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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.
the years, there have been very many UFO observations of significant nature from the vicinity of White Sands Proving Ground, many involving instrumental tracking, many made by experienced observers. A long and impressive list of them could easily be compiled, yet all have been slowly lost from official cognizance by a process that is characteristically at the heart of response to the UFO problem. 5. Case 30. Admiralty Bay, Antarctica, March 16, 1961: This listing of UFO sightings by meteorologists could be extended very considerably by drawing on my file of such cases. To cite just one more that also indicates the global scale of the UFO phenomena, a very unusual luminous unidentified aerial object seen by a meteorologist and others aboard the U.S.S. Glacier at about 6:15 p.m. on 3/16/61 in the Antarctic will be mentioned. I have quite recently received, through French UFO investigator Rene Fouere, a rather detailed summary of this sighting by Brazilian meteorologist Rubens J. Villela, whose earlier account I had seen but paid little attention to (Ref. 10). The point I had missed, prior to reading Villela's detailed description of the circumstances of the sighting, was the very important feature of a low cloud overcast present at about 1500 ft above the sea. With three shipmates on the flying bridge, Villela suddenly saw "a multicolored luminous object crossing the sky," an object which for a moment they took to be an unusual meteor. "It was egg-shaped, colored mainly reddish at first, and traveled slowly from NE to SW at about 50 degrees above the horizon, on a straight horizontal trajectory. From its frontal part, several multicolored,perfectly straight 'rays' extended backwards, diverging outwards at an angle; green, red, and blue. Most striking of all, it left a long trail of orange color in the form of a perfectly straight tube which gave the distinct impression of being hollow, faintly comparable to a neon light." Villela stated in his summary, Then, "Suddenly, the object divided in two. It was not an explosion, it was a controlled division in two equal parts, one behind the other, each egg-shaped as before and each radiating outwards its V- shaped lateral rays. Then the object shone with a slightly stronger light, changing color to blue and white, and disappeared completely. That's it -- just disappeared, abruptly." His account emphasizes that the boundaries of the object(s) were definite and sharp, not diffuse. Villela's account indicates that a total of six persons were above-decks and saw this striking phenomenon. It is to be emphasized that, in the estimated 10 seconds that this lasted, the object was moving below a cloud deck that lay only about 1500 feet above the sea, so that, for the reported elevation angle of about 50 degrees, the slant range from observers to object was perhaps of the order of 2000 ft. Villela had the subjective impression that the egg-shaped initial form was about as big as a small airplane. Discussion: In a recent book aimed at showing that a majority of the most interesting UFOs are an atmospheric-electrical plasma related to ball lightning, Philip J. Klass (Ref. 39) cites the preceding case as a good example of the sort of observation which he feels he can encompass in his "plasma-UFO" hypothesis. To the extent that he treats only the breakup into two parts, he has some observational basis for trying to interpret this as something akin to ball lightning. But almost at that point the similarity ends as far as meteorologically recognized characteristics of ball lightning go. The highly structured nature of the object and its rays, its size, its horizontal trajectory, its presence in a foggy area with low stratiform clouds free of thunderstorm activity scarcely suggest anything like ball lightning. Nor does this account suggest any meteoric phenomenon at sub-cloud altitudes. I would regard this as just one more of a baffling array of inexplicable aerial phenomena which span so wide a range of characteristics that it is taxing to try
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