Documents / Hearing transcript
This is an excerpt from the record of the April 5, 1966 House Armed Services Committee hearing on UFOs, which the Internet Archive holds. It includes correspondence about the September 3, 1965 Exeter, New Hampshire sighting involving Raymond E. Fowler, Project Blue Book and the Exeter police officers, plus a letter on the matter from Minority Leader Ford. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Major Hector Quintanilla and Secretary Harold Brown testify. They say the police officers' observation remains unidentified and that no radar data or jet scrambles were involved.
6043 Dr. HYNEK. It is, I believe, to the best of my knowledge, listed as unidentified. Mr. BATES. This one is still unidentified? Dr. HYNEK. Yes, sir. The CHAIRMAN. In other words, you make no bones about it, you cannot explain it? Dr. Himx. That is correct. The CHAIRAN. Yes. Mr. BATES. I wonder if you would give us some idea of these 20 cases that you have cited, and tell us a little somlthifig about the nature of these cases and what the problems are, generally . Dr. HYNEK. Well, I do not have the case files with me. I should be happy to prepare them for submission. But in broad description, they vary .quite a bit. They are either daytime sightings or night- time sightings. I will describe one, which may not be necessarily typical. But it is an example of a sighting that puzzled some very solid citizens. These individuals hippened-to be-and I will with- hold names, of course-two students of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. They were with two other people ina car, returning home one evening from shopping, about 9 p.m. In the distance they saw what they first took to-be rotating blinker Iights on a police car, and they thought there had been an accident down the road some p lace. They then decided that this -couldn't be the case because the lights were a little too high. This illustrates the sort of thing we refer toas escalation -of explanation. When someone writes in or calls in that they have seen a space ship patrolling the earth, and this' is not a fact, thlis is an interpret~tifn of a fact, usually, what they have ad.itily seen was a light, I am much more interested in the sincere individuals who- report some- thing, who say "I thought at first it was this, then I decide-it couldn't be that it. had tobe somhithing else." In this escalation h'pothesis, the idte 'ht I have described, these peo Iaid it could not have been blinker lights on a police car because they were too high. The next hypothesis was that it was an aircmft about to cdtash. As the object came closer all they could see were four huge red lights and an even larger brighter single white light. As it came closer to the car-the title 12-year-old girl in the back seat, became so frightened that she just tumbled overand hidher eyes. I questioned these people for some 2 hours. They were very intelli- gent people and were truly puzzled. They did not for a moment think they were being visited by a vehicle from outer space. They were just puzzled. They simply wanted an explanation of what they had seen. The object apparently extended upward at an angle of about 30 degrees, so that part of it could be seen above the telephone wires and part below. It hovered around the car for awhile. The man drove into a farmer's driveway, turned his lights out and listened, but could hear no noise. He backed out and as the object began to move away, he gave chase but could not catch up with it. This was a case of four intelligent people seeing this strange object and reporting it. But no one else did. Why not? Was this some sort of a strange phychic projection, or something these people were particularly prone-to? Why did thistake place in an area which was
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 37 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.