Copyright 1999, Wendy A. Connors

C. B. Moore then	C.B. Moore today

Edward Ruppelt:
After a quiet January, TRUE again clobbered the reading public.  This time it was a story in the March 1950 issue and it was entitled, "How Scientist Tracked Flying Saucers."  It was written by none other than the man who was at that time in charge of a team of Navy scientists at the super hush-hush guided missile test and development area, White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico.  He was Commander R. B. McLaughlin, an Annapolis graduate and a regular Navy officer.  His story had been cleared by the military and was an absolute, 180-degree, direct contradiction to every press release that had been made by the military in the past two years.  Not only did the commander believe that he had proof that UFO's were real but that he knew what they were.  "I am convinced," he wrote in the TRUE article, "that it," referring to a UFO he had see at White Sands, "was a flying saucer, and further, that these disks are spaceships from another planet, operated by animate, intelligent beings." 

On several occasions during 1948 and 1949, McLaughlin or his crew at the White Sands Proving Ground had made good UFO sightings.  The best one was on April 24, 1949, when the commander's crew of engineers, scientists, and technicians were getting ready to launch one of the huge 100-foot-diameter skyhook balloons.  It was 10:30 A.M. on an absolutely clear Sunday morning.  Prior to the launching, the crew had set up a small weather balloon to check the winds at lower levels.  One man was watching the balloon through a theodolite, an instrument similar to a surveyor's transit built around a 25-power telescope, one man was holding a stop watch, and a third had a clipboard to record the measured data.  The crew had tracked the balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly shouted and pointed off to the left.  The whole crew looked at the part of the sky where the man was excitedly pointing, and there was a UFO. "It didn't appear to be large," one of the scientists later said,  "but it was plainly visible.  It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape and had a 'whitish-silver color.'"  After taking a split second to realize what they were looking at, one of the men swung the theodolite around to pick up the object, and the timer reset his stop watch.  For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it moved toward the east.  In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped from an angle of elevation of 45 degrees to 25 degrees, then it zoomed upward and in a few seconds it was out of sight.  The crew head no sound and the New Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard "a whisper a mile away." 

When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second.  At one time during the observed portion of its flight, the UFO had passed in front of a range of mountains that were visible to the observers.  Using this as a check point, they estimated the size of the UFO to be 40 feet wide and 100 feet long, and they computed that the UFO had been at an altitude of 296,000 feet, or 56 miles, when they had first seen it, and that it was traveling 7 miles per second. 

Edward J. Ruppelt, Capt.
Project Blue Book