Symposium on unidentified flying objects: hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, second session, July 29, 1968.

113
Specialty: Engineering Science
Fields of Interest: Hydraulic systems analysis; surface water hydrology;
analog simulation.
STATEMENT OF DR. JAMES A. HARDER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
OF CIVIL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT
BERKELEY, CALIF.
Dr.HARDER.Thank you,Mr.Chairman.
Your committee has asked me to comment on the problem of pro-
pulsion as raised by some reports, and to whatever potential benefits
there might be to the aerospace programs from an intense scrutiny of
UFO phenomena.
I am very glad for this opportunity to present to your committee
some of my views on the problems of unidentified flying objects and
to indicate some of the areas in which I think a closer investigation
of this problem might provide us with scientific clues that would
give us important impetus to basic and applied research in the United
States.
As Dr. Hall has said, there have been strong feelings aroused about
UFO's, particularly about the extraterrestrial hypothesis for their
origin. This is entirely understandable, in view of man's historic
record of considering himself the central figure in the natural scene;
the extraterrestrial hypothesis tends inevitably to undermine the col-
lective ego of the human race. These feelings have no place in the
scientific assessment of facts, but I confess that they have at times
affected me.
Over the past 20 years a vast amount of evidence has been accumu-
lating that bears on the existence of UFO's. Most of this is little
known to the general public or to most scientists. But on the basis
of the data and ordinary rules of evidence, as would be applied in
civil or criminal courts, the physical reality of UFO's has been proved
beyond a reasonable doubt. With some effort, we can accept this on an
intellectual level but find a difficulty in accepting it on an emotional
level, in such a way that the facts give a feeling of reality. In this
respect, we might recall the attitude many of us have toward our own
deaths: We accept the facts intellectually, but find it difficult to accept
them emotionally.
Indeed, there are flying saucer cultists who are as enthusiastic as
they are naive about UFO's—who see in them some messianic sym-
bols—they have a counterpart in those individuals who exhibit a mor-
bid preoccupation with death. Most of the rest of us don't like to think
or hear about it. This, it seems to me, accurately reflects many of our
attitudes toward the reality of UFO's—natural, and somewhat
healthy, but not scientific.
In my remaining statements you will note that I have tacitly as-
sumed the reality of UFO's as a hypothesis underlying my assessment
of the importance of this subject for scientific study.
1. THE UFO PROPULSION PROBLEM
By way of introducing the propulsion problem of UFO's, I will
review a sighting near the city of Corning, in northern California,
during the night of August 13, 1960, by two California highway