34th Air Division, 1952: Los Alamos UFO Reports and a Ruppelt Briefing
An air defense history from Kirtland AFB records an 'overwhelming number' of UFO reports around Albuquerque and Los Alamos in late 1952, a Blue Book briefing by Capt Ruppelt, and the division's new UFO report form and regulation.
What this record is
This is the history of the 34th Air Division (Defense) at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, for 1 July to 31 December 1952. It was prepared for the historical office of Western Air Defense Force. The title page (page 5 of the PDF) names the command historian, 2d Lt Lloyd D. Gary, and the commander, Col William A. Matheny. The metadata also names the historical technician, A/1C Frank C. Idaspe. The division’s job was to defend New Mexico’s nuclear sites, above all the laboratory at Los Alamos and the weapons complex at Kirtland and Sandia, and much of the 434-page file deals with that: alert plans, warning procedures with the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, and exercise reports. The history was classified SECRET.
It is in the UAP transfer because the division’s intelligence staff spent a good part of late 1952 dealing with unidentified flying object reports. The history records that work and includes the forms and regulation the division wrote as a result.
What it says about UFOs
There are three passages, on pages 53, 55 and 95 to 98 of the PDF.
Page 53 opens the intelligence section of the Deputy for Operations’ report. It says that during the period there had been “an overwhelming number” of UFO reports in and around the area, from base personnel and from civilians in Albuquerque and neighbouring towns. Most came from the Albuquerque and Los Alamos area, and often one unconventional sighting was reported by a large number of people. Lt Glen D. Parrish, an intelligence officer, went to Los Alamos to investigate flying objects, and on one occasion he went to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for the same purpose. Information copies of reports received from OSI were checked for relevant facts and filed for further research.
The same page records an intelligence briefing by Colonel Donald Bower and Captain Ruppelt, who had come from the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson. Subordinate units, Kirtland personnel and OSI were invited. The two officers covered the technical aspects of the “saucers” and the procedure to follow “in the event that one of the objects falls into our hands”. The history gives no date for the briefing.
Page 55 adds that Lts Parrish, Lewis and Randall attended several meetings held by the Special Weapons Command about “FLYOBRPTS”, the military message code for flying object reports. The main subject was a base policy for reporting them. The division then drafted a regulation on reporting unusual radar observations. The commander approved it, and it went out to all subordinate units with an Air Defense Command radar observation data sheet and a new division form, 34th AD(D) Form 127. A footnote says the FLYOBRPT material is at the close of the chapter as Tab 1.
That tab is pages 95 to 98. Pages 95 and 96 are a blank 34ADD Form 127, “Unidentified Flying Object Report (FLYOBRPT)”. It asks for shape, size, colour, number, formation, aerodynamic features, trail or exhaust, propulsion, speed, sound, manoeuvres and manner of disappearance. It asks for the time in Mountain time and in Zulu, the length of observation, whether the sighting was visual or electronic, and the location of the observer and the object. It asks about the observer’s experience with aircraft, the weather, and anything that might explain the sighting, such as a weather balloon or a shooting star. It asks about physical evidence, about any interception or identification action by the division, and about known air traffic. The receiving officer had to rate the reporter’s reliability.
Pages 97 and 98 hold 34th Air Division Regulation 200-1, “Reporting of Information on Unidentified Flying Objects”, dated 16 December 1952. It replaced an earlier edition of 19 May 1952. It made every member of the command responsible for reporting unusual airborne sightings, visual or radar, and made the division’s Director of Intelligence responsible for reports under Air Force Letter 200-5 of 29 April 1952 and ADC Regulation 200-5 of 29 October 1952. Sightings were to be phoned at once to the senior controller at the air defense control centre, using the Form 127 headings. For radar sightings, units had to fill in the radar data sheet and, wherever possible, photograph the radar scope at three pictures a minute for the whole observation. The undeveloped film went to the Director of Intelligence with certified extracts of the scope camera and controller logs.
The history does not describe any individual sighting, and no green fireballs are mentioned by name. It records the volume of reports, not their content.
Context
New Mexico had been a centre of Air Force concern since the green fireballs of 1948 and 1949 over Los Alamos and Sandia. Those led to the 1949 Los Alamos conference and to Project Twinkle. The period of this history includes the great wave of summer 1952, when reports across the country reached their highest level. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was then head of Project Blue Book at ATIC, and the site has the text of a 1952 Ruppelt presentation of the kind given at Kirtland. Air Force Letter 200-5 of April 1952 was the first service-wide order to send UFO reports straight to ATIC. This division’s regulation turned that order into a local procedure with its own form.
Status
The record’s value is administrative. It shows an air defense division near the country’s most sensitive nuclear sites swamped with reports during the 1952 wave, sending an officer to Los Alamos to investigate, receiving Blue Book’s chief in person, and writing its own rules and form so that reports would come in complete and with radar film where possible. It does not describe what anyone saw, and it contains no case findings. The line about what to do if a “saucer” fell into Air Force hands is best read as contingency planning in a briefing, as the history presents it, and not as evidence that any such thing happened.