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
130 performance experimental radar having a one-third degree beam width. For lockon and track, an object would have to be pinpointed to one -sixth degree, and even if the radar did achieve lockon, an erratically moving object could not be followed even in the STPF radar's monopulse mode of operation. For this reason only satellites having rather well-defined paths (i.e., ephemerides), which have been precomputed,can be acquired and tracked. Our three BEMEWS radars propagate fans of electromagnetic energy into space. If a ballistic missile or satellite penetrates two of these fans successively, then it can be identified. Since astrodynamical laws govern the time interval between detection fan penetrations for "normal" space objects, all other anomalistic "hits" by the radar are usually neglected, and even if they are not neglected, they are usually classified as spurious images or misassociated targets, and are stored away on magnetic tape, and forgotten. One space surveillance site operates a detection radar (FPS -17) and a tracking radar (FPS -79). If a new space object is sensed by the detection radar's fans, then the tracking radar can be oriented toachieve lockon. The orientation is governed by a knowledge of theappropriate "normal" object's astrodynamic laws of motion, or by an assumption as to launch point. Thus, if an unknown is detected, and if it follows an unusual path, it is unlikely that it could, or would, be tracked. Furthermore, the director of the radar may make a decision that the unknown object detected is not of interest (because of the location of the FPS -17 fan penetration or because of the lack of prior information on a possible new launch). In the absence of detection fan penetration (the fan has a rather limited coverage), the FPS -79 tracking radar is tasked to follow other space objects on a schedule provided by the Space Defense Center, and again there is almost no likelihood that an anomalistic object could, or would, be tracked. The NASA radars, such as those at Millstone and Goldstone, are not intended to be surveillance radars, and only track known space objects on command. Again the chances of their tracking anomalistic objects are nearly nil. The new phased -array radar at Eglin AFB (FPS -85) has considerable capability for deploying detection fans and tracking space objects in a simultaneous fashion. Such versatility raises certain energy -management problems—that is, determining howmuch energy to allocate to detection and how much to tracking—but this sensor might have a capability (albeit, perhaps,limited) to detect and track anomalistic objects. The problem is that the logic included in the software associated with the FPS -85's control computers is notorganized in a fashion to detect and track anomalistic objects (I will indicate in a moment how the logic could be modified). Furthermore,the FPS -85, like the other surveillance radars is usually tasked to track a list of catalogued space objects in the Space Defense Center's data base and the opportunity to "look around" for anomalistic objectsis quite limited. There are a number of other radar surveillance systems such as a detection fence across the United States. In the case of this fence, we have a situation similar to BMEWS, in which the time interval between succesive penetrations (in this case separated by an orbital period for satellites) must follow prescribed astrodynamical laws. If they do not, then the fence penetrations are either deleted from
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.