lesser God, is from there, but they pumped out a lot of authors.

SPEAKER_03 16:53

Yeah, yeah. Well, it looks beautiful, so it'd be a great place to sit and contemplate our next novel, that's for sure. And of course, it's time to mention the bakery. Food. What have you listeners done this long without listening to a new bakery?

SPEAKER_04 17:14

That's right.

SPEAKER_03 17:15

And so this bakery is called, appropriately enough, the Indulgence Bakery and Cafe. And once again, just mouthwatering. Uh there's two things I'm going to point out. They make uh an Italian cream cake, which is dark chocolate cake filled with Italian cream cheese frosting, and also frosted with dark chocolate ganache and topped with Italian cream.

SPEAKER_04 17:45

Oh, their cakes look amazing.

SPEAKER_03 17:48

I know. And then they do a whole ton of uh cheesecakes, and the two I picked out, I mean, there's they have many, many, but the two I picked it out, they have uh mocha pecan cheesecake, and they have raspberry amaretto cheesecake.

unknown 18:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:10

Now, as I mentioned earlier, my journalism professor and mentor passed away this summer, Frank Thayer. He has written several books over the years, but his last book was interesting for us, and it was just released, I believe, a couple months ago. It came to earth at Aztec, New Mexico, revealed the recovery of a UFO. And that book was written by Scott Ramsay, Suzanne Ramsey, and Frank Thayer. It is the third and final book on the Aztec incident, which was covered by over 30 years of investigation. Now I know there's a lot of controversy about the Aztec uh UFO crash. All I can say, if Frank really believed it, I had conversations with him about it, and I can tell you from seeing him almost every day for two years in journalism class, he was a major stickler for facts. Um I cannot believe he would be part of something that he didn't believe he found enough evidence to substantiate the claims, but I know it's very controversial. Now, I would just like to say he was an amazing teacher and he affected the lives of so many people. And I'm I'm gonna dedicate all of season five to his memory.

SPEAKER_04 19:35

Oh, that's lovely.

SPEAKER_03 19:37

And we will be right back after this message.

SPEAKER_05 19:44

What is it to look for the truth when others find it easier to look away? When all is said and done, who will we thank for writing the history of unidentified flying objects? It hasn't been governments or institutions, it has mainly been individuals that have done the heavy lifting of ufology. Names like Dr. James McDonald, Dr. J. Alan Heinek, Anne Druffel, John E. Mack, Stanton Friedman, and Dr. Richard F. Haynes, and thousands and thousands of others whose names had been lost to time. For many, there was no fame, no adulation, and little or no monetary reward. And yet they kept on giving their time and large parts of their lives to help find the answer. Are we alone in the universe? So here's to all of those for their hard work over many decades collecting pieces of the puzzle of one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Your investigations will not have been in vain. Sometimes the reward is in and of itself.

SPEAKER_03 21:03

So, Christine, here we are with our first full show of UFO Talker, and we have picked a juicy, juicy topic. Um now, also a tip of the hut because Frank Thayer, he always taught me to look for the small clues, those things that people say or have written that don't seem like much at all, and you just kind of look into them, you pull that keep pulling that thread till you maybe you find something or find nothing. But he said that's how you find the big stories. So when I was listening to the audio tape of uh Captain Edward J. Rapelt, um something hit me, and he did this in front of uh an audience. They didn't make it totally clear who the audience was, but I remember uh people Would ask uh uh rappelt questions, and one of the people that would ask a question, he was referred to as a colonel. So I have to think that this was probably a lot of military men in this. And it was also a confidential meeting. It's they said it wasn't top secret, but confidential. So none of this was going on to the newspapers or on books or anything like that. But here's the part that jumped out at me. And I think this was the colonel that said this. Um and it was this sentence he said uh I'm taking it out of context, so this won't this first line won't mean anything, but he said, I mean, we're just left without any answers. One point that was not brought out is our relationship with Battel. And then Rapelt said, Oh yes, I forgot to mention the Patel Memorial Institute. They're one of the contractors who do work for us and they're they're always silent. So that was just a few sentences that really jumped out at me, and I thought, well, this is interesting, because I sadly I have to admit, I've never heard of them before.

SPEAKER_04 23:19

Nor did I.

SPEAKER_03 23:20

That's right. And the more and more we pulled that thread back, wow, how did we miss them all these years, right? Because they were heavily entrenched in a lot of secret work for the US government, not only on UFOs, but just every kind of national security thing you can think of, and also since uh the late 30s. So, yeah, there's been a connection there for a long, long time. Um, I believe the company started in the 20s, I think.

SPEAKER_04 23:58

Uh, Battel Memorial Institute is the world's largest independent, nonprofit, applied science and technology development organization headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, founded in 1929 in Columbus, Ohio, through a request from industrialist Gordon Battel and his mother Annie Battell, uh, currently employs 22,000 people across more than 130 locations worldwide. Core Focus conducts contract research and development, RD, across national security, health and life sciences, energy environment, and critical infrastructure. Now, the major achievements, Xerography, pioneered early development that led to commercial photocopying and the creation of Xerox. They created the UPC barcode. Wartime innovations contributed to tank armor improvements during World War II and uranium processing for the Manhattan Project.

SPEAKER_03 25:00

Yes, yes. So that that caught my attention. And they said uh in the they had 400 employees working in the Manhattan Project, and at the end of the war, they won a medal. Yeah, the company won a medal for their work in that, and I thought, wow, the most important company that you never heard of. And also, which really struck me is it said it's a nonprofit organization.

SPEAKER_04 25:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:32

It's very odd.

SPEAKER_04 25:33

And yet they manage or co-manage multiple U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Homeland Security and National Labs.

SPEAKER_09 25:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 25:43

They oversee tens of thousands of additional lab personnel, facilities like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which they manage through joint ventures. And I mean, on a side note, apparently they also help develop automotive cruise control and early digital optical disc recording.

SPEAKER_03 26:04

I know they have their hands in so many things. And uh like I'm embarrassed to say I had never heard of this uh organization before.

SPEAKER_04 26:17

But yeah, that's those are all stealth, like stealth achievements.

SPEAKER_03 26:21

Yes, yes. Now we're also we're gonna come back to them because trust me, it gets juicier than that, but definitely I wanted to mention something about uh Captain uh Edward J. Rapelt, and as I'd mentioned on the show uh previously, uh probably many times, is his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. It was the first book I ever read about UFOs, and it totally captured my imagination, an extremely well-written book, and I believe the book is still relevant today. And I I tell people that who are getting into learning about UFOs, you have to read this book, and then they say, Oh, like it's really old, and I said, Forget about that part. Like, this is building the foundation of everything that is going to uh come afterwards.

SPEAKER_04 27:19

And he he actually is credited with coining the term unidentified flying object.

SPEAKER_09 27:25

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:26

They used to use flying saucer and flying disc because the military thought them to be uh misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. Uh for this reason, the military per military prefers the more general, if less colorful name unidentified flying objects, UFO, but they used to pronounce it UFO.

SPEAKER_03 27:49

Now, something that um really also really hit me is the book uh uh it was to really well written. They uh they say he had a a ghost writer as well, but it just had a good voice. It was very neutral, organized, a lot of information. It it it didn't have an agenda. It was really really taking you behind the scenes of uh Project Blue Book, which was really extraordinary back in in that era for sure. And uh I had seen repelt on a couple of clips of TV shows he had been on in the 50s, but listening to him for almost an hour on this audio tape, which just came out in the uh sixth uh uh download of UFO instrument on the uh war.gov UFO site, I really felt wow. He is the person I've always thought he was. He is very scientific, he's very concise, he's to the point. It doesn't feel like he has an agenda. He's not trying to convince you one way or the other. It's like he's on a journey to find out what these are. And he he kind of went out of his way to say, I have I'm not saying these are extraterrestrial or these are from these are from Mars or anything. We don't know what they are. So uh we're definitely trying to find out.

