Edward J. Ruppelt

Edward J. Ruppelt (1923–1960) was a U.S. Air Force officer, a bombardier in the Second World War who became an intelligence officer at the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson. In 1951, as a captain, he was put in charge of the Air Force's UFO investigation, which he reorganised as Project Blue Book, and he ran it through the 1952 wave, including the Washington, D.C., radar sightings and the Tremonton film, until late 1953, shortly after the CIA's Robertson Panel. He is generally credited with coining the term "unidentified flying object".

His book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956) is the first insider's account of the Air Force investigations, and historians, including J. Allen Hynek, regard his tenure as Blue Book's most capable period. He was open about the residue of unexplained cases and about the Air Force's own confusion. In the expanded 1960 edition, published months before he died of a heart attack at 37, he added chapters that took a much more sceptical line, ending by calling the UFO "our Space Age Myth".

Sources: Wikipedia · Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956/1960, Project Gutenberg)