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
166 night couldn't have missed that light. Although it was an unusual sight, it seemed very real to him and is still very vivid in his mind. He had never seen anything like it before and in fact had never previously had the occassion to report anything whatever to the police. He says that the only reason he hadreported seeing the light was a sense of duty, after he had read in the morning paper that some one else had also seen an unusual object in the sky on the samenight. The patient was the youngest male and third youngest child among seven siblings born in Boston into a lower class urban situation, during the Depression. His father, Irish by heritage, was an occassional bartender who was rarely home, paid little attention to his children, and is best remembered as "scarey" because of his violently angry outbursts at the mother when he had been drinking. The patients; early memories include 1) a. scene in which hisforlorn-looking mother is bending over a tub scrubbing clothes in an icey cold kitchen and 2) an episode in which his oldest sister snatched his doll away from him but was later made by the mother to return it. It is that same sister whom he now visits during his vacations; she is married but childless and still lives in Boston. He would like to live permanently with her, if her husband were better dispositioned. His other sisters all have children, and it makes him nervous to be around them. He says he always got along better with his sisters than his brothers and has not kept in touch with any of the latter. He has never had many friends;even as a boy, he was a "loner" and a "homebody" who was more than once called a "mammas boy" by his peers. He didn't involve himself in school athletics or neighborhood games because he seemed to be so clumsy, but did sell newspapers in another part of the city for several years for the sake of the family budget. His leisure hours were spent reading and re -reading old comic books, making upstories about his adventures with Ali (a make-believe playmete from whom he was inseparable until he was 12), and helping his mother in various ways. It is still difficult for him to talk about his dead mother, although he says he thinks about her all the time. Painfully, he revealed that he feels he was never a good enough son to her, that he had wanted to make up to her for all her hardships at the hands of his father but that he had never been able to fill a certain void for her (despite his long-term devotion and protectiveness). He tends to blame himself in a sense for her death and says that it is his fault that she spent her final days so unhappily far away from all her other children; apparently, he had insisted that she follow her doctor's advice and took her West for the sake of her "asthma" condition. She had died on her seventieth birthday. He didn't know the cause. He had come home and found her on the floor of their Tucson apartment near the phone (which was off the hook). It had been 7 PM when he had arrived, having stopped for a couple of drinks atthe neighborhood bar. He says he still gets sick to his stomach when he thinks about how he was sitting in that bar while she was dying and trying to reach him. He remained in Boston, unemployed, for six months after the funeral,during which time he slept a lot, ate little, and hit the bars more often than usual. By the time he could bring himself to face Tucson and the apartment again, he had lost his accounting job.
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.