SPEAKER_04 29:28

And yeah, he definitely uh it was so cool to see the the clip. I mean it's so cool to see it. But the one thing comes through is his honesty is like we don't know, we don't have a clue.

SPEAKER_03 29:42

Yeah. So here's another thing that is very, very confusing, right? So this uh meeting took place in uh Boston in uh 1952, I believe it was. And he it was a confidential meeting, so everything everyone was saying in this meeting, it wasn't going to the press, it wasn't gonna be in a book, none of that stuff. This was like I believe they were all military men, but they were all talking about this phenomenon that was in the headlines all the time. And here's something which a lot of other people have just kind of glossed over because you always read these uh books and people on podcasts saying, you know, the US military had this, they did this, they had aliens, they had crashed uh uh UFOs. But when you're hearing these people talk in this confidential meeting, the thing that really comes through is that they didn't know what they were. And it makes you pause because you think so it is possible there was another layer of secrecy that uh Captain Rapelt didn't know, or any of the people in this uh meeting. But it's odd that none of them ha talked like, oh, you know, Roswell, like you know, you know we have aliens in Area 51. Like no one said anything like that. And this was a confidential meeting, so it's not like they were going on record for the press or anything like that. There was no hint of anything other than we legitimately don't know what these things are, and that is quite puzzling and a little bit confusing. It just makes you think that for all of these other things to be true, like you know, if there was a crashed vehicle at Roswell or many of these other spots and there are captured aliens, for any of that to be true, then it has to be very, very secret um in a way that these gentlemen didn't didn't even have an inkling of, which is definitely something to ponder, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_04 32:25

Well, and you know what Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. You know, sometimes you know, you you see a bunch of guys sitting around going, We don't know, we don't have any idea. Um, you know, which which is the antithesis of conspiracy. Uh but you know, like you say, this is a confidential meeting, not a what uh what was the distinction? This is a confidential meeting, not a classified meeting.

SPEAKER_03 32:55

Yeah, so they they definitely um this research I did it came up and it said this definitely wasn't a top secret meeting.

SPEAKER_04 33:04

That's it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:05

But it was a confidential meeting. So definitely whatever you're saying, it's not being broadcast or uh, you know, it's not gonna be in the newspapers the next day, that kind of thing. So how we are going to discuss this audio tape is we have divided it into four sections. So I know a lot of other UFO podcasts have played the entire 65-minute uh recording, and you can you can listen to that on the uh uh war.gov UFO site if you if you would like to do that part. And it is interesting, so I would recommend listening to the entire uh thing. And you can listen to it and also download a full transcript. But for our purposes, we have picked uh four segments which we are gonna focus in on and the last segment, definitely the juiciest, wow, stuff that I think it could be another two or three episodes for sure. Um so part one, or what we're gonna call section one, is um what we're gonna call the Air Force Changes Its Mind. And we are gonna play that now, and we'll be right back after you listen to this.

SPEAKER_02 35:02

They flared up for about oh spasmodically for about two years, and then the things uh died down to a certain extent. Um the Air Force took over this project soon after the first sighting because the public demanded an explanation uh of these objects. In 19 in August of 1949, uh the Air Force came out with a a report, supposedly a final report on this, uh, where they reached a few conclusions. Now they had some uh uh uh specialists in certain fields working on this problem, and you might be interested in knowing who they were. There's a Dr. A.J. Heine, an astronomer at Ohio State, Dr. G. Valley of a scientific advisory board, a Dr. Fitz of the Aeromedical Lab, I believe he was a psychologist, the Rand Corporation Air Weather Service, uh, Cambridge Field Station, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Weather Bureau. All those people took the reports, I believe they had about 300 reports at that time. They took the reports and read them over, came up with their conclusions. Uh while their conclusions varied to a certain extent, uh they all agreed that they didn't know exactly what they were. However, they were obviously no direct threat to the United States, so they uh didn't pay too much more attention to them. Uh the Air Force came up with uh several conclusions in that report. One of them was that it was a mild case of uh war of mass hysteria due to uh we might say war and errors, the war just over. Uh some of them were due to psychopathical uh people or nuts, something like that, trying to create an excitement or get publicity or pure due to pure hoaxes. And the other one was that they were due to misinterpretation of conventional objects. Well, since that time, uh several years has passed, we've been able to go back and review these conclusions a little bit. We've been able to drop out all except the misinterpretation of conventional objects. Uh going back, we have approximately 800 cases now on record, and only about 2% of those are actual hoaxes or uh psychopathological people who just don't know what they see. Uh, the the uh misinterpretation of known objects is still, of course, a large factor. I mean, that that could possibly account for all of them. However, it's a little bit doubtful. Uh, we've gone through these reports and come up with the fact that about 20% are very good reports uh offered by very reliable people, and there just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn. Uh the uh mass hysteria factor has gone out because the newspapers haven't played this up for the last approximately three years. There's uh occasional flurries, but nothing to get excited about at all, and still reports continue to come in. Uh we dropped this project in uh in 1949, as I said, as a special project and using this information as regular uh intelligence material since that time. Uh we've uh decided, or about last October, we decided there possibly was enough material now to reopen this case. So we uh the center appointed a permanent project engineer, which I'm the project engineer, and uh we reviewed all this stuff. We took all the cases that we had, reworked them, filed them all in in a uh neat file so we could tell what we had. We went through and cross-indexed all the material so that we could get an idea of the different factors that were involved in these reports. Um we came up with uh some results. I won't say they're outstanding results, but we don't know what the results mean. But uh unlucky, I didn't realize we're gonna have such a large audience here, so we didn't bring these slides along. I don't know whether any of you in the back of the room see this print. Uh I'll pass it around and you can get an idea. This is a plot of the sightings in the United States. Now, this does not include the uh we have sightings outside the United States, but we're not too worried about those at the present time. We're more interested in the United States. Uh I'll explain this a little bit to you since you can't see it. Uh we have certain areas of the United States where there are concentrations. Um in Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, there are concentrations. Now, this is possibly due to two things. One of them is the fact that the people in that area knew that all the activity in this project was taking place in that area, and consequently they were they were doing a little bit more reporting. Another thing is of all the uh experimental flying was being done around right field, and we still have a lot of trouble with that. People call in and say, I just saw a great big light go over 5,000 miles an hour, and it turns over it's a turns out it's an airplane carrying a flare, something like that. So we've disregarded that concentration. However, uh, around all the ports in the United States, San Francisco, Los Angeles, uh, the coastal area around New York City and New Orleans, there's concentrations. Around Los Alamos and the Albuquerque area, there's concentrations. Around White Sands, there's concentrations, and down here at Camp Hood, Texas. Now, this Camphood, Texas uh concentration was due to an outbreak of odd lights about two years ago, and they never did determine exactly what the lights were. Uh there they were a special uh, we might say a special type of report that uh haven't occurred again, and we haven't paid too much attention to that. But the ones around uh Oak Ridge and the ones around Albuquerque uh may possibly uh mean something we don't know. The rest of the reports are pretty well scattered out around the United States. The uh, if you plot these reports up by years, they started in the West Coast, up around in the north uh west, around Washington, Oregon, Idaho, in 1947. The next year they were they tended to be on the East Coast to a certain extent, and from then on they were just spread out all the United States. There was no no pattern.

SPEAKER_03 41:11

So that was our first listen to Captain Edward J. Rapelt, unvarnished, not for a TV audience. Uh very cool, controlled, definitely in command. He sounds very educated. And one thing he did for sure is he made it clear that when he was using the word unexplained, he did not mean extraterrestrial. And it kind of just meant that his investigations could not establish a s a satisfactory conventional explanation for a lot of these sightings.

