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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I found my latest bombshell while reading the 1956 book “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects”<\/em> 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,”<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few days prior to the Washington sightings, Ruppelt wrote, he was talking with a scientist \u201cfrom an agency I can\u2019t name\u201d about a \u201cbuild-up of reports along the east coast of the United States.\u201d The scientist, who Ruppelt said had access to all the Air Force\u2019s flying saucer reports, made a bold prediction: \u201c\u2019Within the next few days,\u2019 he told me, and I remember that he punctuated his slow, deliberate remarks by hitting the desk with his fist, \u2018they\u2019re going to blow up and you\u2019re going to have the grand-daddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York,\u2019 he predicted, \u2018probably Washington.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe trend in the UFO reports that this scientist based his prediction on hadn\u2019t gone unnoticed,\u201d Ruppelt wrote. \u201cWe on Project Blue Book had seen it, and so had the people in the Pentagon; we had all talked about it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n