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
120 1957. The story of its discovery is contained in chaper 9 of the Great Flying Saucer Hoax, written by Dr. Olavo T. Fontes. Briefly, several small metallic fragments were recovered by some fishermen near the coastal town of Ubatuba, Sao Paulo, after they saw what they described as a brillant explosion of a flying disc. Some of the fiery fragments were extinguished in the water near the shore, where they were recovered. Fontes acquired three of the fragments that weighed less than a tenth of an ounce each, and had one of them analyzed at the MineralProduction Laboratory in the Brazilian Agriculture Ministry. The re- sults of the first analysis was that the substance was magnesium of an unusually high degree of purity, and that there was an absence of any other metallic element. On the basis of the first examination a second spectrographic test was conducted,using the utmost care and the most modern instruments. The second report was again marked by references to the "extreme purity" of the sample. Even impurities that are sometimes detected due to contamination from the carbon rod used as an electrode were absent. A further test, using X-ray diffraction, failed to turn up any other metallic component. One of the pieces was flown to California and was analyzed. I have the report here. They used neutron activation analysis and discovered a total of one -tenth of 1 percent of other metallic elements than magnesium, 500 parts per million zinc, that included zinc, which is interesting, and small amounts of barium and strontium.Certainly this metal is of extraordinary purity, certainly far beyond the capacity of fishermen at Ubatuba to produce. What could be the use of such high -purity magnesium in the con- text of a spacecraft? One clue lies in its crystalline structure. It is close packed hexagonal structure, and is in this regard similar to the high -strength metals beryllium and titanium. Hexagonal crystals havebut one slip plane, and this tends to make them brittle but strong. One of the reasons for slip along crystal planes is that local im- perfections in the crystal, or foreign atoms, create lines of stress con- centration that move rapidly through the crystal, producingdeformation. If these imperfections, or dislocations, could be eliminated, the theo- retical strength of the crystal lattice itself might be approached. This strength is on the order of millions of pounds per square inch for any materials. Carefully prepared I/ 4 -inch diameter glass rods, etchedto remove microscopic surface cracks and then laquered, have withstood stress of 250,000 psi for 1 hour. Fused silica fibers have been stressed to 2 million psi. Thus, foreign atoms within a crystal lattice are focal points for dis- locations—points of stress concentration where the crystal lattice itself tears and slips. We can imagine that a high -purity crystal, free ofsurface and internal imperfections, would achieve fantastic strengths. Indeed, with the advent of iron whiskers, and boron fiber reinforced composites we are already approaching some of these strengths, butonly for extremely small diameter fibers. Should, by any good fortune, further samples of UFO material be found, there may be further clues that would spur on research into high-strength materials, and perhaps give us hints of how to achieve
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.