SPEAKER_04 41:52

Yeah, and and the nice thing, as I keep saying, in in everything he says, it's we don't know. He said, you know, the concentrations of UFOs might mean something. He just doesn't know what produced them. He just he doesn't know. Um and it's interesting how he uh, you know, talking about previously, uh, he describes earlier the Air Force thought reports resulted from mass hysteria or delusion and hoaxes or might misidentification. And then he says, no, we got rid of that because only about 2% of the reports were hoaxes, and that roughly 20% of them were good reports for which investigators had no conclusion. Um, you know, and those are significant numbers.

SPEAKER_03 42:45

Yes, I believe I don't have the exact number, but he's talking about a sample of I think it was either 3,800 or 4,000 uh cases that they had looked into.

SPEAKER_08 42:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:59

And so that is a bit amazing, this 20% figure that they could not come up with, and also that they had done a lot of um geographical plotting, and a lot of these sightings were around Los Alamos and White Sands and Oak Ridge. And he's in the uh his speech there, he g it said this added a national security dimension because you know these sites are associated with atomic weapons, missile testing, and advanced uh military research.

SPEAKER_04 43:35

Yeah. And percentages in the talk are they're approximate, they refer to the case population available at the moment in 1952. So just remember it's the statistic for that year, which wouldn't be percentages for later. And uh he would sense from him, there's a change in method and attitude, uh, saying this really needs to be classified and studied. Not a declaration at no time does he say UFOs or spacecraft.

SPEAKER_03 44:05

That's right. He I think like his book, he always remains a little bit cautious about what he is explaining or or talking about.

SPEAKER_04 44:15

And cautious, not dismissive.

SPEAKER_03 44:18

That's right. That's very important. He was uh you can tell by all these things he said, um he never uh dismissed a witness. He never ridiculed them or or anything like that.

SPEAKER_04 44:34

Yeah. And I mean if it was then why did the Air Force you know retain this group of reports and he wanted to know why they were clustered around sensitive installations. What does this mean? That's that's a fundamental thing I think we're getting here. What is this and what does it mean?

SPEAKER_03 44:52

Also something uh they mentioned uh and this keep in mind this is in 1952 that they he was giving this speech and I thought wow, how little things have changed in all those years. So this is uh quote directly from the speech. He said, However, there was no obvious uh direct threat to the United States. So they didn't pay too much attention uh to whatever they were. And so that has not really changed. I I in a lot of my research over the years, that is what I have found that you know, you'll see, well, this thing was hovering over a nuclear uh testing site, but no one got too excited. Like, oh well it left. You know, and then you know, like all those UFOs that went to like m uh Malstrom missile base and in the 60s, and they shut down all the nukes. These are like incredible events, but you know, I guess they were investigated and life rolled on. Like it it didn't seem to get anybody too worried, which always made me uh really w think. Okay, so now we're gonna do section two, and this isn't something that we're gonna call performance and reporting stigma. And so let's listen to that now.

SPEAKER_02 46:17

In these two years, 47 and 48, there was a lot of newspaper publicity. However, in 49, 50, and 51 there was very little newspaper publicity, and the reports from 49, 50, and 51 are mostly from military sources. The civilians have dropped out because possibly they didn't know where to report this stuff or they weren't interested in it. The Air Force came out and said that there was nothing to it, so they just quit making reports. However, military has continued to make reports. I should say military and a few airlines pilots are covering these two years. We've taken the uh reported shapes. We have a lot of questions. People say, Well, what are people reporting? So we've broken it down into shapes. Uh in this segment here, there were no shapes reported. Somebody just called in and wrote a letter and said, I saw something, so we've had to disregard it. Uh this segment right here represents uh some type of an astronomical body. I mean, you could say it was either a bright light in the sky or a streak of light that could have been a meteor. We've lumped all those together. In this section are discs or spherical-shaped objects. Uh we've lumped those together because it's uh we don't believe that people can tell if they're seeing a disc or a sphere, unless they should happen to see it both in the bottom view and edge wise to determine it's a uh disk. So we've lumped those all together. Uh some of these could be balloons. I mean, there's no doubt about that, that they could be weather balloons. However, due to uh or contrary to popular opinion, these things they are not, are definitely not all balloons. Uh these are shapes of just reported as oval shapes. It's difficult to tell what they are. Miscellaneous is almost anything. Uh vapor trails probably actually were vapor trails of aircraft. There's one small segment in here, which is only six-tenths of one percent of the all 800 reports, and that is uh reports of groups of lights going through the sky. Now we've had quite a bit of difficulty with those because the reports are usually from pretty good sources, and they'll see uh, oh, anywhere from uh six to twenty lights in a formation going streaking across the sky. Well, it's almost impossible that that would uh that you would find six meteors together. I I understand it's uh possible to see two of them together that it would appear to be in formation, but no more than that. Uh certain percentage, one percent, are uh uh reported to be balloons. Now these are balloons that we've not been able to establish the origin. In other words, we don't uh they're just balloons floating over the United States, and they're probably uh meteorological balloons that have gotten loose from some station and haven't burst when they were supposed to. Um two and a half percent resemble actual aircraft. We've had quite a bit of discussion as to whether or not these objects could possibly be some highly developed aircraft type that the Soviets have. We've almost uh been able to throw that out because a small percentage of reports that even mention any shape uh due to aircraft that would resemble aircraft. This percentage here are uh reported to be rockets or cigar-shaped objects. Now, once again, we've gone into that uh quite thoroughly and have found that uh and it's we use common knowledge that any bright light traveling through the air will burn an image uh in your eye and will uh you'll have some persistence there and it will appear to be elongated when actually it's just a round source of light. Well, that's some of the uh shapes that we've had. Now, down in getting back to this disc or spherical-shaped objects, uh these things are are always silent. I mean, if if we want to assume that this object we're dealing with is a disc-shaped thing, these are always silent and they're usually highly maneuverable. Although lately uh the reports that have been coming in uh have neglected to put this 90-degree turn business in. They just go over uh at a great rate of speed. But uh the fact that they're silent is uh quite interesting because we uh we have no knowledge of any type of power plant that would uh that would be completely silent. Now these are the types of people that send in our reports. This segment here are civilians, and most of these reports came in when the project was first initiated back in 1947 and 48. This black segment here uh are reports from military sources, and they are we've uh put them in as just uh ground officers, not usually not flying officers, or at least the reports are not made from the air. We have a small segment here of radar returns that we've been unable to explain. Uh this section right here are uh reports from civilian pilots uh who were airborne at the time of the sighting. This segment in here, especially, is the one that we're very interested in. There are reports from airline pilots, from tower operators, uh, and balloon observers. Now, these balloon observers are normally uh people like the General Mills crews that launch these high-altitude balloons. And here we have technically trained personnel such as scientists, engineers, and so forth. This uh segment, as I said, are the ones that we're very much interested in. Now, airline pilots are uh we consider very reliable because they're very uh well, they don't like to stick their neck out and make one of these reports unless they're absolutely sure they saw something. They received some very unfavorable favorable publicity during this last uh rash of reports, or the first, I should say, in 47 and 48 and 80, absolutely refuse to give us reports unless they're completely sold that they saw something. Uh well I've talked to quite a few of the pilots, and one of them made the statement that if he looked out his window and saw a V-2 rocket or something like that flying wingtip to wingtip with him over Spokane, uh he wouldn't tell anybody about it. I mean, he'd never report it to the Air Force because, or to anybody because they just say he was crazy and probably grounding. So that's the big difficulty we have in getting reports from airline pilots. We do hear through the grapevine that they see an awful lot of odd things uh and that they don't report, especially over in uh the Near East, Iran and Middle East, I should say, Iran, Palestine, Egypt, and those runs. Now uh we haven't been able to pin that down as fact. That's just a rumor that we've uh picked up in in talking to other airline pilots who've heard other airline pilots say that, but we've never been able to pin it down. However, it would be uh very interesting to find out, and we're making attempts, although we've run up against a lot of trouble because I said the pilots just don't want publicity and they won't make those reports. Uh this segment in here has been reported by Air Force pilots and their aerial sightings. A lot of these have been balloons. Uh we've had a lot of trouble with the balloons in it. Uh a pilot meeting a balloon in the air isn't familiar with what that balloon's going to do. I mean, he's uh familiar with meeting another airplane, and he's already made up his mind as to what the rate of closure should be and different things like that. He'll usually assume that the uh when he meets a balloon that it's instead of a balloon, it's some object about 30 or 40 feet in diameter, and uh, judging the rate of closure, he assumes it's going at a very terrific speed. But we've been able in some cases to actually show uh how that pilot was misled and that it was actually a balloon. However, we don't we don't try to say that everything uh was a balloon. In other words, if a balloon was launched in the area, we we try to definitely pin that down. And we can get the time of launch of the balloon, the rate of ascent, the winds aloft, we can plot out the path of that balloon and plot out the pilot's path and show uh by various lines of sight uh how he actually did see the balloon. Uh in the past, it's been a practice to say, well, there was a balloon launch within 100 miles, consequently, the pilot must have seen the balloon. We don't want to try that because it's uh well, we just want to have more proof before we say that it's a balloon. And the Air Force has gotten into a lot of trouble in the past by uh very loosely tying up these balloons with the sightings. We have some photographs of these objects that uh we we have quite a few photographs, I should say. A lot of them are definitely either hoaxes or else they're uh flaws in the negative, and the people that have found this print have looked at it and said, I took a picture of the sky and I didn't see this flying saucer, although here's a picture of it, and they'll send it in to us. Uh it's not too difficult to uh examine the emotion through a microscope and find out that it that the image is due to a uh an imperfection in the negative. However, we have a few photographs that are very difficult to evaluate. This is one of them right here. It was taken in Phoenix, Arizona on the 7th of July 1947. Um this has been hashed around quite a bit, and there's a little bit of doubt as to the uh whether or not this was purposely faked, but we've never been able to prove it. This uh picture is probably the most interesting one that we've ever received, uh, mainly because we went into the background of this thing a lot more. This was taken in Lubbock, Texas, last September. Now, this Lubbock case is probably the most interesting one. The whole case is the most interesting one we've ever had. Uh, these five college professors from Texas Tech were sitting out in the backyard one evening, and I believe it was in August. Yes, August 25th, and they happened to be discussing meteors, and so they were sitting there looking up in the sky, and all of a sudden this bunch of lights went over. And uh so one of them they looked at each other and said, What was that? Nobody seemed to know. And so uh about a half an hour later, while they were still discussing the lights, and they said they wished that something like that would go over again, and it did. So uh for well, altogether in a period of uh I believe it was five or six nights, they observed twelve of these things that went over. Well, they assumed that it was uh some kind of a missile that the Air Force had been developing, and being nosy, they thought they'd find out what this uh, well, they reached this conclusion after they saw the first two that they'd find out what these missiles were. So they uh set up their own measuring, uh crude measuring systems. They uh were able to set up uh or measure the angles on the on the houses and things in their backyard so they could tell like angle this thing went through, and they timed it with a stopwatch. They also set up a baseline uh 90 degrees to the path, and incidentally these things always came over the same path and at roughly the same time every night, so they knew about what was going on. Uh they set up this baseline and got each end with two-way radios and some homemade uh you might call them field lights or measuring uh angle measuring devices and tried to get an alley tokay so one thing uh repelt uh pointed out is silence can be a meaningful reported characteristic when an object appears close enough that an aircraft engine, propeller, or jet would normally uh uh be audible.

