Ruppelt held back before the Robertson Panel

Ruppelt held back before the Robertson Panel

Date	9 December 1952
Topics	Government programs (topic)
People	Edward Ruppelt
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 46
Year	1952 in UFO history
Timeline	1952 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

Ruppelt held back before the Robertson Panel refers to a claim by the UFO historian Brad Sparks. He says that on 9 December 1952 Colonel Donald L. Bower, the superior of Project Blue Book chief Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, forbade Ruppelt to visit the CIA. Ruppelt had been due to hand certain UFO case reports to the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), which was preparing what became the Robertson Panel.^[1][6] Sparks set out the claim in "Ruppelt's Coverup", a paper in the 1999 proceedings of the Sign Historical Group's UFO History Workshop. He used it as evidence that Ruppelt's famous 1956 book misrepresented the Air Force's cooperation with the panel.^[1] Michael Shellenberger repeated the claim in his 2024 testimony to Congress, saying the CIA held the panel the following month "without these key cases".^[7]

Background

• Ruppelt. Edward James Ruppelt (1923–1960) was a decorated wartime bombardier who earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Iowa State College in 1951. He was recalled to duty that year as an intelligence officer at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.^[3]
  • Sparks dates his leadership of the reorganised Project Grudge and of Project Blue Book from October 1951 to 1953.^[1]
  • He is generally credited with coining the term "unidentified flying object".^[3]
  • The UFO researcher Jerome Clark calls Ruppelt's years the project's "golden age".^[3]
• The CIA's concern. The 1952 wave of sightings, including the July radar-visual cases over Washington, D.C., led the CIA to review the Air Force's UFO work.^[2]
  • Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith wanted to know whether the Air Force investigation was objective enough. According to Haines, Smith thought there was only one chance in 10,000 that UFOs threatened national security, but "even that chance could not be taken".^[4]
  • On 4 December 1952 the Intelligence Advisory Committee agreed that the DCI should enlist selected scientists to review the evidence.^[2][4]
  • The resulting panel, chaired by the Caltech physicist H. P. Robertson, met from 14 January 1953.^[2][4]
• Ruppelt's account. In his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt was the first to reveal publicly that the panel had existed.^[2][4]
  • He wrote that the Air Force had agreed to give the panel "every detail about the UFO", and that "we had our best reports for them to read" (pp. 209–210).^[1]
  • He described a preliminary review group that visited ATIC and, he said, unanimously recommended that "a higher court be formed to review the case of the UFO". In his account, higher Air Force authorities accepted that recommendation within an hour (p. 200).^[1]
  • He also wrote that everyone who knew about the proposed panel "was eager to get started" (p. 199).^[1]

Sparks's account

• How Sparks came to doubt Ruppelt. Sparks writes that CIA documents he obtained in the early 1970s gave him "the first real shock" about Ruppelt's reliability.^[1]
  • They listed Ruppelt as only one of dozens of people the panel heard, with his briefing taking up a few paragraphs in dozens of pages of records.^[1]
  • After Blue Book and Air Force OSI records reached the National Archives in 1975 and 1976, he found other episodes in Ruppelt's book that he says were invented.^[1]
  • He says he later obtained "smoking gun" CIA documents showing that Ruppelt knew of an Air Force cover-up aimed at the CIA, designed to keep vital information from the panel.^[1]
• Cover-up No. 8: the 9 December order. Sparks calls Ruppelt's "every detail" statement "a blatant falsehood". He writes that Ruppelt knew very well that on 9 December 1952 his boss, Colonel Donald L. Bower, had forbidden him to visit the CIA to give OSI officials certain UFO case reports needed for the panel.^[1][6] Sparks does not say in the paper which cases were involved.^[1]
• Cover-up No. 9: the Dayton visit. Sparks says Ruppelt's "preliminary review panel" was really an aggressive CIA effort to break through the Air Force cover-up, which the CIA had only just learned about.^[1]
  • After Bower's order, the CIA decided to visit Ruppelt in Dayton, Ohio, on 12 December 1952. The aim was to obtain the withheld documents and review other material on site.^[1]
  • The three visitors were Robertson himself; Dr H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA's Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence; and the CIA/OSI official Frederick Durant.^[1] Sparks describes Durant as a personal friend of Ruppelt who used their rapport to uncover Bower's orders. He says Durant's report noted Ruppelt's reluctance to disclose what was going on.^[1]
  • Durant's own later record of the panel's meetings confirms a visit to ATIC by Chadwell, Robertson and Durant as part of the run-up to the panel.^[5]
• Battelle and the postponement. During the Dayton visit, Sparks writes, the CIA group met "very surprised and disturbed" staff of the Battelle Memorial Institute.^[1]
  • Battelle was carrying out an exhaustive statistical analysis of the entire Blue Book database, about 4,000 reports, and could not finish in time for a panel planned for the following month.^[1]
  • The CIA officials agreed Battelle's work should be included and tried to postpone the panel to give it time.^[1]
  • They were overruled, Sparks says, by their own Director, an Army general who sided with the Air Force's demand for an immediate review.^[1] The DCI at the time was Walter Bedell Smith.^[4]
  • Sparks also writes that the CIA had first tried to set up a permanent scientific study of UFOs, but the Air Force vetoed it and insisted on a hasty review panel.^[1]
• Cover-up No. 10: the rush. After the 12 December visit, Sparks says, Ruppelt and everyone else, including the CIA, thought the panel would be postponed.^[1]
  • Ten days later plans changed again. Ruppelt phoned Air Defense Command on 22 December 1952, confirmed by teletype on 23 December, to postpone his briefing tour because the CIA panel was now set for early January.^[1]
  • Sparks reads the Battelle letter of 9 January 1953 by Howard Cross, the so-called Pentacle memo, as a "desperate effort to buy time" for Battelle. He rejects Jacques Vallée's reading of it as a sinister plot.^[1]
  • In Sparks's view it was the Air Force, not the CIA, that "stampeded the Robertson Panel to a hasty conclusion over the objections of CIA's OSI officials".^[1]
• Cover-up No. 11: the briefing. Sparks says Ruppelt told the panel that the Air Force had never found "one measurement of size, speed or altitude that could be considered to be even fairly accurate".^[1]
  • Ruppelt said this even though he knew of cine-theodolite films from White Sands in April and May 1950.^[1]
  • For the 27 April 1950 case, two tracking stations had triangulated four objects at about 150,000 feet and about 30 feet across, according to a 15 May 1950 data-reduction report by the Holloman mathematician Wilbur L. Mitchell.^[1]
  • Those films, reports and witnesses were not put before the panel. Sparks concludes that the panel's outcome was "predetermined" once Ruppelt helped the Air Force keep this evidence from the CIA.^[1]
• Sparks's wider argument. The withholding claim is one of eleven "Ruppelt Coverups" in the paper. Sparks's overall theme is that Ruppelt repeatedly claimed the government had no measured speed, size or altitude data on UFOs, while concealing that it did.^[1]
  • He does not suggest discarding Ruppelt's book. He says it should be used "much more cautiously and critically", especially on questions of official cover-up.^[1]
  • He notes that Ruppelt, who died in 1960 aged 37, could not be interviewed for the research.^[1][3]

