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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
to invent any single hypothesis to rationalize them all. The full spectrum of UFO phenomena will, I predict, come as a shock to every scientist who takes the necessary time to look into the wealth of reports accumulated in various archives over the past two decades and more. Official assertions to the effect that UFO reports in no way defy explanation in terms of present scientific and technological knowledge are, in my opinion, entirely unjustified. The Villella sighting seems a case in point. And meteorologists do see UFOs, as the foregoing cases should suggest. DON'T WEATHER BALLOONS AND RESEARCH BALLOONS ACCOUNT FOR MANY UFOs? Probably the most categorical statement ever made attributing UFO observations to balloons appeared in a _Look_ magazine article by Richard Wilson in February 1951, entitled, "A Nuclear Physicist Exposes Flying Saucers." Dr. Urner Liddel, then affiliated with the Navy cosmic ray research program using the large Skyhook balloons, was quoted as saying, "There is not a single reliable report of an observation (of a UFO) which is not attributable to the cosmic balloons." When one considers the large number of UFO reports already on record by 1951 in which reliable airlines pilots, military personnel, and other credible witnesses have observed unidentified objects wholly unlike a high-altitude, slowly drifting pear shaped Skyhook balloon, that assertion appears very curious. Neverthe less, that many persons have misidentified Skyhook balloons and even the smaller weather balloons used in routine meteorological practice is unquestioned. A Skyhook seen against the twilight sky with back illumination yields a strangely luminous, hovering object which many observers, especially if equipped with binoculars, were unprepared to identify correctly in the 1946-51 period when Skyhook operations were tied up with still-classified programs. To this extent, Liddel's point is reasonable; but his sweeping assertion fails to fit the facts, then or now. Actually, in official case-evaluations, one finds Skyhook balloons invoked relatively infrequently compared with "weather balloons." But in many of the latter cases, the balloon hypothesis is strained beyond the breaking point. The official criterion used (Ref. 7, p. 135) is extremely loose: "If an object is reported near a balloon launch site within an hour after the scheduled launch times, it is classed as a balloon." with no specification of heights, shapes, distances, etc. Using such a criterion, it is easy to see why so many "balloon" explanations figure in the official summaries. There are even "balloon" UFOs whose speed, when inferred from the report, comes out to be supersonic! The tiny candles or flashlight bulbs hung on pilot balloons for night- tracking have been repeatedly made the basis for explanations of what witnesses described as huge luminous objects at close range. Within only days of this writing, I have checked out such a case near Tucson where four adult witnesses saw, on July 2, 1968, a half- moon-shaped orange-red object hovering for several minutes at what they estimated to be a few hundred feet above terrain and perhaps a few miles away over open desert. They watched it tip once, right itself, then accelerate and rise over a mountain range and pass off into the distance in some tens of seconds. Because a weather balloon had been released earlier (actually about an hour and forty-five minutes earlier) from the Tucson airport Weather Bureau station, the official explanation, published in the local press, was that the witnesses had seen a "weather balloon". A pilot balloon of the small type (30-gram) used in this instance rises at about 600 ft/min, the tiny light on it becomes invisible to the naked eye beyond about 10,000 ft slant- range, and the upper-level winds weren't even blowing toward the site in question. Also the angular size estimated for the observed reddish half-moon was about twice the lunar diameter, and some said about four times larger. A pilot balloon light would have to be within about 20-30 feet to appear this large. Yet such a case will enter the files (if even transmitted to higher echelons) as a "balloon", swelling the population of curious balloon- evaluations in official files. 1. Case 31. Ft. Monmouth, N.J., September 10, 1951: It is clear from Ruppelt' s discussions (Ref. 5) that a series of radar and visual sightings near Ft. Monmouth on 9/10/51 and the next day were of critical importance in affecting official handling of the UFO problem in the ensuing two-year period. Many details from the official file on these sightings are now available for scientific scrutiny (Ref. 7). Here, a sighting by two military airmen flying in a T-33 near Ft. Monmouth will be selected from that series of events because the sighting was eventually tagged as a weather balloon. As with any really significant UFO case, it would require far more space than can be used here to spell out adequately all relevant details, so a very truncated account must be employed. While flying at 20,000 ft from a Delaware to a Long Island airbase, the two men in the T-33 spotted an object "round and silver in color" which at one stage of the attempted intercept
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