SPEAKER_03 57:41

And he talked a lot about that. And he talked about the stigma that was created. Um and actually he mentioned that in his uh book also. But you know, blue book received only the reports that witnesses were willing to risk making. So that's another thing that you know has much changed.

SPEAKER_04 58:04

No, nothing has changed. Pilots still feel stifled because they still feel it'll affect their career. Um, and again, you know, what what is the official total because it the complete number of events ever witnessed by military and commercial aviators, a lot of them don't want to come forward. And I mean, how many years later is this? It's 2026, and they still face the same uh problems reporting, the same stigma, and people would try to create official channels for them to report, and not a lot has happened in that area.

SPEAKER_03 58:40

I know, and it's funny, and what he spoke about, I know, like repelled what he was describing was the same institutional pressure that we face today. This was in 1952.

SPEAKER_08 58:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:53

And something else I think is worth noting is he mentioned, you know, a witness can be credible and still be mistaken, because he was always trying to be fair in his uh analysis. And rappelt's method, it seemed to me, was to treat credibility as one factor, then compare the report with weather, astronomy, aircraft movements, radar, and uh other evidence. And you know, like we've mentioned, the pilot's fear of being grounded is valuable oral evidence of why apparently strong incidents might never enter the official files.

SPEAKER_04 59:30

Well, and you know, pilots, the other thing, their training gives them experience judging aircraft behavior, things like relative motion, altitude, and distance. And again, it's still a big deal. Pilot safety when you're dealing with these objects.

SPEAKER_03 59:47

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:48

I can't even imagine what's going through a pilot's mind.

SPEAKER_03 59:52

It's crazy. And then, you know, again, listening to this segment that we just played, here is something which I have brought up on other shows for sure. And it is, you know, how reliable can any official statistical study be if some of the best qualified witnesses believe that reporting an event could damage their careers.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:17

Well, then you're yeah, and you're not even getting a cross-section then. You know, you're just getting the people who have agreed to speak about it.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:28

Well, I I know just from UFO Talker, the amount of people that have sent me emails over the last four seasons and I always ask them, did you ever report this anywhere? And I'm gonna say almost nobody re made an official report like telling me was the first time they've ever told anybody um outside of their family.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:55

Yeah. But especially I mean the average person might think twice about reporting. But I mean pilots could think they could really be grounded or lose their jobs.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:07

That's right. That's right. And that's that affects the pocketbook, and uh is the most important factor, I would say. This is uh section three, and we've entitled it from reports to instruments. And I think this is the most scientific portion of the talk. Um he discusses a lot of uh radar limitations, uh getting cameras to take pictures of uh uh you know, when you get a radar blip, that kind of thing. So let's listen to that now. Now we uh see.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:53

