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
127 Several appendixes accompany this report. The first two are in response to Congressman Roush's invitational letter of July 10, 1968, and consist of my biographical sketch and a listing of my bibliography, respectively. The third appendix relates directly to my specific recommendations, and was included with the kind permission of Dr.Sydney Walker III. The fourth appendix presents three reprints of articles (Baker (1968a) and (1968b) and Walker (1968) ) that are pertinent to the subject matter of this report. PART I. ANALYSES OF ANOMALISTIC OBSERVATIONAL PHENOMENAUTAH AND MONTANA FILMS My initial contact with anomalistic observational phenomena— AOP—came in 1954 when I was a consultant to Douglas Aircraft Co. in Santa Monica, Calif., serving as special assistant to Dr. W. B. Klemperer, director of Douglas' research staff. The data consisted of two short film clips: one taken in Montana—termed by us as the Mon- tana film—and one taken in Utah—called by us the Utah film. These films were provided to us by the Air Technical Intelligence Center— ATIC, now the Foreign Technology Division—FDT—at Wright - Patterson Air Force Base; 35 -millimeter prints were furnished by Green -Rouse Productions of Samuel Goldwyn Studios. Both films had been taken by apparently reliable and unbiased men using amateur movie cameras and, in each case, there was a credible, substantiating witness present. The films exhibited the motion of rather fuzzy white dots, but the Montana film was remarkable in that foreground was visible on most of the frames. Preliminary analysis excluded most natural phenomena. More de- tailed study indicated that the only remaining natural phenomenon candidate for the Utah film was birds in flight, and for the Montana film it was airplane fuselage reflections of the sun. After about 18 months of rather detailed, albeit not continuous, study using variousfilm -measuring equipments at Douglas and at UCLA, as well as anal-ysis of a photogrammetric experiment, it appeared that neither of these hypothesized natural phenomena explanations had merit, and a report was published by me (Baker (1956) ) and forwarded to Brig. Gen. Harold E. Watson, commander, ATIC. Since the description ofthe circumstances of the filmings and the analyses of the data pro- vided on the films is rather lengthy, and have since been published in the open literature, 1 it does not seem unreasonable to repeat the analyses here. FLORIDA FILM During the course of this study we also had the opportunity to view some gun -camera photographs taken over Florida. Unfortunately, we could not retain this film, and did not have time available to accom- plish a comprehensive analysis. Like the Montana and Utah films, this film also exhibited only white-dot images; however, since a foreground was present, a competent study could have been carried out. Dr.Klemperer and I agreed on the preliminary conclusion—not supported by detailed analyses—that, again, no natural phenomenon was a likely source for the images. 1 For the Utah film, see Baker and Makemson (1967): for the Montana film, see Baker (1968a). This latter reference is included in app. 4 to this paper.
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.