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.
6046 number of unexplained cases where the data is not sufficiently precise to be he! pfil in'bitihlysis. Mr. N'EDZI. MY final question, Doctor, would be whether-and I think you touched upon this-whether there has been ever any evidence in any of these unexplained sightings that. would indicate that there is some kind of extraterrestial intelligence involved? Dr. HYNEK. I believe I have covered that. I have not seen any evidence to confirm this, nor have I know any competent scientist who has, or who believes that any kind of extraterrestrial intelligence is involved. However, the possibility should be kept open as a possible hypotliesis. I don't think we should ever close our minds to it. But certainly there is no real evidence of intelligent behavior of hardwares. If we had received periodic visits by controlled space vehicles since 1947, or earlier, it is likely they would have lhd some kind of troflble at some time and dropped s6ething off the coast of Spain or somre place, and we have rrot. come across any positive prbbf like that. Mr. NEDZ[. Mr. Chairman, untllthe. sightings get a little closer to my district, I have n6 furth °qftestions. The CRmnu ,AN. I recognize-Mr. Cha mberlain, thhw Lgto Governor Stafford and Mr. Hbert, because I want to-get as close to the districts as I can. I want to put in the record Mr. Ford's letter, and the response by Secretary Brown. What. else, Mr. Blandford, ought too'i6h)therecord? Mr. BLANDFORD. That is all that ought tobe in at. this time. The CIIAIRMAN. Without objection, we will , t all of these in the record. I want to shed as much light oiV these illUitin ted objects av we can. (The mitetrial above-referred to is as follows:) CoNoass OF THE UNIED STATES, OFFICE OF THE MINORITY LEADER, HousE OF"REPRESENTATIVES, Washington, D.C., March 28, 1966. Representative L. MENDEL RIVERSs, Chairman, Armed Services Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. DEAR CHAIRMAN Rivxas: No doubt you have noted the recent flurry of news- paper stories about Unidentified flying objects (UFO's). I have taken special Interest in these accounts because many of the latest reported sightings have been In my home State of Michigan. The Air Force sent a consultant, Astrophysicist Dr. J. Allen Hynek of North- western University, to Michigan to investigate the various reports; and he dis- missed all of them as the product of college student pranks or swamp gas or an Impression created by the rising crescent moon and the planet Venus. I do not agree that all of these. reports can be or should be so easily explained away. Because I think there may be substance to some of these reports and because I believe the American people are entitled to a more thorough explanation 'than has been given them by the Air Force to date, I am proposing that either the Science and Astronautics Committee or the Armed Services Committee of the House sched- ule hearings on the subject of UFO's and invite testimony from both the execu- tive branch of the Government and some of the persons who claim to have seen UFO's. I enclose material which I think will be helpful to you in assessing the ad- visability of an investigation of UFO's. May I first call to your attention a column by Roscoe Drummond, published last Sunday in which Mr. Drummond says, "Maybe all of these reported sightings are whimsical, Imaginary or unreal; but we need a more credible and detached appraisal of the evidence than we are getting."
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.