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This is the prepared statement James E. McDonald, a senior physicist at the University of Arizona's Institute of Atmospheric Physics, submitted to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics for its July 29, 1968 Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects. He draws on hundreds of witness interviews and weighs eight hypotheses. His conclusion is that UFOs are probably extraterrestrial surveillance devices. He argues that scientists have wrongly neglected the subject and urges much more scientific investigation and further Congressional hearings.
“Anderson”2 pages
METEOROLOGISTS AND WEATHER OBSERVERS LOOK AT THE SKIES FREQUENTLY. WHY DON'T THEY SEE UFOs? 1. Case 26. Richmond, Va., April 1947: To begin an answer to that rhetorical question, we might consider an observation made by a weather observer at the Richmond, Va., U. S. Weather Bureau station, about two months before the first national publicity concerning UFOs. Walter A. Minczewski, whom I located at the same Weather Bureau office where he made the sighting in 1947, was making a pilot balloon observation, when he spotted a silvery object that entered the field of his theodolite (which was trained on the balloon he had released). In the account that Minczewski sent me, he stated that "the bottom was flat and the top was slightly dome-shaped"; and when he tried to see it with naked eye, he could not spot it. (Typical pilot balloon theodolites have magnifications of about 20 to 25, and angular fields that are usually about a degree across.) It was a "clear bright morning" when he spotted the object, and it lay to his NNE at an elevation of about 45 degrees. Whether Minczewski really saw the upper surface or formed his mental impressions without realizing that the theodolite may have inverted the image is now unclear, and my questioning did not settle that point. Discussion: A report of this sighting is in the official files, a circumstance which greatly surprised Minczewski, since he had discussed it only with his fellow workers. In the ensuing two decades, he has never again seen anything like it. Clearly, the probability of an object crossing the small angular field of a meteorological theodolite is quite low, if only chance were involved here. He tried to track it but lost it, due to its high angular velocity, after about five or six seconds, he recalled. No obvious conventional explanation suggests itself for this early sighting. 2. Case 27. Yuma, Ariz., February 4, 1953: Weather Bureau observer S.H. Brown was tracking a pilot balloon at 6000 ft over Yuma at 1:50 p.m. MST on 2/4/53 when first one and then a second unidentified object moved across his theodolite field, somewhat as in the preceding case. I obtained an account of this sighting from V.B. Cotten, Meteorologist-in-Charge at the Yuma station. The full account is too long for recapitulation here. Both objects appeared to be of the order of a minute of arc in diameter and appeared "almost round, a solid dull pure white color, with a thin white mist completely edging each object." The first object moved into the optical field and curved upwards to the west, with the theodolite oriented to about 53 degrees elevation, 157 degrees azimuth. About 20 seconds later, a second object entered the field and moved in and out of the field erratically two times, to rejoin the first object. Brown was able to track the pair thereafter, as they jointly changed both azimuth and elevation. Because he had a stopwatch at hand for the balloon observation (which he did not complete because of following the unknown objects), he was able to determine that he followed the pair of objects for five minutes (1350 to 1355), until he lost sight of them against a cirrus cloud deck to the SSW. At the termination of the observation, his instrument was pointed to 29 degrees elevation, 204 degrees azimuth. Discussion: This case is carried as Unidentified in the official files (see Ref. 7 for official summary). At times these objects lay near the sun's position in the sky, which might suggest forward-angle scattering of sunlight by airborne particles. However, initially, the objects were detected at angular distance of about 40 degrees from the solar position, which would not yield appreciable low-angle scattering. Furthermore, if these were airborne scatterers, they would almost certainly be separated by random turbulence within as long a period as five minutes, yet the observer's report indicates that they maneuvered together within angular separations of the order of the roughly one-degree field of such theodolites. The fact that the second object did go out of the field only to return to the vicinity of the first object strains the airborne particle hypothesis. Thus the official categorization of Unidentified seems reasonable here. 3. Case 28. Upington, Cape Province, December 7, 1954: R.H. Kleyweg, Officer-in-Charge of the Upington Meteorological Station, had just released a balloon for upper- wind measurement and was shielding his eyes from the sun trying to spot the balloon to get his theodolite on it.
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