Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed record of a July 29, 1968 symposium on unidentified flying objects held by the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired by Rep. J. Edward Roush. The committee heard statements from six scientists: J. Allen Hynek, James E. McDonald, Carl Sagan, Robert L. Hall, James A. Harder and Robert M. L. Baker. It also printed papers from Donald Menzel, Stanton Friedman, Frank Salisbury and others. Hynek argued that puzzling UFO reports from competent witnesses deserve serious scientific study.
“Nevers”43 pages
101 Second, what are the probable consequences from the point of view of a sociologist or social psychologist of each of the major explanations? And third,I would like to comment quite explicitly on the hypothe- sis that mass hysteria and hysterical contagion is common in many of the cases. I believe I should start with the mass hysteria hypothesis. To begin with, I think there is very strong evidence that some of the cases do result from hysterical contagion in the sense that this has often been used by social psychologists. Once people are sensitized to the exist- ence of some kind of a phenomenon (whether indeed it really exists or not), when there is an ambiguous situation requiring explanation, when there is emotion or anxiety associated with this, resulting from the uncertainty, there are precisely the conditions that have been observed repeatedly as resulting in what I shall call "improvised news." Lacking well-verified facts and explanations, people always seem to generate the news and the explanations that will reduce the ambiguity, thereby reduce the anxiety they have about uncertain situations. There are many well-documented cases of this kind of mass hysteria and hysterical contagion. I believe it will be out of place for me to go into lengthy discussions of these episodes, but I shall comment on a few ways in which we can examine the observations of unidentified flying objects to assess whether this is a reasonable hypothesis for the hard-core cases. One of the first of these is one thoroughly familiar to attorneys, ;social psychlogists having no monopoly on an interest in the credibility of testimony, but this is one of the principal means obviously of establishing whether we should reasonably believe certain explanations. The criteria, as most of you know, involve such things as the established reputation of the witnesses, the quality and details of the report, whether there are apparent motives for distortion or prevari- cation, whether there was preexisting knowledge of the thing being reported, whether there were multiple witnesses and whether there was contact among these multiple witnesses, whether observation was through more than one medium (for example, direct visual observation confirmed by radar) whether there were verifiable effects that could be observed after the reporting by witnesses, recently of the events being reported, the duration of the period in which the witness was able to observe the phenomenon how the witnesses reacted, whether they had intense anxiety and emotion themselves, which might inter- fere with their observation, and so forth. These are some of the major factors, and a closely related factor in assessing the credibility of the testimony is of course an assessment of the care in gathering the testimony by interviewers themselves. How does the testimony on hard-core UFO cases look with reference to these criteria? I should say that there is a substantial subset of cases which look very good on these criteria, which make it very difficult to say that the witnesses involved were victims of hysterical contagion, grossly misinterpreting familiar things. For example, there is the Red Bluff, Calif., case in 1960, where two policemen observed for 2 hours and 15 minutes constantly, apparently
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.