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
6065 Back by Frank Mannor's house the road jammed up with the cars of the expectant; one man scraped away at a violin for an hour in the hope of sum-moning creatures from outer space and another blinked a light in what he described as a "pi code"—which he believed to be the key to interplanetary understanding. Many came to scoff. Mannor grew more indignant by the hour. "People are trying to make a fanatic out of me," he complained. "They was still tramping around here at 3 o'clock this morning and look at them now. They say, 'How much money are you going to make off this?' That's crazy. I don't want no money. I didn't want no publicity in the first place. I don't want none now. I'm just a simple fellow. But I seen what I seen and nobody's going to tell me different. That wasn't no old foxfire or hullabillusion. It was an object. Maybe it'll come back if all these people would stay away and we could get a picture and have verication of it. Anybody wants to give me a lie -detectortest I'll take it." Leona, his wife, was more succinct: "We ain't Martians—they act like you're not human or something because you seen it. I'm about to get a gun and shoot some of these smart alecks if they don't stay to hell away." 10,147 FLYING SAUCER SIGHTINGS (Ever since the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel recorded an encounter with a fiery flying wheel, people have been seeing saucerlike things in the sky. In the following report Life Correspondent Bill Wise tells of the Air Force's efforts to make sense of all.) DAYTON, OHIO.—There have been 10,147 reported UFO sightings since a pri- vate pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed he saw a set of rapidly moving "things" in the air near Mount Rainier, Wash., on June 24, 1947. Arnold's widely publicized report set off the first of the modern epidemics of saucer sighting, and the Air Force has been in the saucer business ever since. Its "Project Bluebook" occupies a single room on the second floor of a windowless red concrete building here at Wright -Patterson Air Force Base. Its functions: (1) to try to find an explanation for all reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, (2) to dis- cover whether the UFO's pose any security threat, and (3) to determine if UFO's exhibit any advanced technology which the United States could put to use. To assist Project Bluebook, there is an UFO officer stationed at every Air Force base in the country; the officer at the base nearest a reported sighting is respon- sible for initiating the investigation. According to Maj. Hector Quintanella, Jr., a physicist who heads Project Bluebook, most UFO sightings have a rational and usually very simple explanation. The most common reports stem from bright stars, planets and meteorites, particularly when viewed through broken clouds or haze. Others turn out to be satellites—few people realize that there are now more than 30 of these in orbit that are visible to the naked eye. Thousands of bal- loons—some as large as 300 feet in diameter, some carrying running lights—are released daily at airports, weather stations and research centers, and these leadto a great many "saucer" reports. Conventional aircraft are another major source—reflecting sun by day or providing the glow of running lights or jet afterburners or the flash of photo recon strobe lights at night. All satellites and most weather balloons and aircraft are being carefully tracked and logged by military or civilian agencies, and Project Bluebook rou- tinely checks sightings against these records. Unreported local flights by privateaircraft pose the most frequent problem in this detective work. Strange blips on radar screens have occasionally unsettled personnel at track- ing stations—e.g., two "objects" that appeared on the scopes at Patuxent NavalAir Station (Md.) last December seemingly approaching the base at an estimated 4,800 miles an hour before making a tight turn and disappearing. But these can generally be traced to pulsating "bugs" within a receiving set or to interference from other neighboring electronic gear. Wright -Patterson experts have beenable to account for every errant radar blip reported to date. There is no question that our Air Force and those of other countries employ assorted airborne hardware as tactical and training devices. Many of these are, of course, seen as flying saucers and it is obvious that for security reasons the Air Force is reluctant to talk about them. "I have looked at the records of nearly every UFO case back to 1947," says Major Quintanella, "and my feeling is that the vast majority have involved simple misinterpretation of natural phenomena."
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.