Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed transcript of an April 5, 1966 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services on unidentified flying objects. Air Force Secretary Harold Brown testified that 9,501 of 10,147 sightings from 1947 through 1965 had been identified and that no threat or extraterrestrial evidence had been found. The record includes the Scientific Advisory Board ad hoc committee report recommending university studies and the Air Force's marsh gas explanation for the Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan sightings. Members also questioned J. Allen Hynek and Maj. Hector Quintanilla about the Exeter, New Hampshire case.
6015 "He was right. It was coming up over a row of trees. There was no noise at all. It was about 100 feet in the air, and about 200 feet away from us. I could see five bright red lights in a straight row. They dimmed from right to left, and then from left to right—just like an advertising sign does. It lit up everything around us. But it was silent. The horses started kicking and making an awful fuss, and the dogs in the farm started barking. The kid froze in his tracks, and I grabbed him and pulled him toward the police car. I reached for my revolver and then thought better of it. Then Officer David Hunt arrived in another patrol car. "We sat there and looked at it for at least 10 minutes. My brain kept telling me that this doesn't happen—but it was, right in front of my eyes. There was no tail, no wings, and again no sound. It hovered there. still about 100 feet away, sort of floated and wobbled. I don't know what it was. All I can say is that it was there, and three of us saw it together." Nobody else can tell you exactly what it was, either. Lieutenant Cottrell will tell you that the whole story is on the police blotter, and that you can't find two better officers than Hunt and Bertrand. "If I didn't believe these guys, I'd put 'em in a locked room and give 'em some blocks to play with," he says. The Hampton police will tell you that too many reliable people have reported these sightings to doubt them. The editors at the Manchester Union Leader and the Exeter News -Letter will tell you that the reports are from too many reliable sources to doubt. Moreover, officials suspect other local UFO landings have gone unreported. As Lieutenant Cottrell said, "If I had seen that thing—and I was all alone, nobody else would have ever heard about it." [From the Haverhill Gazette, Oct. 27, 1965] PENTAGON DOESN'T BELIEVE UFO EXETER SIGHTINGS WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Pentagon believes that, after intensive investigation, it has come up with a natural explanation of the UFO sightings in Exeter, N.H., on September 3. A spokesman said the several reports stemmed from "multiple objects in thearea," by which they mean a high -altitude Strategic Air Command exercise outof Westover, Mass., was going on at the time in the area. A second important factor was what is called a weather inversion wherein a layer of cold air is trapped between warm layers. The Pentagon spokesman said this natural phenomena causes "stars and planets to dance and twinkle." The spokesman said "We believe what the people saw that night was stars and planets in unusual formations." (This is the official Air Force "explanation" for the September 3, 1965, UFO sightings in the Kensington -Exeter, N.H. area. I have asked the USAF public information officer at the Pentagon for a copy of their official evaluation for the subcommittee and NICAP files.') RAYMOND E. FOWLER,Chairman, NICAP Massachusetts Subcommittee. NICAP MASSACHUSETTS INVESTIGATING SUBCOMMITTEE, Wenhann„ Mass.Subject: Addendum IV, UFO report, September 3, 1965 (Kensington, N.H.)(Bertraund-Hunt-Muscarello). Date: October 10, 1965. From: Raymond E. Fowler, chairman, NICAP Massachusetts Subcommittee. To: NICAP. This newsclip identifying UFO reports in the southern New Hampshire area is misleading. At the time of the September 3, 1965 UFO sighting I checked with the manager of "Sky-Lite Aerial Advertising Co." and its aircraft was net flying on this night. On October 9 I went over the advertising plane's flight paths between August and October 8. The plane was not even airborne between August 21 and September 10. I See later USAF letter in file which reverses their position.
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.