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

delay. On the basis of the evidence I have examined, and on the basis of my own weighing of alternative hypotheses
(including some not listed above), I now regard Hypothesis 7 as the one most likely to prove correct. My scientific
instincts lead me to hedge that prediction just to the extent of suggesting that if the UFOs are not of extramundane
origin, then I suspect that they will prove to be something very much more bizarre, something of perhaps even
greater scientific interest than extraterrestrial devices.
SOME REMARKS ON INTERVIEWING EXPERIENCE AND TYPES OF
UFO CASES ENCOUNTERED:
1. Sources of cases dealt with:
Prior to 1966, I had interviewed about 150-200 persons reporting UFOs; since 1966, I have interviewed about 200-
250 more. The basis of my post-1966 interviewing has been quite different from the earlier period of interviewing of
local witnesses, whose sightings I heard about essentially by chance. Almost all of my post-1966 interviews have
been with witnesses in cases already, investigated by one or more of the private UFO investigatory groups such as
NICAP or APRO, or by the official investigative agency (Project Bluebook). Thus, after 1966, I was not dealing
with a body of witnesses reporting Venus, fireballs, and aircraft strobelights, because such cases are so easily
recognizable that the groups whose prior checks I was taking advantage of had already culled out and rejected most
of such irrelevant material. Many of the cases I checked were older cases, some over 20 years old. It was primarily
the background work of the many independent investigatory groups here and in other parts of the world (especially
the Australian area where I had an opportunity to interview about 80 witnesses) that made possible my dealing with
that type of once sifted data that yields up scientifically interesting information so quickly. I wish to put on record
my indebtedness to these "dedicated amateurs", to use the astronomer's genial term; their contribution to the ultimate
clarification of the UFO problem will become recognized as having been of basic importance, notwithstanding the
scorn with which scientists have, on more than one occasion, dismissed their efforts. Although I cite only the larger
of these groups (NICAP about 12,000 members, APRO about 8,000), there are many smaller groups here and abroad
that have done a most commendable job on almost no resources. (Needless to add, there are other small groups
whose concern is only with sensational and speculative aspects.)
2. Some relevant witness-characteristics:
By frequently discussing my own interviewing experience with members of those non-official UFO groups whose
past work has been so indispensable to my own studies, I have learned that most of my own reactions to the UFO
witness- interview problem are shared by those investigators. The recurrent problem of securing unequivocal
descriptions, the almost excruciating difficulty in securing meaningful estimates of angular size, angular elevation,
and angular displacements from laymen, the inevitable variance of witness descriptions of a shared observation, and
other difficulties of non-instrumental observing are familiar to all who have investigated UFO reports. But so also
are the impressions of widespread concern among UFO witnesses to avoid (rather than to seek) publicity over their
sightings. The strong disinclination to make an open report of an observation of something the witness realizes is far
outside the bounds of accepted experience crops up again and again. In my interviewing in 1947 sightings, done as a
cross check on case material used in a very valuable recent publication by Bloecher (Ref. 8), I came to realize
clearly for the first time that this reluctance was not something instilled by post-1947 scoffing at UFOs, but is part of
a broadly disseminated attitude to discount the anomalous and the inexplicable, to be unwilling even to report what
one has seen with his own eyes if it is well outside normal experience as currently accepted. I have heard fellow-
scientists express dismay at the unscientific credulity with which the general public jumps to the conclusion that
UFOs are space ships. Those scientists have certainly not interviewed many UFO witnesses; for almost precisely the
opposite attitude is overwhelmingly the characteristic response. In my Australian interviewing, I found the same
uneasy feeling about openly reporting an observation of a well-defined UFO sighting, lest acquaintances think one
"has gone round the bend." Investigators in still other parts of the world where modern scientific values dominate
world-views have told me of encountering just this same witness-reluctance, The charge that UFO witnesses, as a
group, are hyperexcitable types is entirely incorrect. I would agree with the way Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, then
Director of Air Force Intelligence, put it in a 1952 Pentagon press conference: "Credible observers have sighted
relatively incredible objects."
Not only is the charge of notoriety-seeking wrong, not only is the charge of hyperexcitability quite inappropriate to
the witnesses I have interviewed, but so also is the easy charge that they see an unusual aerial phenomenon and
directly leap to some kind of "spaceship hypothesis." My experience in interviewing witnesses in the selected