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.
“Harder”17 pages
190 Mr. Rousx. Thank you, Dr. Baker. I anticipated we would have difficulty keeping the members of the committee here at a time when important legislation is considered on the floor. We thought we would reserve the final few minutes for those of you who have made presentations to discuss among yourselves questions which may have been aroused by one of your colleagues' presentation today. With that in mind, we are going to permit you to have a real free for all. Dr. Sagan. Dr. SAGAN. I just wanted to underline one point that Dr. Baker made, Congressman Roush, in his detailed presentation of the various Air Force systems. I am afraid that the main point won't come across to a lay audience, and that is that with relatively little expenditure of funds, it would be possible to significantly improve the available information. Apparently what is now happening is that the Air Force surveillance radar is throwing away the data that is of relevance for this inquiry. In other words,if it sees something that is not on a ballistic trajectory, or not in orbit, it ignores it, it throws it in the garbage. Well,that garbage is just the area of our interest. So if some method could be devised by the Air Force to save the output that they are throwing away from these space surveillance radars, it might be the least expensive way to significantly improve our information about these phenomena. Mr. Rousx. Thank you. Dr. BAKER. Let me just make a comment: That is quite true. At the present time our space surveillance sensors are about 200 percent overtasked. That means they could make about 50 percent of their time available to us. They task too many space objects, their capacity is much greater than the space objects that they are tasked to watch. The space population may grow to fill this void, but currently what Dr. Sagan says is true, we could as I indicated in conclusion (4) modify our current space surveillance system. It is not an expensive thing to modify existing radars. The FPS-85 itself costs something like $100 million. The software modification called for here I am sure would be much less. Mr. Rousx. Dr. Hynek. Dr. HYNEK. I would just like to concur in what Dr. Sagan has said. I understand there are several hundred UCT's a month, uncorrelated targets, that because they don't—I understand—which since they do not follow ballistic trajectory, they are tossed out. It would not be expensive to introduce a subroutine into the computer to take care of these things for a short while. I strongly second Dr. Sagan's and Dr. Baker's suggestions. Mr. BOONE. Mr. Chairman. Mr. RousH. Mr. Boone. Mr. BOONE. I think the gentleman should advise you too, though, when you do that, you must make a trajectory determination on each target including aircraft which may put a terrific burden on the radar you are insisting on upgrading. Dr. HYNEK. I will certainly grant that. Dr. HARDER. I would only respond to Mr. Boone by suggesting you could reject all objects that were found,for instance, under 90,000 feet.
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.