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.
“The Advance”52 pages
177 The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences Vol. XV, No. 1, pp. 31-36 Jan.—Feb., 1968 Observational Evidence of Anomalistic Phenomena' Robert M. L. Baker, Jr.3 Abstract A summary of the data obtained from a series of analyses and experiments, which were initially carried out by the au- thor under the auspices of Douglas Aircraft Company and based upon movie film containing anomalistic data, originally provided by the United States Air Force, is presented. It is concluded that, on the basis of the photographic evidence, the images cannot be explained by any presently known natural phenomena. On the other hand, the quality of the images is insufficient to determine the nature of the anomalis- tic phenomena recorded on the movie film. Introduction Two anomalistic unidentified flying objects (UFO's) were sighted and later photographed at about 1130 a.m. Mountain Standard Time on August .15, 1950, by Nicholas Mariana at Great Falls, Montana. Mr. Mariana owned and operated a radio station in Mis- soula, Montana, and was the owner of the Great Falls baseball team. • All of the soft-data (eye witness reports of )Lr. Mariana and his secretary) indicated that the objects were silvery in appearance with a notch or band at one point on their periphery and could be seen to ro- tate in unison, hover, and then "...with a swishing sound, floated away to the left (SW) ...." The hard data from the film showed inarticulate bright white dots. Figure 1 shows the manner in which the diameter of the bright dots decreased with time. The objects passed behind a water tower and are exhibited in Fig. 2, along with the associated frame number (the frames below 65 exhibited no foreground). According to lari- ana, 35 of the earlier frames, allegedly lost by the Air Force, showed a larger image, complete with a "ro- tating notch." Figure 2 was constructed from iconolog measurements (a film viewer with moveable cross hairs and a digitalized coordinate output) using the ftire- Manuscript submitted November, 1967. Paper was pre- sented at an AAS Seminar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. A manuscript on the same subject matter was originally submitted in 1962. The complete revision of this earlier manuscript, after receiving three favorable reviews, was accepted. The Senior Scientist of System Sciences 'Corporation, a subdivision of Computer Sciences Corporation, 650 N. Sepul- veda Blvd., El Segundo, Calif. 90245, and the Department of Engineering, UCLA. ground reference points marked C), C), ancl C). This figure is drawn like a panorama on the assumption that the photographer kept his stance without moving ap- preciably (which was reported by him and was well borne out by the consistence of his perspective). These initial measurements were made by the author at Douglas Aircraft Company in 1955-1956. Analysis The "Montana" film contains six independent data (as functions of time) on about 225 frames (frames 65 to 290), which describe the UFO images, i.e., the two degrees of freedom of each dot (as depicted on two- dimensional film after the foreground appears on frame 65) and the apparent diameter of the developed image of each on all 290 frames (no ellipticity could be seen in the images except for occasional image smear due to uneven panning). In the analysis it was convenient to treat the UFO's as a system. The four degrees of freedom chosen for this system were the azimuth and altitude of the midpoint on the line of centers between the images, their angular separation and their inclina- tion to the horizon. The inclination to the horizon was found to be very small, the objects appearing to move almost in a plane parallel to the ground. There is a slight decrease in the angle of inclination as the objects regress, but its small value is almost masked by random errors inherent in the measurements. Figure 3a presents a plot of the angular altitude, /t, and the azimuth, A, of the midpoint of the line of centers after frame 6.5 (i.e., after a measureable foreground appears), and Fig. 3b presents the separation distance ratio WO as a function of time, where 00 is the initial angular separation (frame 1) and 8 is the angular separation at any given time. In both of these plots some frames were not measured, e.g., due to obscuration of the images during water-tower passage, or were missing (there were frames missing between frame numbers 177 to 180 on the 35 mm print that was measured for separation distance, but these were accounted for in the time scale using the 16 mm original as a basis). About 225 frames after the foreground (ventilator duct) appears on the film (i.e., after the 290th frame), the objects can no longer be clearly identified and measure- ments become very uncertain.
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.