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.
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6047 Mr. Drummond goes on to state, "We need to get all the data drawn together in one place and examined far more objectively than anyone has done so far. A stable public opinion will come from a trustworthy look at the evidence, not from belittling it. "The time has come for the President or Congress to name an objective and respected panel to investigate, appraise, and report on all present and future evi- dence about what is going on." I agree fully with Mr. Drummond's statements. I also suggest you scan the enclosed series of six articles by Bulkley Griffin of the Griffin-Larrabee News Bureau here. In the last of his articles, published last January, Mr. Griffin says, "A main conclusion can be briefly stated. It is that the Air Force is mis- leading the public by its continuing campaign to produce and maintain belief that all sightings can be explained away as misidentification of familiar objects, such as balloons, stars, and aircraft." I have just today received a number of telegrams urging a congressional inves-tigation of UFO's. One is from retired Air Force Col. Harold R. Brown, Ard- more, Tenn., who says, "I have seen UFO. Will be available to testify." Another, from Mrs. Ethyle M. Davis, Eugene, Oreg., reads, "9 out of 10 people want truth of UFO's. Press your investigation to the fullest." Ronald Colier of Los Angeles, who identifies himself as "a scientist from MIT," urges that you "do everything in your power to make Air Force Project Blue Book (the Air Force name for its study and verdicts on UFO reports) known to the people." Are we to assume that everyone who says he has seen UFO's is an unreliable witness? A UPI story out of Ann Arbor, Mich., dated March 21, 1966, states that "at least 40 persons, including 12 policemen, said today that they saw a strange flying object guarded by 4 sister ships land in a swamp near here Sunday night." Matt Surrell of Station WJR, Detroit, cites an eye witness account of a recent UFO sighting by Emile Grenier of Ann Arbor, an aeronautical engineer employed by Ford Motor Co. He points out that an aeronautical engineer can hardly be considered an untrustworthy witness. In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a com- mittee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFO's and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on this subject. Kindest personal regards. Sincerely, Enclosures. GERALD R. FORD, Member of Congress. [From the Washington Post, Mar. 27, 1966] DON'T SNEER AT UFO's (By Roscoe Drummond)You can't dismiss the possibility that some of the unidentified flying objects, which so many people have sighted in so many places, are real. There are, of course, UFO buffs who seem to want to believe everything and discount logical explanations. But Air Force officials assigned to check up on these sightings seem so bored and skeptical that many people have the impression that they think the public would panic if all the facts were brought out into the open. Let's not leave the search for more knowledge to those who tend to accept everything uncritically or to those who tend to dismiss every UFO as ridiculous. The time has come for the President or Congress to name an objective and respected panel to investigate, appraise and report on all present and future evidence about what is going on. Last week, more than 100 persons (some of them trained observers) reported seeing "flying saucers" in seven States, from Maine to Texas to Colorado. Last year, project Blue Book, the small Air Force unit created to keep tabs on these things, received 886 reports of UFO sightings. During the last 2 years, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe- nomena, a private group headed by a retired Naval Academy Marine Corps pilot, received 3,000 such reports. During the past 10 years, the NICAP received some 8,000 reports and says that 1,500 of them "seem pretty substantial and unexplained."
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.