The documentary basis

• Sources cited. Sparks bases the 9 December claim on CIA documents he obtained, but the proceedings paper does not reproduce or quote the documents for this episode. He described it as "a preliminary paper" and expected to add documentation later.^[1]
• Other records. The CIA's 1997 history of its UFO work, by staff historian Gerald Haines, describes the 4 December 1952 IAC decision and the January 1953 panel. Among the sources read here, it does not mention any Air Force withholding of cases.^[4]
• Shellenberger's summary. Shellenberger's timeline describes the withheld material as "compelling UAP data" and says the CIA held the panel "without these key cases", citing the workshop proceedings.^[7] Sparks's paper itself says only "certain UFO case reports". It presents the 12 December Dayton visit as an attempt to obtain them, without saying whether it succeeded.^[1]
• Another Bower episode. Sparks's Cover-up No. 7 also involves Bower. Ruppelt's own memo of 23 July 1952 shows that when Ruppelt asked to stay in Washington to investigate the National Airport sightings, Bower simply refused. Ruppelt's book instead tells a story about being unable to get a staff car.^[1] See Washington, D.C. UFO incident.

Significance

• A limited selection. If Sparks is right, the panel judged UFOs on a narrower set of cases than Ruppelt's book implied. The panel itself reviewed about 23 of 2,331 Air Force cases in roughly 12 hours.^[2]
• The panel's conclusions. The Robertson Panel found no direct threat to national security. It recommended stripping UFOs of their "special status" and "aura of mystery" through a training and public education programme, and recommended watching civilian UFO groups.^[2][5]
• Lasting effect. According to the researcher Swords, as summarised in the Wikipedia account, the report greatly reduced concern about UFOs within the military and intelligence agencies.^[2] Ruppelt's own Blue Book staff was cut from more than ten people to three after the panel reported, and he asked to leave the project in late 1953.^[3]
• Ruppelt's reputation. Hynek called Ruppelt honest and seriously puzzled, and recommended his book to anyone interested in UFO history.^[3] Sparks's paper argues it should be read critically.^[1] The earlier version of this article said "historians argue" the report sharply reduced official interest. Among the sources read here, that view is attributed to Swords.^[2]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.
• Edward Ruppelt — Head of Project Blue Book in 1952–53 and author of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Robertson Panel — Robertson Panel
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects — Edward Ruppelt's 1956 book.
• Project Sign — The Air Force's first formal UFO study (1948), whose staff reportedly favoured an interplanetary explanation.

On the Timeline

• CIA–MIT talks on UFO study (1952) (2 December 1952) — A CIA science chief meets MIT leaders about studying UAP through Project Lincoln.
• Toronto dematerialization claim (1953) (1953) — An RAF instructor claims he saw a successful 'dematerialization' experiment in Toronto.

See every 1952 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Robertson Panel”, “Edward J. Ruppelt”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.