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.
“Terry”1 page
6020 INTERESTING SIDELIGHTS 1. Mr. and Mrs. Chase of Kensington who live a few miles down Route 150 told me that: (a) An Air Force officer had gone around to all the stores selling news- papers in Exeter and purchased all copies of the Manchester, N.H., UnionLeader newspaper which carried a detailed account of these sightings and a posed photo of Herman Muscarello and Officers Bertrand, Hunt, andTowland. The police had not heard of this and I did not check further. (a) Mrs. Chase, a nurse, was on duty at the Exeter Hospital during the sightings and told me that the Hampton, N.H. police phoned the hospital to see if a man was brought into the hospital suffering a heart attack orshock. This was in relation to the hysterical man who tried to reach the police by phone about being chased by a UFO. Reference sighting No. 5. (c) Mrs. Chase also told me that a friend of hers, a Mrs. Parker Blodgett, works as a correspondent for the "Haverhill (Mass.) Gazette" newspaper and was asked by the USAF not to publish UFO reports. (However, she did, as I have a copy of her article dated September 7, 1965.) 2. A Mrs. St. Laurente of Kingston Road, Kensington, N.H. told a church minister friend of mine that her brother, who usually cuts the hay on the Carl Dining field, refuses to do so because he has heard that the hay has been contaminated by radiation. 3. The police told me that for the past few weeks previous to the sightings they have received reports from people, some of them personal friends, of their whole house suddenly being momentarily illuminated by a bright reddish glow after they had gone to bed. No objects were seen. 4. Mr. and Mrs. DeMarco, N. Hampton Road (Route 88), Hampton, N.H., observed a star -like object blinking red which alternately hovered and moved in the western sky between 9 and 9:30 p.m. on September 5, 1965. Since Venushad set and Mr. DeMarco was a former USAF control tower operator who assured me that it was not an aircraft, I thought the report was worth mentioning. 5. A Mr. Rice, who owns a CB radio told me that he was talking over his radio with a Portsmouth, N.H., police cruiser on September 7, 1965, about 8:00 p.m. e.d.t. The officer told him that he was out investigating a UFO report and asked Mr. Rice to give him a call if he spotted it. He said the UFO was supposed to be over the Hampton Falls area near where Mr. Rice lives on Route 88. No UFO was seen by Mr. Rice. The cruiser used call letters KMA-8616 and usedboth channel No. 2 and No. 6. 6. Since the UFO sighting at the Carl Dining field, many cars pull up and watch for the object at night. Mr. Dining had to rope off the entrance to his field and post it as people were littering his property. 7. Mrs. Muscarello thinks the USAF Lieutenant's name was Brant. 8. On my first two visits to the Carl Dining field on the morning of September 11, 1965, I saw a low -flying 0-119 Flying Boxcar pass over the area on both occasions.9. Other civilian UFO Investigators were given the brushoff by the police. I was very fortunate to have received such a good response from them. EVALUATION Characters of witnesses Muscarello: Comes from twice-broken home—has had problems with police and is well-known by them—usually a cool, calm boy. Until my personal inter- view with him I can say no more. Bertrand and Hunt: Credible witnesses, good observers with a keen desire torelate only facts—I could not even Versuade them to guess at estimates of the object's real size and speed. The sightings Sighting No. 1: There is enough similarity between the unidentified woman's report and the detailed sightings No. 2 and No. 3 to warrant its probable au- thenticity. The chances of a similar report occurring the same morning, unless it were authentic, is astronomical. It is possible that the object she pointed outto Officer Bertrand was Jupiter and not the object that had chased her. Sightings No. 2 and No. 3: The credibility of the witnessing police officers coupled with the sightings of Muscarello; the many typical UFO characteristics
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.