We've reached several general, or I shouldn't say reached any conclusions. There's two or three general facts about all of the sightings, the overall uh collection of sightings that we have. One of them is that on our good sighting, there's absolutely no noise ever reported connected with these objects, no matter how low they are. They may be uh reported as just being specks in the sky or down fairly low, and there's absolutely no noise reported. And once again, we uh we don't know of any kind of a propulsion system that would uh that would do that. I mean, everything that that we know of uh has some type of noise connected with it. Another thing is we've had a lot of radar returns, uh, but we have never had a visual sighting linked up with a radar return. We've had two or three reports of that, but we've never been able to pin them down enough uh and get enough facts about them to make sure that they were both looking at the same thing. Uh they have had a project on this down at uh Holland, and they've been very much interested in it because they've been seeing uh compare on a comparative basis more of these things around the Hollom and White Sands area. They did track something down there with their synotheodolites. Uh they don't know what it what it is, and it could possibly be a slow-moving daylight meteor. Now, I'm not an astronomer, but I understand such things exist. Uh they they got pictures of it and they were able to track it. However, they saw about five, well I think it's five or six of these things at once. Uh it was right after they launched a missile and they had their uh scan uh synotheodolites pointed up in the air, and they saw these four or five things right behind a missile, and they got the word to swing over on those and forget the missile, and they're a little bit doubtful as to whether or not all stations track the same object. So consequently, their readings are a little bit off, but they did come up uh with an altitude reading of about 150,000 feet. Uh the speed was uh very great. They they came up with a speed of about 3,500 miles an hour, but again, they won't back that up because they aren't they aren't sure of the conditions that these readings were made under. Um that's the only time we've ever come really close to getting any uh any accurate data on these things, and I want to say again that it could be that it was a uh a meteor in a daytime. Now they have another type of uh phenomena or object or something floating around down that area, and that's these green fireballs. Now, I don't know whether you've been reading about that in a paper, but there's a doctor, uh Lincoln La Paz, down in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico, who's been making a big deal out of these green fireballs. They appear to be uh similar to a meteor, except that they have a definite flat trajectory. Uh they're reported to be a brilliant uh greenish-blue color, and they uh they don't explode. I mean they appear to be very low about a third or a fourth the size of a full moon, and they're very low, and they just go out like that. They don't explode. Now, Dr. LaPaz's theory on this thing is that if it's a normal meteor, there should be a terrific explosion because of the size of these things. Uh indicates that they're down low in the atmosphere, and there should be a terrific explosion when they uh when they get down low enough to explode. It's uh again we don't know what they are. I mean, they actually exist, there's no doubt about it. I mean, it's not anybody's imagination because they've been reported by, well, Dr. LaPaz himself has has seen one, and and we've had some very fine reports, and they all uh follow the same path. There's a definite flat trajectory right across the uh, well, parallel to the Earth's surface. Uh they they go out with no explosion and they're a brilliant, bright green. Now, airline pilots have seen them, and maybe if they meet them head on or something like that, they'll rack the airliner up and just about toss everybody out of seats because they think they're gonna have a head on collision with this uh whatever it may be. Now, Cambridge uh labs have been working on that for two years, and they came up with no conclusions whatsoever as to what there might be. So I understand that we're gonna. Take it over again and see if we can't possibly come up with uh some idea. Uh we've talked to uh well Dr. Kaplan's I or uh Lapaz's ideas that they come from Russia, but he said that they're using some kind of a self-destruction missile that and they're they're zeroing in on uh Los Alamos. Now that's a a good story. I mean, it it uh sounds really exciting, and and there's a possibility. I mean, it we can't say that it isn't because we don't know what it is. Uh we've talked to Dr. Kaplan quite a bit on his subject. Uh probably probably know him from uh the University of California. Uh he thinks that they're either some kind of uh possibly a new meteor that we are not familiar with or uh some phenomena that's related to the aurora. Uh he claims that he can uh duplicate this color in his lab, and I I'm not uh sure of just exactly how he does it. I believe he uses uh well, I don't know, I won't say I've got a report, but I don't want to quote something I don't know about. But anyway, he can duplicate this color, and he believes that that's what it is. Now uh as I say, that is a definite division of these things. I mean, they they definitely exist, and our problem is to find out, really find out what they are. If they're some kind of phenomena, well then we can turn it over to the astronomers and let them take it. Uh if they should happen to come from Russia, well, then we better start finding out what they're trying to do, or how many of these bringing life reports? Oh, we have quite a few, sir. I'd hate to say, I mean, uh I I couldn't tell you exactly a number, but they started out, I believe, in 49, didn't they, sir? Uh there was a big outbreak of them in 49, and they seemed to appear uh in in January or in December and January in that period between the uh the years, and uh they coincide with a uh meteor shower that occurred at that time. I don't believe, I don't remember the name of it is, but for a long time they tried to tie them in with that meteor shower. But just recently, now within the last year, they've begun to occur more on a uh over the whole year instead of coming at at uh at one time. OSI, uh Dr. LaPaz worked for OSI in 1949 on these, and they tried to uh come up with the conclusion they couldn't. Uh they've also spent a lot of time trying to find any fragments and have never been successful. I mean, they've been able to triangulate these things and get a heck of a lot of reports on people that have seen them or seen one of them and then uh work their triangulation like they do on large meteors, but they've never been able to find any uh parts. They uh want us to fires to pick up, put a dust collector on a B-29 and try to fly through the area right after these things occurred, try to pick up any uh dust that they might have left in the upper atmosphere, but they didn't find anything at all that would indicate that anything unusual was going on. So we were we're up against a stone wall on these things, too. I mean, all we've got is just people's ideas. We've got no proof as to what they actually may be. Now we've uh one of our approaches on this thing is going to be the use of uh diffraction gratings on cameras. Uh this is Dr. Kaplan's idea. Uh he says that we can uh, and I mean I shouldn't say he says, Well, he knows that we can take a very inexpensive camera and put a diffraction grating on it, uh, and give them to these guards around Sandia and White Sands and all these places where the guards are outdoors 24 hours a day. And every time they see something that's unusual, just point the camera at it and take a picture, and then he says that he can take the uh reading and uh match them up either by known objects or match them up in his lab and tell us uh what the composition is of this object that's emitting this light. Now uh we haven't that's just strictly in the planning stage. Now we haven't done very much except Dr. Kaplan is now trying to figure out the cheapest camera that he can build for us and and the most rugged camera so these guards can throw it around and still uh we'll get some decent pictures, these objects. Uh another thing that we've done is recently we briefed Air Defense Command on this whole project and have got their cooperation in uh with their uh radar scope cameras. Uh as I mentioned before, we have had quite a few unknown radar returns. Uh these things have the radar uh the Air Defense Command radars tracked objects going anywhere from a thousand up to about 3,500 miles an hour. Uh we've never been able to determine, however, that these weren't weren't malfunctions in a radar set or due to some type of atmospheric phenomena. Uh we've we've tried to get the weather charts uh at the time or the weather conditions at the time this phenomenon has occurred and try to correlate that data and show that due to a certain type of weather condition that they had this type of return. Now uh we haven't had too much luck luck on that angle, so now we're going to try to get radar scope cameras and get pictures of this stuff, and then we'll know. And before we've just had the radar observer's interpretation of what he saw in a scope, we think that with pictures, probably we can uh do a little bit more with this. Now, another step further in that, and we haven't uh done anything on this except talk about it, and it may get into the point where we're going to do this, and that is try to put in a long focal length camera, uh trying to match a local long focal length camera with the radar spinner. So the time whenever this radar operator gets a return, uh all he has to do is poke a button, and this camera will take a picture of the area of the sky that the radar spinner is pointing at. And in that, if we get that far, and if we get a bad uh funny return, we'll say, and a usual return on a scope, and if we get an image, no matter how big the image is, on the uh photographic plate or on the film at the same time, well then we can say that that this radar operator was actually picking up something. I mean, uh that'll be a great help to us now because we don't uh know for sure if they're even picking anything up. But uh that's the next step, and it's still in the planning or even it's in the talking stage right now. Um that's about the main thing we're going to try to do as far as future plans is concerned. We want to get uh try to get some concrete data to say that these things exist. Uh up till present time we we've got no real proof that anything even exists. The only thing we've got are reports from very reliable people that do have a lot of details in them, but the details aren't the kind that we want. I mean, they don't give us enough data as to the possible performance or anything else that we might need on these objects. Uh the official Air Force viewpoint uh is that we've got enough good reports from reliable people to be interested in this. Uh we can't back up any of these books by Scully or Kehoe and say that we know that they're from Venus or that we know they're from Russia or that we even know they exist. I mean, there's a possibility that everything that's being reported is uh some as a balloon or as a meteor or ducks or anything you can think of that somebody just saw them from an odd angle or under odd lighting conditions and they look like something else. But it's it's uh at the present time we have enough faith in these people who have been turning in their reports to say that we we don't exactly believe that. I mean, we're gonna have to get more proof before we can say that everything that's being seen is some known object just viewed under uh uh different circumstances. Uh I could go on for a long time telling you about the good reports we've had. Uh I'd say about 20% uh of the of the 800 or 900 reports that we now have uh just cannot be explained. I mean, you can't say that looks like a meeting. You can't say that that that could be a balloon if there is a balloon in the area because it it just doesn't tie up. And most of these people have made these reports are uh well-established airline pilots. I mean, old pilots who've had a lot of flying time. Uh the people who released these General Mills balloons have seen something. Uh the people at White Sands have seen very odd things. It's Dr. La Paz himself has seen a couple things floating over the mountains down to New Mexico that he didn't uh he couldn't explain. Now we've got about 20% of our reports are like that. But we just we can't go up to them and say, now you can't uh this can't be your nuts. I mean that that would be our only answer on those. You just you're just crazy. But you uh can't go up to anybody and tell them that. I mean, they're they're they've seen something and we don't know what it is. Now uh well some of the big questions that enter our mind on this is one, the no sound business. If it actually exists and there's no, there's some type of propulsion, but there's no sound, what could it possibly be? Another big question is, uh, and it's uh getting in the lines of psychology, uh why or how could a person uh look up at night or in the dusk, we'll say, or even in the daytime, and and see some of these things that they report.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:10

