James E. McDonald statement, Symposium on UFOs, House Committee on Science and Astronautics

York newspaper "which shall go unnamed," but "they weren't interested." It got to NICAP almost by accident, and
NICAP sent up their standard witness-questionnaires which Leick said they all filled out.
Discussion:
When an incident such as this is cited to the skeptic who asks, "Why no UFOs near cities?", I find that his almost
invariable retort is something like; "If that had really happened, why wouldn't hundreds to thousands of persons have
reported it?" There are, I believe, two factors that explain the latter situation. First, consider the tiny fraction of
persons on any city street whose vision is directed upwards at any given moment. In absence of loud noises aloft,
most urbanites don't spend any large amount of time scanning the skies. In addition to infrequency of sky-scanning,
another urban obstacle to UFO detection is typically restricted vision of the full dome of the sky; buildings or trees
cut down the field of view in a way not so typical of the view afforded the farmer, the forest ranger, or a person
driving in open country. Finally, in UFO studies, it is always necessary to draw sharp distinction between a
"sighting" and a "report". The first becomes the second only if a witness takes the step of notifying a newspaper, a
law enforcement office, a university, or some official agency. It is abundantly clear, from the experience of UFO
investigations in many parts of the world, that psychological factors centering around unwillingness to be ridiculed
deter most witnesses from filing any official report on a very unusual event. Again and again one learns of a UFO
sighting quite indirectly, from someone who knows someone who once mentioned that he'd seen something rather
unusual. On following such leads, one frequently comes upon extremely significant sightings that were withheld
from official reporting channels because of the "ridicule lid", as I like to term it, that imposes a filter screening out a
large number of good sightings at their source.
Returning to the 11/22/66 New York City report, I must say that, between the information NICAP secured from the
witnesses and my own direct conversations with Leick, I accept this as a quite real sighting, made by reliable
observers under viewing circumstances that would seem to rule out obvious conventional explanations. When the
object left its hovering location, it rose straight upward rapidly, before heading east, Leick said. Although he and his
colleagues may well have erred in their slant-range estimate which put it over the UN Building, their description of
its shape and its maneuvers would appear to rule out helicopters, aircraft, balloons, etc.
2. Case 17. Hollywood, Calif., February 5-6, 1960:
A still more striking instance in which entirely unconventional object: were observed by many city-dwellers, where
low-altitude objects hovered and exhibited baffling phenomena, is a central Hollywood case that was rather
carefully checked by LANS, the Los Angeles NICAP Subcommittee (Ref. 34). The two incidents occurred just after
11:00 p.m. on two successive nights, Friday 2/5/60 and Saturday 2/6/60, over or near the intersection of Sunset
Blvd. and La Brea Ave., i.e., in the heart of downtown Hollywood. I have gone over the site area with one of the
principal investigators of these incidents, Mrs. Idabel Epperson of LANS, have examined press accounts (Ref. 35)
that dealt (very superficially) with the event, and have studied correspondence between the LANS investigators and
official agencies concerning this case. The phenomenology is far too complex to report in full detail here; even the
21- page single-spaced LANS report was only a digest of results of all the NICAP witness-interviewing carried out
to substantiate the events. The LANS report summarizes object-descriptions given by eight witnesses Friday night
and eighteen witnesses Saturday night, several of them police officers.
Cars were stopped bumper-to-bumper, according to employees of several businesses on the Sunset-La Brea
intersection in the midst of the main events, with people gaping at the object overhead. Persons on hotel and
apartment rooftops were out looking at the bright "cherry-red, circular light" that figured in both incidents, On the
two successive nights, the red object first appeared at about 11:15 p.m., and on both nights it stopped and hovered
motionless for periods of about 10 minutes at a time. The angular estimates of the size of the red light varied, but
seemed to suggest a value of one-fourth to one-third of the lunar diameter, say 5-10 minutes of arc. Almost all
agreed that the light was sharp-edged rather than hazy or fuzzy. The usual witness-variances are exhibited in the
total of about two dozen persons interviewed, e.g., some thought the light pulsated, others recalled it as steady, etc.),
but the common features, consistent throughout almost all the testimony, bespeak a quite unusual phenomenon.
On Friday night, the red light was first seen directly overhead at Sunset and La Brea. Two service-station attendants
at that intersection, Jerry Darr and Charles Walker, described to LANS interviewers how, "... hundreds of people
saw it -- everybody was looking" as the light hovered for at least five minutes over a busy drive-in there. Ken