Scientists Debate the Question of UFO's

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## Deceptive Reasoning

life history of our solar system. The number of habitable

The believers, I feel, are much too eager to reach a decision. Their method is quite simple. They try to find someone whom they can establish as an authority, someone who will support their views. Then they quote and often misquote various authorities, or they misquote one another, until they believe what they are saying. Having no real logic on their side, they resort to innuendo and ridicule and try to discredit those who fail to support their view. The UFO magazines all refer to me as the archdemon of saucer-dom!

To the buffs all sightings are true UFO's unless proved otherwise.

I concede that the concept of manned spaceships is not an absolute impossibility. Neither are the concepts of ghosts, spirits, witches, fairies, elves, hobgloblins or the devil. The only trouble with this last list is the fact that they are somewhat out of date. We live in the age of space. Isn't it natural that beings from outer space should exhibit a similar interest in us? But when we consider that these beings — if indeed they are beings — have been bugging us for centuries, why should not one have landed on the White House lawn and shown himself to the President of the United States, to a member of the National Academy of Sciences or at least to some one of you editors?

Now, please don't misunderstand me. I think it is very possible that intelligent life, hopefully more intelligent than we may exist somewhere in the vast reaches of outer space. But it is the very vastness of this space that complicates the problem. The distances are almost inconceivable. The time required to reach the earth even at speeds comparable to that of light range in hundreds, if not thousands, of years for some of our nearer neighbors. And it takes light some billions of years to reach us from the most distant galaxies, times comparable with that for the entire

you have heard, including mine, are just guesses. I have guessed that our own Milky Way many contain as many as a million such planets. That sounds like a lot, but the chances are that if this figure is right, the nearest inhabited planet would be so far away that if we sent out a message to it today, we should have to wait about 2,000 years to get a reply. Alas, the evidence is poor for intelligent life in our solar system, although I would rather expect to find some low forms of life on planet Mars.

## Other Reasons

With respect to UFO's, my position is simply this: that other natural explanations exist Dr. McDonald to the contrary for the unexplained sightings. The Air Force has given me full access to their files. I concur with Dr. MacDonald that there is no vast conspiracy by either the Air Force or the CIA to conceal the facts from the public, as many groups have charged.

The Air Force has made its mistakes. They never have had enough scientists in the project. They have failed to follow up certain sightings of special importance. To me their questionnaire is amateurish, almost cleverly designed in certain cases to get the wrong answers and lose track of the facts. The Air Force is aware of my criticism. And at Major Quinta-

From 1947 until 1954 a bewildered group of Air Force personnel tried honestly and sincerely to resolve the UFO problem. Many highly reliable persons had reported seeing objects moving at fantastic speeds and apparently taking evasive action in a manner impossible for known terrestrial craft. By 1952 a sizable number of those in the Air Force group had concluded that extraterrestrial vehicles were the only expla-

nilla's invitation I have been making constructive criticisms and trying to help them in a revision of the questionnaire. It is not an easy job.

ploited these ideas, and soon various UFO clubs came into

## eCIFA RDP69B00369R000200240055-8

have heard, a committee of scientists headed by H.P. Robertson of Cal Tech met at CIA to consider a number of the Air Force's most convincing cases. These cases were supposedly the ones that had convinced the Air Force personnel who had worked on them as the 20 to 30 most outstanding cases, the ones that looked as if there was absolutely no other explanation except UFO's from outer space to account for the sightings. The Robertson Committee immediately solved a number of them. The rest they could not solve only because of poor or insufficient data. The questionnaire again! They concluded that all cases had a natural solution. And the report states that there is no evidence to support the idea that UFO's are vehicles from another world.

Nevertheless, the UFO buffs believe, almost as an article of faith, that special observers, such as military or airline pilots, couldn't possibly mistake a meteor or a planet or a star, a sundog or a mirage for a UFO. This viewpoint is absolute nonsense, and the Air Force files bear witness to its falsity! They contain thousand of solved cases - sightings by the same kind of "reliable individuals," like the pilots. But such persons have often made huge errors in the identification.

## Meteor Mistaken

A huge meteor flashes by in the sky! The copilot thinks it is going to strike the plane and takes evasive action. He may even imagine that his plane is hit by the backwash from this UFO. The pilot disagrees, the pilot is right. The UFO proves to be a bright fireball or meteor a hundred miles away! such occurrences are frequent, not rare.

Distances, especially in space, are hard to estimate. If you're in the air, a thing you might think is 100 feet away from you actually may be a star that is clear back in the firmament.

brightly in the sun, floating a mere 20 feet overhead may, to someone on the ground, seem to be a distant object moving at a very high speed.

Conversely, a pilot may think the bright object on the horizon, in reality a star or planet, that lies just beyond his wing tip is a UFO. Sometimes a layer of warm air, sandwiched between two layers of cold air, can act as a lens, projecting a pulsing, spinning, vividly colored saucer-like image of a planet. (I have seen this phenomenon myself, despite the fact that the previous speaker in his lengthy manuscript tries to discredit my sighting.) Pilots, thinking they were dealing with a nearby flying object, have often tried to intercept such images which evade, of course all attempts to cut them off. The distance may seem to change rapidly as the star fades or increases in intensity. Because, as the pilot flies along, the star may even be completely cut off at times by a mountain or by a forest and it will seem to buzz in and out from the plane, attacking the plane. It's realistic and very frightening.

The observations of this type fortify the UFO legend that these objects "maneuver as if under intelligent control." But the pilots fail to realize that the "intelligent control" came from within themselves, and I think that the Air Force personnel of Project Blue Book still do not appreciate this important UFO phenomenon.

Miages aren't the only apparitions that appear to maneuver. I think I was the first person to point out that a special kind of reflection of the sun (or moon) from ice crystals, sometimes called a sundog (or moondog), can also perform evasive action. Layers of ice crystals are necessary like those found in cirrus clouds. An aviator, flying through cirrus, sometimes sees a peculiar metallic-appearing reflection. The reflection often has a reddish tinge on one side, a reflection of the sun or moon. He may elect to chase it. The apparition will recede if approached.