Documents / Hearing transcript
This NICAP extract reproduces the statement of Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, Jr., a Computer Sciences Corporation scientist and UCLA engineering faculty member, to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics symposium on unidentified flying objects on July 29, 1968. Baker reviews his analyses of the Utah, Montana, Venezuela and Vandenberg films. He argues that current radar and optical sensors are poorly suited to detecting anomalistic phenomena and urges a well-funded, long-term interdisciplinary research program. The extract ends with panel discussion including Hynek and Hall.
“The Advance”14 pages
Dr. Harder. I would only respond to Mr. Boone by suggesting you could reject all objects that were found, for instance, under 90,000 feet. [[190]] Dr. Sagan. That is just what I was going to say. Certain velocity and altitude limitations. Mr. Boone. With that I agree. But I don't think we make many sightings at that altitude. We do have a problem here of what you want to look at. So in fact I think the thrust of Dr. Baker's argument here was that most of the Air Force equipment do not supply the material you would like to have. So you are going to have to go to a much lower altitude, and you are going to have to check a much larger number of targets. Dr. Sagan. I may have misunderstood, but my understanding was, since all of these "uninteresting" trajectory objects are thrown away, we have no way of knowing at the present time whether there are or are not large numbers of interesting objects at altitudes above 90,000 feet. Mr. Boone. What this means is you check each one and determine its trajectory, and then throw it away, so it no longer becomes a simple task of saying "Oh, I only want to look at the unidentified ones." I have to check each one, and discard it. Dr. Sagan. Isn't that being done already? Mr. Boone. No, it doesn't do it below certain altitudes. Dr. Sagan. Right. Mr. Boone. All right. Certain targets are picked up at certain ranges, are they not? Dr. Sagan. Right. So therefore the suggestion is that within the altitude range, that is being used anyway by the surveillance radar -- Mr. Boone. You complicate the procedure. Dr. Sagan. Slightly. Mr. Boone. The procedure is used but it involves the software again which is much more difficult to add to the systems than I believe is being presented. It can be done, there is no question it can be done. Dr. Harder. I would agree the amount of effort that goes into the relative softwares, although by no means a $100 million project, it is not a very simple project. Mr. Roush. Dr. McDonald, do you have a comment? Dr. McDonald. Yes. I would underscore another one of the points, the general points that Dr. Baker made. I think it addresses itself to the question raised. Both scientists and members of the public are quite aware we have many monitoring radar systems, optical and so on. This question is raised often, why aren't UFO's tracked? The point one is struck with in studying each of these systems in turn is the large degree of selectivity that is necessarily built into them. Good examples were cited by Dr. Baker. It has to be kept well in mind that even systems like SAGE when they were developed necessarily had to have programmed into them certain speed limits both lower and upper, certain safe requirements like if the target was on an outbound path it could be ignored. In almost every monitoring system you set up, whether for defense or scientific purposes, if you don't want to be snowed with data, you intentionally built selectivity in, and then you do not see what you are not looking for.
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 68 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.