Once again I’ve come across something quite startling in researching my book about J. Allen Hynek. You Hynek haters, bear with me, because this has nothing to do with Hynek and it’s pretty interesting…
I found my latest bombshell while reading the 1956 book “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” by Captain Edward Ruppelt, the original head of the Air Force’s UFO investigation unit, Project Blue Book. In Chapter 12, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Ruppelt recounts the sensational 1952 UFO flap over Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, and he drops what I think is a pretty amazing piece of information: Ruppelt claims that he was forewarned.
A few days prior to the Washington sightings, Ruppelt wrote, he was talking with a scientist “from an agency I can’t name” about a “build-up of reports along the east coast of the United States.” The scientist, who Ruppelt said had access to all the Air Force’s flying saucer reports, made a bold prediction: “’Within the next few days,’ he told me, and I remember that he punctuated his slow, deliberate remarks by hitting the desk with his fist, ‘they’re going to blow up and you’re going to have the grand-daddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York,’ he predicted, ‘probably Washington.’
“The trend in the UFO reports that this scientist based his prediction on hadn’t gone unnoticed,” Ruppelt wrote. “We on Project Blue Book had seen it, and so had the people in the Pentagon; we had all talked about it.”
This passage blows my mind for a number of reasons. First, it indicates that there was some sort of scientific analysis being made of flying saucer reports even in the earliest days of Project Blue Book. Second, it indicates that there were clear patterns to flying saucer reports. Third, it indicates that parties unknown at the Pentagon were paying very close attention to UFO reports before the Washington sightings. And, finally, nothing seems to have been done after this moment to make use of this high level of analysis to make any further predictions about flying saucer reports. Surely this invaluable predictive analysis, once validated, would have become an integral part of Blue Book’s ongoing operations, and yet it is never mentioned again by Ruppelt or by anyone else associated with UFO study and research.
Okay, commenters, time to earn your keep. Can anyone poke a hole in this account?