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.
“Sagan”21 pages
132 Mr. Rousii. Dr. Baker,I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm going to have a brief recess here. Dr.BAKER. Certainly. Mr. Roust'. There is a motion to recommit the military construction bill, and I would like to vote on it. None of my colleagues are here right now, so we will declare a very brief recess, and I shall return as quickly as I can. (Whereupon a short recess was taken for a floor vote.) Mr. RousH. The committee will be in order. Dr. Baker, you may proceed. Dr. BAKER. Thank you. Personally, I feel that it is premature for me to agree that the hard and soft data forces the scientific community to give overriding at- tention to the hypothesis that the anomalistic observations arise from manifestations of extraterrestrial beings. On the other hand,I strong- ly advocate the establishment of a research program in the area of anomalistic phenomena—an interdisciplinary research effort that pro- gresses according to the highest scientific standards; that is well funded; and that is planned to be reliably long term. The potential benefit of such a research project to science should not hinge solely on the detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life • it should be justified by the possibility of gaining new insights into poorly understood phenomena, such as ball lightning, cometoid impact, and spiraling meteorite decay. There is practical value in such research for the Military Establish- ment, as well. Let us suppose that something similar to the 'Tunguska event" of 1908 occurred today, and that it was Long Island in the United States, rather than the Podkamenaia 'Tunguska River Basin in Siberia that was devastated by a probable comet impact. Would we misinterpret this catastrophic event as the signal for world war III? What if another "fireball procession," such as occurred over Canada on February 9, 1913, repeated itself today, and the low-flying meteors were on nearly polar orbits that would overfly the continental United States. Would we interpret the resulting surveillance data as indicating that a fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) had been initiated in Russia? My knowledge of our Air Force sensors, both current and projected (see Baker and Ford (1968)), indicates that they are sufficiently sophisticated so. that they would probably not react prematurely and signal a false alarm—although a careful study of this point should be made. On the other hand,there may exist other anomalistic sources of data that might give rise to a false alarm and perhaps provoke us either to deploy our countermeasures, or even to counterattack. Before I enumerate the specific benefits this research might confer upon various scientific disciplines, allow me to digress briefly on the subject of soft data. The primary reason that I have avoided the in- troduction of soft data into my photographic studies and have not involved myself in the analysis of eyewitness reports (such as the excellent ones given by Fuller (1966)), is that I have been unable to develop a rational basis for determining the credibility level for any given human observer. Although they lie outside the field of my own scientific competence, I feel that credibility evaluations of witnesses
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.