Flying Saucers Over the White House

Book excerpt: Flying Saucers Over the White House is the story of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, a US Air Force officer who researched UFO sightings in the 1950s and made a concentrated effort to convince the United States Air Force that UFOs exist. Ruppelt, who coined the term 'UFO', headed "Project Blue Book," an assignment designed by the United States government to investigate and report on the existence of unidentified flying objects and their link to extraterrestrial beings. Ruppelt dissected the evidence, separating chance sightings of ordinary objects from true UFO sightings. He eventually wrote The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, summarizing his findings. In Flying Saucers Over the White House, Bennett examines the life of this "founding father" of ufology, analyzing the evidence and the U.S. government's reporting of this phenomenon for a new generation of readers. COLIN BENNETT has written several books, including The Entertainment Bomb, *Looking for Orthon*, and Politics of the Imagination, which won the Anomalist Award for Best Biography in 2002. After leaving school to become a professional musician, Bennett returned to college to study English at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He wrote several plays that were performed in London before reinventing himself as an electronics engineer and founding a consulting agency. Bennett currently resides in London where he continues to write and discover new interests.