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
13 fine brain teasers and could easily be made the subject of profitable discussion among physical and social scientists alike. (5) The Air Force has no evidence that UFO's are extra-terrestrial or rep- resent advanced technology of any kind. This is a true statement but is widely interpreted to mean that there is evidence against the two hypotheses. As long as there are "unidentifieds," the question must obviously remain open. If we knew what they were, they would no longer be UFO's—they would be IFO's. Identified Flying Objects! If you know the answer beforehand, it isn't research. No truly scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon has ever been undertaken. Are we making the same mistake the French Academy Sciences made when they dismissed stories of "stones that fell from the sky"? Finally, however, meteorites were made respectable in the eyes of science. (6) UFO reports are generated by publicity. One cannot deny that there is a positive feedback, a stimulated emission of reports, when sightings are widely publicized, but it is unwarranted to assert that this is the whole cause of high incidence of UFO reports. (7) UFO's have never been sighted on radar or photographed by meteor or satellite tracking cameras. This statement is not equivalent to saying that radar, meteor cameras, and satellite tracking stations have not picked up "oddities" on their scopes or films that have remained unidentified. It has been lightly assumed that although unidentified, the oddities were not unidentifiable as conventional objects. For these reasons I cannot dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug. The "hard data" cases contain frequent allusions to recurrent kinematic, geometric, and luminescent characteristics. I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th-century science to forget that there will be a 21st-century science, and indeed, a 30th-century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different. We suffer perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity. J. ALLEN HYNEK, Dearborn Observatory, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. One great misconception is that only UFO buffs report UFO's; quite the opposite is the case, as is the misconception that the most baffling reports come from unreliable, unstable,and uneducated people. Most reports of this baffling sort which I at least receive in my mail, are remarkably articulate. Other misconceptions are that UFO's are never reported by scien- tifically trained people, are never seen at close range, have never been detected on radars, and have never been recorded by scientific cameras. It is well to remind ourselves at this point of the definition of an UFO: those aerial phenomena reports which continue to defy expla- nation in conventional scientific terms, even after appropriate study. There is no point to be interested in anything else; lights at night which might be aircraft, balloons, meteors, or satellite re-entries— all these fit more readily into the category of IFO's or identified flying objects. In other words, only truly unidentified cases should be of interest. The Air Force has its own definition of an unidentified case, and it has many,hundreds in its files. The Air Force calls a sighting unidenti- fied when a report apparently contains all pertinent data necessary to suggest a valid hypothesis concerning'the cause or explanation of the report but the description of the object or its motion cannot be correlated with any known object or phenomena. It is most logical to ask why do not the unidentified in the Air Force files call forth investigative efforts in depth and of wide scope. The answer is compound: the Air Force position is that there is no evidence that UFO's represent a threat to the national security; con- sequently it follows that it is not their mission to be scientifically curious about the hundreds of unidentified cases in their own files. 97-818-68 2
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.