Okay, so you know, a few things he mentioned that really caught my attention was when he reported the case uh with spectacular figures from White Sands, you know, approximately 150,000 feet, an object was going 3,500 miles per hour. But he really felt uh the investigations or and the investigators uh should really be attempting to move beyond witness recollection and toward measurements that could establish spectrum, speed, altitude, and trajectory. He also talked about uh synchronizing uh cameras up with radar systems that could help to determine the apparent target if it was a physical object or just fault the fault of uh a faulty radar system.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:01

Just the lack of proof doesn't mean that every case had been explained. He just said investigators couldn't get decisive evidence establishing the nature of the remaining cases. Uh but the green fireballs were treated as genuine observed events. The question was what caused them and why some reported trajectories differed from ordinary meteors, which is a pretty good question.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:26

Yeah, so that green fireball uh incident, it is gonna be the subject of the next uh mini documentary that will be on the UFO Talker Network, and I will post when that's coming out, we'll either mention it here or also post on the Facebook page when that is coming out, and that covers all of this uh green fireball incident, which is very, very interesting because uh as you'll see, it doesn't seem like they were meteorites as they were being uh expressed to the public. Oh, you're just saying a meteorite. But there was a lot of brilliant minds um like Lincoln La Paz and uh I think Edward Keller was there, and they were saying, Yeah, we don't think that they are meteorites for a whole bunch of uh reasons. He also talked during the section three part, it kind of almost sounded like he wanted the blue book to kind of leave from just a collection of uh reports, and he wanted it to move into almost real experiments and investigations. So the next section that we're gonna listen to, we we are calling section four, and by far this is the juiciest section, and we've called it Hotel and the Hidden Scientific Partner. And this should be an it definitely was an eye-opener for me, and I'm gonna say this is gonna be a big time eye-opener for most of our listening audience as well. There is one quote I want to read from uh this section, and you're you're gonna hear this as well. But I think it is so important that I I want to include it. Um it was something I think we probably all know, but it is it was good to actually hear someone in official capac uh capacity mention it. So here's a quote in the this is rebel talking to the audience. Now in two weeks, a week from this coming Friday, Life, like Life magazine, is coming out with an article on these objects. And we've been working closely with Life, and they're supposedly are going to print what we told them to. Wow, like, you know, it doesn't it's not too big of a stretch to imagine that this is what's happened for many years on many things, not just UFOs. But to actually hear someone, you know, say it out loud. That is pretty fantastical. But let's listen to this section of uh uh audio right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:32

If you got any questions, well, we'd be very happy to discuss any aspect of this whole thing with you folks.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:40

No, sir, I haven't.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:43

Oh, I yeah, I saw something like that. But it was I it was just a uh large meteor, one of these green fireballs or something. It was uh I think it was one of these green fireballs down in Texas. And uh, but it it was that's all that I have ever seen.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:02

I might at the risk of repeating just uh some of these points. Uh one is uh Lieutenant Ruppell mentioned around 800 cases that we have in our files. Uh we know that that's only a portion of the site. Uh those are the ones that have managed to be reported just on military days and three channels to go to it. You can read the local newspapers almost anywhere in the country during a little period of time. You'll find stories on these things that we have not heard of. We've even heard of them in military organizations that not in report. Because I think it's almost a case of the airline pods. I wonder if there's something. For example, I was talking to St. They were telling me about radar bomb scoring run of B-29 out of St. Louis. They were following the B-29. Initial point. He immediately thought, well, that's possible. Anyway, he explained it away in his own mind. Well then the uh blood upper started descending on a collision course. And uh quick check revealed that it was descending at a rate of something like a thousand miles an hour. Got a little more concerned, and still thought, well, possibly this is either the radar or some atmospheric condition. But then when the thing broke off, made a turn, and then another turn, and took the course and disappeared, they just don't know what it is. Well, we find on these radar sightings that uh you're just left pretty much outside. I mean, you you can't really dig in, you haven't got anything because uh there's so many of them that can be explained as a possibility that it is something in the atmosphere or that's uh we had one good one not too long ago, and uh one of our electronics people pulled out a textbook, and uh gee, there was a case written up in the textbook exactly what happened and reported to us. A hovering object could be a wrapper. Such a thing has occurred because it was a phenomenal. So that whole area of deciding things were just left without any answers. One point that was not brought out uh is uh relationship with uh Patel. Oh yes, I forgot to mention uh Battel Memorial Institute. Uh they're one of the contractors who do work for us.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:04

They're always silent.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:08

They became interested in this when we pointed out to them one day that here's an area in which we've had a lot of problems and uh we're looking for help. We we don't know the answers. So one of the things that they hope to do for us is make available to us people who are specialists in various areas. So if we get a case that calls for an astronomer, we can quickly get an astronomer to work on it. Another thing is possibly a clipping service that will bring in a mass of reports that we don't have, and if any of them are worth following up, we can't. But our problem, as you've probably seen, is just getting facts. Uh we don't have enough facts to do anything other than explain that 80% of these roughly are known objects. That possibly. As a matter of fact, they're not 80% definitely proved, but say 60 definitely. I mean, there's no question in our mind it was a plane or something else. Uh then uh these are rough figures, say 20% that maybe it could have been a plane, a balloon, or a meteor. And then there's that 20%, like the green fireballs and the lights that we just do not have an answer for. Now, one thing that people have suggested, well, how about a feasibility study? Well, you a feasibility of what? The unknown. Well, we're stuck there.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:41

Colonel, have uh all the intelligence officers of air bases in the US have been alerted on this and the report to everything alert. Is the military generally alerted?

SPEAKER_06 1:24:52

Yes, uh we we should have brought that out earlier. That there is a directive uh from uh headquarters USAF that establishes a reporting procedure. Now, we felt for a long time, like most directives, uh, particularly if there's no activity on it, people forget about it. I mean, it gets stuck off in the file. We've also felt that it was not a very good one. It had a lot of weak points in it. So we prepared a new directive and in the meantime suggested that they go ahead and remind all of these people that there is a reporting procedure set up so that it would uh bring reports in. And the new directive has just recently been coordinated, I believe, hasn't it? It's going back in Divine right now. And it should be out. Now, uh Lieutenant Ruppelt in getting around on these cases, of course, does a lot of missionary work. I mean, when he hits a base, I mean he briefs pretty thoroughly on our problem. And the places he's hit, I'm sure, are well aware of how it's done. I'm equally sure there are a number of these places that just don't know. They probably have a directors in where it would.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:57

I'm just thinking of my own case. I knew you folks are interested from this association others, but no uh still any efficient channel. I've never heard that there's any interest from that.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:10

How about the ground observer code? They have 100,000 people, but they are quite active now. Are they allowed to do that?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:17

