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.
“The Pentagon”5 pages
6064 Frank called his 19 -year -old son, Ronnie. Suit pants or not, they started down toward whatever it was. "I thought a meteor had hit, that maybe we could pick up pieces of it," Frank said. It never for a minute occurred to him that the United States hadn't had a good, mysterious flying saucer manifestation for a coon's age, that it was proba- bly time for a new visitation from the mysterious little men from outer space and that they had decided to use southern Michigan in general and his swamp in particular for the dangdest display of flashing lights and whizzing half -seen objects since Frank Perkins fired a .22 rifle at a New York crow—and hit a fireworks factory—back in 1951. Frank Mannor soon realized that he and his son were stalking some kind of thing. The ground between his house and the swamp is hummocky, rolling, hut the night was clear and moonlit and the glow ahead was plain. "Just like we were hunting deer," Frank said to Ronnie, "Don't talk, we'll sneak up on it." They jumped a creek, climbed a rise, and there it was, a few hundred yards ahead in the marsh. The thing seemed as long as an automobile, and wore a green light on one end and a white light on the other. Its back was humped and looked grayish- or bluish -brown and was "quilted" or rough "like coral rock," It seemed to be sitting perhaps 8 feet off the ground in a patch of mist. "Like a man in a boat on a misty lake in the morning—you can see the man but can't quite make out the boat." Suddenly it turned blood red. "Look at that horrible thing, Dad," blurted Ronnie—and the lights instantly went out. Both began running toward it. "I was a -puffin'," said Mannor. "But when we got there it was zone. I hunted for 4 hours but there was no sign or smell of it. I'm glad I didn't have a gun. I'd a shot it and I might have harmed someone." Back at the house, meantime, Mannor's wife Leona—a woman who wears shapeless slacks and a flannel shirt with the tail out—decided to call the nearby Dexter village police. "We've got an object out here," she said formally. "that looks like what they call a flying saucer. It's got lights on it down in the swamp." Since the Mannors are on an eight-party line Leona told a great many other other people, too, and the word spread like lightning—or the glow from a flying saucer. Cops and deputy sheriffs were soon tumbling out of cars and thrashing off toward the marsh, and the road beyond the house was jammed solid withthe cars of gawkers. Most of them were rewarded for their effort. Dexter Police Chief Robert Taylor and Patrolman Nolan Lee saw the red glow as they stumbled around in the dark; so did Washtenaw County Deputy Sheriffs Stan- ley McFadden and David Fitzpatrick. All reported, like Mannar, that the light eventually vanished. But unlike their host, who said, "I never seen it take off," the cops felt it had zipped away over Mannor's house making a sound like "an ambulance." "I seen it," said McFadden, "but I still don't believe it." Dexter Patrolman Robert Hunawill saw a "strange, lighted object" appearover his patrol car as he waited in the road for those who had set out for the swamp. It had red and white lights "which at times had a bluish tinge" and made continuing sweeps over the swamp at a height of 1,000 feet and then, on being joined by three other "objects," flew away. Chief Taylor's 16 -year -old son Robert saw one lighted thing at 10:30. It flashed red and white and hurried off to the west. Ann Arbor, though sharply divided between scoffers and believers the next day, still seemed to feel a unanimous civic pride in the fact that the Air Force had taken cognizance of its lurid phenomenon by dispatching Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, director of Northwestern University's Dearborn Observatory, to weighthe tales of the elect and, no doubt, send a message of gravity and import to the Pentagon. They were even more heartened to hear that Hynek did not instantly announce that Mannor and his fellow bushwhackers had simply seen the Uni- versity of Michigan's dish-shaped Peach Mountain radio telescope, which standsagainst the sky beyond the area in which they saw the glowing thing. Hynek, a bearded man who has investigated a hundred other "sightings" for the Air Force in the last two decades, was sure Mannor was too accustomed to the tele- scope to ever mistake it for anything else. "I believe the people who made these sightings are entirely honest and sin- cere," he said. "But I am not willing to guess what they saw." He hedged whenasked if he thought the thing might conceivably have been a new "test vehicle" of some sort. "I think I know much more of what is going on than * * *" hebegan, but then halted and said, "so I don't think I should say anything * * *I'm sure there is some natural explanation for all of this."
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.