Talk:Estimate of the Situation

Ruppelt’s 1956 book cleared by USAF?
Sword’s opinion that “Ruppelt's published account of the material contained in the ‘’Estimate of the Situation’’ left out significant documentation proving that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin” would mean US Air Force censorship of the book, is off-base. There is no proof of that. Nobody knows why Ruppelt did so.

What we do know is that he posed the question, “What constitutes proof?”:


 * The hassle over the word “proof” boils down to one question: What constitutes proof? Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof? The at times hotly debated answer to this question may be the answer to the question, “Do the UFOs really exist?” I’ll give you the facts - all of the facts - you decide.

So he was not going to “prove” the UFOs to be of extraterrestrial origin. He even left it to the reader to decide whether the UFOs really existed or not, which question has to be answered ‘’before’’ any discussion of their origin. Ruppelt obviously tried to not take sides. ‘’This’’ cautious approach may much more have been the real reason why he left out the material that ‘’Sign’’ thought to be “proof” of the interplanetary origin of the UFOs. Maybe he had other reasons, for instance, that the material seems to be too hot in his opinion. We do not know. It is quite unnecessary to speculate about US Air Force censoring interference, and more so since Ruppelt was a “whistleblower”. The Air Force would have done everything to prevent the book from being published, they would with certainty not have “cleared” it, to be sure.

Swords speculation makes no sense, at least in the form Hoyt quotes it, and the alleged “clearance” is off-base. This paragraph should therefore, in my opinion, not be included in the article.7bells (talk) 00:23, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
 * There were a couple of newspaper articles from around that time that were 'approved' by the Air Force as part of an initiative to be more open with the general public but alas I can't find anything about a book being approved. PanydThe muffin is not subtle 13:03, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Redirection
As I see it an Estimate of the Situation is not just something that applied to one UFO conspiracy theory. Nor do I think that anyone would associate it with UFO's outside the field of UFOlogy.Slatersteven (talk) 12:17, 19 May 2020 (UTC)