We uh they are to a certain extent, so we've we've talked about that quite a bit, and we don't know whether it's it's worth alerting those people. Now they're not now on a 24-hour basis. They will they hope to get them on a 24-hour basis soon, but uh uh we don't know exactly how far to go. I mean, we're afraid maybe if we uh alert that number of people, then then everybody in the United States can get excited again. That's the thing we're trying to uh keep out of this thing is this excitement business. Now, in two weeks, a week from this coming Friday, life is coming out with a with an article on these uh objects. And we've been working closely with life, and uh they supposedly are going to print what we told them to. I hope they do. Uh they're gonna put it on a factual basis. I mean, just about like this briefing. In other words, uh there may be something to it, but we don't know. And uh we feel that that report may tend to take the mysteriousness and hysteria out of the thing and just get people to uh give us a few reports in uh, well, people with good common sense instead of all these nut letters that we get occasionally. Another thing, uh, Colonel Kirkman referred to this newspaper clipping service. We hope to get that started before this Life magazine article comes out and keep it going over, say, a period of a year and see how the peaks in the newspaper publicity uh correspond with the peaks in this in the reports that we get. Uh we feel that after life comes out, or then several other magazines will undoubtedly pick this stuff up. A true magazine is supposed to be coming out with an article uh sometime within the next couple months. It will be slammed the other way. It's going to be written by one of these science fiction writers. And uh it should give us somebody in trouble. We haven't been able to get true to uh cooperate with the cinema. I mean, I shouldn't say that they probably would, but they're kind of magazine. I mean, they sell sensational items, and they don't uh they want to play it up, and then I believe Luke is also thinking about coming up with an article. So uh magazines are gonna follow life, and we'll probably we'll run into a little bit of flight again on this thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:28

So this was the most telling part uh for me, and especially when you think of the question and answer from the uh, I believe it was a colonel that brought Patel up. Now it's I think it's very important to say, you know, that Rapelt, he didn't bring up Patel on his own. That was another participant brought that up. And also in uh Rapelt's book, the report on unidentified flying objects, he described an organization very, very similar to Battel in his book, but uh instead of calling the name the project its proper name, he called it Project Bear. And in reality, uh it was called Project Stork, and this was being done by uh Battel. So I guess one of the first things we're gonna talk about is you know, what was Project Stork? And uh, like I'm saying, a lot of this was certainly eye-opening for me. Battel's participation in UFO investigations went be way beyond the small Project Blue Book office, which only had a few people at any given time, and into the larger world of contracted scientific and intelligence work. So this is pretty significant. And Project Stork, it was it was a huge project. Um, it mainly encompassed the uh the people at Battel looking into you know Russian aviation, secret developments, aircraft. It was kind of mainly all of that, but a small part of it was devoted to uh UFOs. And also here's something that is pretty interesting to think about is Project Stork, which was doing a lot of work on UFOs for the US military, it predates the freedom of information, the FOIA. And it's beat the FOIA law didn't become didn't come into effect until 1966. So many of the things they were doing on UFO work, you couldn't even have found out about it even if you had wanted to. And also it's a private organization. This is where I wish we had on um John Greenwald uh Jr., because he is a definitely an expert in this area, but I believe you can submit certain FOIA requests to private companies if there is some major link between the U.S. government and the company, but that's a very gray area, and I'm sure they get a round of a lot of important documentation that far. I think another important question to ask is that does government contracting in general, but specifically we're talking about Battel, does it make trying to find a historical trail a lot harder to follow? Um, you know, there's no present proof that Battle was deliberately used to conceal UFO records, but who knows? You know, like you would kind of think, oh, you know, they weren't thinking about this kind of stuff back then, but maybe they were. There's a lot of stuff that you know we attribute to more modern day thinking, but uh there was a lot of smart people back then, and you know, maybe they were that far out ahead of their skis to think about that kind of how it would happen in the future. So just to go into a little bit of background on Project Stork, so Project Stork was the code name that for Battel uh for all of their work supporting the Air Intelligence, Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. And like I mentioned, it was mainly to look into foreign aircraft, weapons systems, technology, and UFOs were just a very small part of it. Um one thing Battel did, which was quite significant, they standardized reporting methods, uh how coding case information, they put them on punch cards, and they used a lot of statistical analysis, which hadn't really been done very much up until that point. And then official modern uh histories generally placed the UFO-related Battel work from late 51 to uh late 1954. You know, I could find no evidence. Now, this doesn't mean there isn't evidence, but I could find no evidence that uh Project Stork still continues today. And from what I've gathered, a lot of these projects that went on for years and years, some of them would just get recoded or have a different name. So probably it still exists, but under a different um code name than uh Project Stork. Something else to think about is because there is no real paper trail in a lot of this, so the exact end of some of these larger cro contracts like Project Stork, um, you know, are there any surviving records? All that remains unclear. A lot of it they say was destroyed or filed under different contract numbers or held internally by Battel. Um, and then we would never know about it, right? So when we were looking into all of this, Project Stork and all of those things, uh, we came across Howard C. Cross. Now, this guy is boy, you would love to know everything he knew. So he was born July uh June 4th, 1904. He died in March 30th, 1992, and he was a senior Battel uh metallurgist, scientist, and research administrator, and he was a recognized expert in metals, including titanium. Now, Rapelt never mentioned his name in any of these recordings, but Christine is going to tell us how we know how we know of Howard Cross.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:26

Well, there's a memorandum attributed to Cross, uh, dated January 9, 1953, shows someone at Battel making recommendations about future Air Force methods for handling what is called unidentified aerial objects. The memorandum says the recommendation grew out of experience, analyzing several thousand reports, indicating a substantial body of work rather than an isolated consultation. It discusses what projects stored at ATIC should and should not disclose to the impending CIA scientific panel. It proposes controlled instrument and ideas equipped for visual observation, radar photography, and meteorological measurements. It proposes a secretly scheduled aerial activity so investigators could compare what actually occurred with what observers and instruments reported. The document is directed to Miles E. Gall at Wright Patterson with Captain Edward J. Rappel, specifically named for attention. It ends with the type name H. C. Cross and the initials HCC. But again, neither Howard Cross nor HC Cross is named in the Rappel transcript. Only Battel is identified. Cross enters the story through the January 1953 memorandum and the documentary records surrounding Project Stork.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:58

And I think I have this right. I think it was Jacques Villet. Yeah. He reported finding a copy of this in the files of J. Allen Heinek. And because of that, that's how we know about Howard Cross. So here is some reasonable, or what I'm calling reasonable speculation. But I want you to, I want the audience to know that this is speculation. We have no hard proof of this. But if you think of a guy like Howard Cross doing major work at Bertel and his, you know, specific uh expertise in a lot of this, and it seemed like he was the lead investigator on anything to do with uh UFOs. So I think it's a reasonable question to say, what else did Howard Cross know about UFOs and what else did he work on? Because none of that is known. And this is my feeling is I think in any corporate entity, if you are very good at something, and your company comes up with a project and they want someone to lead that project, they immediately think of who's done this kind of work before and who knows the most about this. And I can't help but think, you know, that Howard Cross's name was coming up, and I think he was probably getting all the heavy-duty UFO uh experiments, investigations, knowledge. And so really Battel could be uh just an incredible resource for a lot of secret UFO information. I don't think that is an unreasonable uh speculation.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:07

No, I don't think that's unreasonable either.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:10

Here's a couple of questions I want to throw out here because I've jotted, I've thought about these. And because they mention in the in the document that Cross talked about a controlled experiment uh with different equipment, radar, photography, and was that ever approved or attempted? There's something to think about. And also this is a bit telling is why did Captain Rapelt disguise Battel as Project Bear in his book? It was really Project Stork. He called it Project Bear. Now it could be totally innocent. Maybe you know he wasn't going to use the name of a real project, but it is interesting, like why he would try to cover that stuff up. And also our additional records stored under contract numbers or unrelated project titles. We don't know that either. Is if you look hard enough, you'll find these small little slip-ups, these little cracks in the story that they get released by mistake somehow. So it's really just through a chance uh finding uh valet finding this document that we know anything about Howard Cross. And, you know, how will we ever know more about Howard Cross? That is the problem. Now, here's something else that when you start pulling this thread and start looking deeper into this rabbit hole, you find some things that you know I don't think the public generally knows, but they've been sitting in plain sight for a while. So Battel, they came up with a document that they called Project Blue Book Special Report number 14. Now, this has been known publicly for a long, long time. It from what I found, it's only some real heavy duty researchers have uh known about this. Um, I have not, I have to admit, I was not familiar with this at all. And basically, this report it examined reports that were made between June 1947 and December 1952. That was approximately 4,000 reports. So it was Battel that carried out uh this work on this, and they're the ones that named the report. And so this special report number 14 was an attempt to move beyond individual UFO stories and examine patterns across thousands of reports. Approximately 33% of the cases rated excellent remained unknown, and approximately 25% of those rated good remained unknown. So I guess if you're if you're trying to boil down what this special report number 14 is, it's the documented result of the road Captain Rapelt was beginning to travel in 1952, as you've heard from the audio recordings. Now repelt had the reports and the unanswered questions. Project Stork and Battel supplied the large-scale scientific and statistical analysis. That analysis became special report number 14, and it is the bridge that provides the mystery of Battel and Howard Cross. And can you imagine being a fly on the wall in all of those in all of those conversations?

