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
6 backs, of which the sole purpose of many seems to be, apart from making a fast buck for the authors, to titillate the fancy of the credulous. Indeed, in such newsstand publications three or four UFO reports are frequently sensationalized on one page with gross disregard for accuracy and documentation; the result is that a scientist—if he reads them at all—is very likely to suffer mental nausea and to relegate the whole subject to the trash heap. This is the first problem a scientist encounters when he takes a look at the UFO phenomenon. His publicly available source material is almost certain to consist of sensational, undocumented accounts of what may have been an actual event. Such accounts are much akin, per- haps, to the account we might expect from an aborigine encountering a helicopter for the first time, or seeing a total eclipse of the sun. There is nowhere a serious scientist can turn for what he would consider meaningful, hard-core data—as hard core and quantitative as the phe- nomenon itself permits at present. Here we come to the crux of the problem of the scientist and the UFO.The ultimate problem is, of course, what are UFO's; but the im- mediate and crucial problem is, How do we get data for proper sci- entific study? The problem has been made immensely more difficult by the supposition held by most scientists, on the basis of the poor data available to them, that there couldn't possibly be anything sub- stantial to UFO reports in the first place, and hence that there is no point to wasting time or money investigating. This strange, but under the circumstances understandable attitude, would be akin to saying,for instance,let us not build observatories and telescopes for the study of the stars because it is obvious that those twinkling points of light up there are just illusions in the upper atmosphere and do not represent physical things. Fortunately, centuries ago there were a few curious men who did not easily accept the notion that stars were illusory lights on a crystal- line celestial sphere and judged that the study of the stars might be worthwhile though, to many, a seemingly impractical and nonsensi- cal venture. The pursuit of that seemingly impractical and possibly unrewarding study of astronomy and related sciences, however, has given us the highly technological world we live in and the high stand- ard of living we enjoy—a standard which would have been totally im- possible in a peasant society whose eyes were never turned toward the skies. Can we afford not to look toward the UFO skies; can we afford to overlook a potential breakthrough of great significance? And even apart from that, the public is growing impatient. The public does not want another 20 years of UFO confusion. They want to know whether there really is something to this whole UFO business—and I can tell you definitely that they are not satisfied with the answers they have been getting. The public in general may be unsophisticated in scientific matters, but they have an uncanny way of distinguishing between an honest scientific approach and the method of ridicule and persiflage. As scientists, we may honestly wish to see whether there is any scientific paydirt in this international UFO phenomenon. But to dis- cover this paydirt we must devote serious study to UFO's. To make
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.