Harley Rutledge

Harley D. Rutledge was an American physicist and ufologist. He earned a doctorate in solid-state physics from the University of Missouri and spent nearly two decades as chair of the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University. In the 1970s Rutledge directed Project Identification, a long-term field investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena in Missouri that was reported as the first sustained scientific study of UFOs. The project involved trained observers and technical instruments, and his findings were published in the 1981 book Project Identification: The First Scientific Study of UFO Phenomena. Though widely recognized as a UFO expert and frequent media commentator, Rutledge emphasized that many sightings had conventional explanations.