SPEAKER_04 1:43:23

Oh man.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:25

So here's some interesting information that um we can also state is the earliest surviving formal formal project record. That's the first project stork. It was titled PPS-100 status report. That was dated April 25th, 1952, and it states that the UFO subproject began on March 31st, 1952. That is the strongest record of when Battel's formal UFO work began. Now, here is some interesting stuff that uh we were also able to find. Now, as we mentioned, Project Stork wasn't really about UFOs. It was more about uh foreign technology, uh tactics, all of those kind of things. That made me think about because uh Battel existed during World War II, and as we know, they did a lot of work for the US government. It makes you think, you know, with Stork's wider mission that included foreign aircraft, materials, manufacturing methods, scientific capabilities, I think it's reasonable to say that Battel had examined German derived technology that was later used by the US or Soviet Union Union, including rockets, jet, jet swept wings, aircraft, and flying wing designs. However, there are no stork documents that have been so found showing a specific investigation of these alleged Nazi flying saucers or anti-gravity craft or anything like that. But having said that, it does make you think, because as we've talked about, they were doing a lot of secret work, a lot of secret work, not just on UFOs, but uh captured German technology, you know, and here's something else to think about that Patel was connected to uh the ATIC long before Blue Book existed. Yeah, so that makes you think, um, you know, did Battel, because it's a very scientific organization, and this again, this is speculation, did was it Battle that you know organized Project Blue Book? You know, they wanted something more like Project Blue Book. Were they behind the creation of that? Now that's a hundred percent speculation, but the more we looked into this Battel connection, wow, it just opens up big vistas, right? Um it's hard to believe that Battel, knowing their history and knowing how involved they were with secret programs in the US from an early stage, and they're still doing it now, you know, decades and decades later. Um how deep are they in this? And also because we probably can't see any of their work. No. And we don't know we just know one name, Howard Cross, by a mistake. Um it really, really makes you wonder. There are so many possibilities. It would be good to find someone, because I am a hundred percent sure there are very serious researchers that uh know a lot more about Battel than what we've been able to find out. And I I think we should uh interview some of those guys because this Battel connection, it just sounds uh ripe with so much information. Um, I'm gonna say the bulk of our audience has probably never heard of Project Blue Book Special Report number 14. Now, that report is online, and anyone that has a computer can go look at it. We're put we'll leave a link in our show notes to where you can look that up. There are so many things that make you question, you know, what you think you knew and what is really out there. Another thing I want to mention about that um uh memo that was found, it discusses what Project Stork and ATIC should and should not disclose to the impending CIA scientific panel. That would have been the Robertson uh panel. So that is an important clue as well, because you know, we like to think that 60 or 70 years ago, oh, these intelligence people they couldn't have been that s sophisticated, not like we are today. But yeah, they were manipulating and hiding and doing all of that stuff on a much larger level than what I ever imagined now. Um you know, because if they are trying to min manipulate what a CIA UFO panel is gonna see, wow. So they were used to doing that. So it is it does bring up what we've talked about is in Repel's uh audio recording that we've listened to parts of they all talk as if they're there's you know, they don't mention crashed uh UFOs or aliens or anything like that. It comes across as uh we don't know what they are. We have no idea what they are. And so you have to think, was there's something else going on that was more secret that Repelt and all these guys were sh were kept out of, were kept in the dark. And this uh there's a few sentences. Report on unidentified fine objects that always sticks with me. Is where we rebelt said he always pondered if there was some other secret organization that was looking into this beyond himself. He said that he that was a question he thought about a lot because some reports that he thought were very good, they would go somewhere else, and he was never able to find out where that somewhere else was.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:33

Yeah, that's a good line.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:35

So you know, is Battel the key to a much larger UFO secret? And there's probably not just Battel, there's probably lots of Battel's, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:50:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:53

So is we've just scratched the surface on this audio table. And uh, you know, I got somewhere right there is up there smiling because as soon as I saw that sentence, I thought, oh yes, there is the thread. That's the thread I have to pull and find out. So hopefully we'll be able to find um some serious researchers who know a lot more about this than we do. And uh just it's totally fascinating because one of the reasons we look into these old cases, I've had some people say to me, Oh, you shouldn't do so many shows on old stuff. You should just do it on, you know, tic tacks and all this new new stuff. But you can find still find out so much information in the history. And uh it's been said by greater people than me, is you know, history can tell us a lot. And I just find this totally fascinating. I hope our audiences found this uh fascinating as well. And I'm gonna say we'll probably be doing other shows on this. This is a huge, huge topic.

SPEAKER_05 1:52:17

Here are the Canadian civil aviation anomalies from reports added to Cadors during the week of September 21st to September 25th, 2026. The incidents described in these reports originally occurred in July. The September dates that follow are the dates the reports were added to Cadors. On September 21st, a daytime encounter was reported involving Jazz Flight JZA 7970 departing Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport for Montreal. The crew reported a black, shiny object described as a drone during the initial climb at approximately 4,500 feet above sea level. The object passed close to the aircraft. No evasive action was taken, and the flight continued to its destination without further incident. Also on September 21st, an aircraft sighting of a possible stationary drone was reported approximately two miles east of Hatzick Lake, British Columbia, at an altitude of 2,500 feet. The report provided no further description of the object. On September 22nd, a daytime incident was reported involving Summit Air Flight SUT-8392 flying from Massett to Vancouver International Airport. The crew reported hitting a white drone while approaching Vancouver. The aircraft was just over three nautical miles from the runway at an altitude of 1,300 feet. The pilot later called back to report that there was no damage to the aircraft. On September 25th, a daytime sighting was reported by Flight JBA 786 of a drone over the Van Term terminal in Vancouver Harbor. The pilot described it as white and red or orange and a decent size. The report did not provide an altitude or indicate how close it was to the aircraft. Looking across the four daily reports, there were 48 records involving missed approaches or go-arounds. Recurring reasons included unstable approaches, aircraft still occupying runways, weather conditions, and runway inspections following bird strikes. There were also 30 records involving bird strikes or possible strikes. Some resulted in runway closures, inspections, or instructions for approaching aircraft to go around. Drone activity appeared in 14 records. Six described encounters, sightings, or unauthorized operations. The remaining eight were notifications of drone operations, including one emergency operation. These figures count report entries, and some entries may describe related events. No operational delays were reported in the four selected drone incident summaries. The Jazz flight continued to its destination without further incident, and the Summit Air Pilot reported no damage to the aircraft.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:53

Well, that's our podcast for this week. Please share, subscribe, and do all those great things to help spread the word about UFO Talker. And until next time, this is Michael Ryan. Keep watching the skies.

SPEAKER_05 1:56:08

You have been listening to the UFO Talker. If you have any questions or comments on this episode, you can email us at UFOtalker at Bell.net or visit our website at UFOTalker.ca. You can support UFO Talker by using the Buy Me a Coffee app with links on our website and in the show notes. We appreciate every listener. Thank you for your support. This has been a Michael Ryan production.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:36

30. That's a wrap.