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.
“Scientific American”26 pages
192 what appear to be similar to UFO's, whatever we define those to be, is not quite as conclusive as it might seem. The second coinment I would make concerns Dr. Baker's remark that we should move,ahead to instrumental techniques and perhaps lessen attention on the older data. I too agree that we have much need to replace what police officers and pilots saw with good hard instrumental data,the sooner the better, but there are many fields in which once you get instrumental data, say seismology, and being to learn about the phenomenon you are studying, seismology, astronomy, meteorology, once you understand these things you do go back to exploit the knowledge that is implicit in older data. Seismologists do study old earthquake records to improve the seismicity data available. Ecologists do look at old shifts in plant and animal patterns. Astronomers do look at old eclipse information, because once you begin to understand a problem, you can then sort out much better the important material. I would not want to see excluded entirely—in fact, I think it would be folly to exclude observations that go back 20 years, and a, part of the problem we have not talked about today, still earlier ob- servations. Dr.BAKER. Yes,I concur in that. My message there was that if we preoccupy ourselves with continu- ally going over past history, it is going to be frustrating. I think we can always use past history in retrospect. In order to go back, as you say,to look at the data and to put it in the proper perspective, when we learn more about the phenomena. So I agree. Mr. RousH. Is there any other aspect of previous presentations that any of you would like to question? Dr. BAKER. I have a question of Dr. Harder about the Ubatuba magnesium. Was this magnesium terrestrial? In other words, it is granted that Ubatubas couldn't produce it, but could the magnesium have been produced terrestrially, and if so, in what connection would we pro- duce and employ such magnesium here on earth? Dr. HARDER. ,Well, such pure magnesium is indeed produced ter- restrially in connection with Grignard reagents, and produced by the Dow Chemical Co., where magnesium is produced in greater purity actually than this. At the time in 1957, the Brazilians did not have a sample of mag- nesium from the U.S. Bureau of Standards that was as pure as this Ubatuba magnesium with which to compare it. I might enlarge upon the data which was produced, or which was gotten at the request of Dr. Craig, that of the impurities found by the Colorado group, the principal one was zinc strontium with barium being a runner-up. These are very curious kinds of alloys from any terrestrial point of view. No detected aluminum, and only three parts per million copper, and those are the most likely alloying elements from the terrestrial point of view. Dr. BAKER. Would you say that the sample was partially terrestrial- ized, and it might be the remnants of an ultrapure nonterrestrial alloy, or did it Appear these particular impurities were in the sample from the beginning?
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