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
204 or right. You will probably see a faint roundish out -of -focus spot. This is light reflected from the front surface of your eyeball, back to the lens, and then back into the pupil of your eye. A bright source, to one side and slightly behind you, can also reach your eye 'through reflection from the internal surface of the spectacle lens. To this moment I have not mentioned still another method of detecting saucers—one not subject to the vagaries of the human eye. I mean radar, of course. Radar is a machine. It can't make mistakes. Or at least that is the com- mon argument advanced by UFO buffs. Radar is cursed with all the potential afflictions that any complicated electrical gadget can suffer. But let me mention only one: mirage. Let me explain briefly what a radar does. It sends out a pulse of radio waves. We know the direction, Northeast for example. We know the elevation above the horizon. An echo re- turns. From the interval between transmission and reception of the pulse, we know how far away the object is that reflected the pulse back to us. We think we detect a plane—or a UFO in flight—because the radar directs the pulse upward. We have no way of following the pulse in its path toward the target. A layer of warm, dry air or even a layer containing a few bubbles of warm air will bendthe radar beam back to earth. The reflection may be from a distant building, a train, or a ship. No wonder that planes, sent to intercept radar UFO, find noth- ing. In one such case, a well-known writer on flying saucers wrote: "The dis- covery of visible saucers had been serious enough.—The discovery now of in- visible flying saucers would be enough to frighten anyone." Small changes in the atmosphere can make the UFO seem to maneuver at fantastic speeds, executing right-angle turns or suddenly vanishing completely from the radar scope. I was very familiar with such effects from having worked with them during Naval Service in World War II. The greatest radar saucer flap of all times occurred in the hot, dry month of July 1952, when a whole fleet of UFO's were detected by radar at Washington National airport. Subsequent research by the Weather Bureau completely confirmed what the UFO buffs pointedly refer to as my "Hot Air Theory." After all why should one be surprised to find hot air over Washington? I know of no reliable case of simultaneous visual and radar sightings. In viewof the physical properties of the eye, the surprising fact is that so few eases have been reported. 'Time will not permit me to elaborate on still other relevant phenomena. Forexample the Air Force appears to have neglected completely the psychological angle of which mass hallucination is just one phase. Back in 1919, in Spain, a not unrelated phenomenon occurred. Thousands of people—reliable people—swore that they had seen images of saints rolling their eyes, moving their hands, dripping drops of blood, even stepping out of their panels. One person would call out, others would imagine they had seen something! There are many similar events recorded through the ages. There are hundreds of known hoaxes, such as the ingenious one perpetrated by students of the University of Colorado. Spurred by the allotment of an Air Force grant for studying UFO's to the University of Colorado, enterprising pranksters made hot-air balloons from candles and plastic bags, the kind usedfor packaging dry cleaning. The show was spectacular. And it gave the Uni- versity investigators a good opportunity to see how poor the evidence can be, a fact well-known to the legal profession. This is still another point that the Air Force has sometimes failed to realize. Moreover their poor questionnaire only further confused an already confused picture. A recent similar sighting south of Denver, later identified as plastic -bag balloons and candles, produced fantastic: reports from "reliable" witnesses. Several times I have used the phrase "UFO's cavorting across the sky." I did so deliberately because it seems to be a favorite phrase of my good friend Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University and consultant to the Air ForceProject Blue Book. He has sometimes expressed doubts about the UFO becausestars don't "cavort" across the sky. What I have tried to show is that many kinds of optical stimuli can produce weird effects. With all these kOs of phenomena masquerading as UFO's, many of them, like those related to physiology of the human eye still practically not investigated, Ithink I can reasonably claim, applying the criterion of Sherlock Holmes, that we
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.