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
203 My assurance that there must be some mistake in the observation could not be accepted, because this erratic course of the heavenly body had been seen by all of them so plainly that no doubt could exist on the subject. The men who saw it were not of the ordinary untrained kind, but graduates of West Point, who, if any one, ought to be free from optical deceptions. I was con- fidently invited to look out that night and see for myself. We all watched with the greatest interest. In due time the planet Mars was seen in the east making its way toward the south."There it is!" was the exclamation. "Yes, there it is," said I. "Now that planet is going to keep right on its course toward the south." "No, it is not," said they; "you will see it turn around and go down towards the north." Hour after hour passed, and as the planet went on its regular course, the other watchers began to get a little nervous. It showed no signs of deviating from its course. We went out from time to time to look at the sky. "There it is," said one of the observers at length, pointing to Capella, which was now just rising a little to the east of north; "there is the star setting." "No, it isn't," said I; "there is the star we have been looking at, now quite inconspicuous near the meridian, and that star which you think is setting is really rising and will soon be higher up." A very little additional watching showed that no deviation of the general laws of Nature had occurred, but that the observers of previous nights had jumped at the conclusion that two objects, widely apart in the heavens, were the same. Those words came from a book called "Reminiscences of an Astronomer," published in 1903 by Simon Newcomb, who was in charge of the American Nautical Almanic office from 1877 until 1897. The event actually occurred in 1860. The similarity to modern UFO's is overpowering. A star cavorting across the sky! Military officers as responsible witnesses! In his delightful book, "Light and Colour in the Open Air," the well-known Dutch astronomer, M. Minnaert, wrote. "Moving Stars. "In the year 1850 or thereabouts, much interest was aroused by a mysterious phenomenon; when one looked intently at a star, it sometimes seemed to swing to and fro and to change its position. The phenomenon was said to be observable only during twilight, and then only when the stars in question were less than 100 above the horizon. A brightly twinkling star was first seen to move with little jerks, parallel to the horizon, then to come to a standstill for five or six seconds and to move back again in the same way, etc. Many observers saw it so plainly that they took it to be an objective phenomenon, and tried to explain it as a consequence of the presence of hot air striae. "But any real physical phenomenon is entirely out of the question here. A real motion of %° per second, seen by the naked eye, would easily be magnified to 100° or more, by a moderately powerful telescope; that means that the stars would swing to and fro and shoot across the field of vision like meteors. And every astronomer knows that this is sheer nonsense. Even when atmospherical unrest is at its worst the displacements due to scintillation remain below the limit of perceptibility of the naked eye. Psychologically speaking, however, the phenomenon has not lost any of its importance. It may be due to the fact of there being no object for comparison, relative to which the star's position can be easily observed. We are not aware that our eye continually performs little involuntary movements, so that we naturally ascribe displacements of the image over our retina to corresponding displacements of the source of light. "Somebody once asked me why a very distant aeroplane appears invariably to move with little jerks when followed intently with the eye. Here the same psychological cause obviously comes into play, as in the case of the 'moving' stars, and 'very distant' seems to point to the fact that this phenomenon, too, occurs most of all near the horizon. "And how can we account for the fact that, suddenly and simultaneously, three people saw the moon dance up and down for about thirty minutes?" This is the phenomenon of "Telekinesis," the apparent erratic motion of an object caused by the erratic motion of the human eye. I have seen a number of UFO reports in which the observer stated that the object could not have been a meteor or a satellite because it moved irregularly. For you who wear eyeglasses there is still another way of seeing a UFO. Look directly at some bright light, with your head turned slightly to the left
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.