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.
“Long John Nebel”1 page
• 217 ocean, in the void of space and on the surface of the airless, waterless moon and Mars. More and more we are also finding that life exists under almost all circumstances. 19. If we are being visited why haven't they landed? The fact of the matter is that there are many reports of landings. The compre- hensive study by scientist J. Vallee 20 reviews 200 landings which occurred in 1954 alone ;-many of them with multiple witnesses giving reports of humanoids in addition to strange craft either on or just above the ground. Most scientists have unfortunately not examined this data since it was published in a UFO Journal and laughter comes easier than facing up to the evidence. 20. Has the attitude of the scientific journals and professional community been changing? There has been a quiet yet enormous change in the attitude of the technological community. I say technological to include the applied scientists and engineers who are far more responsible for the progress of the last 30 years than the academic scientists who are prone to tell us all that is impossible. Examples of the change include the publication of articles by Science 2223 Astronautics and Aeronautics," the Journal of the Astronautical Sciences'the American Engineer 2020 Industrial Research,' Scientific Research'8 Aviation Week and Space Technology.' In addition, numerous pro-UFO talks have been pre- sented to local and national meetings of professional groups (see Appendix 1 and Ref. 36, 37) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science is planning a UFO seminar for a national meeting. The AIAA has even set up a UFO Committee. 21. Have there really been any electromagnetic effects associated with UFO sightings? Indeed such reports are numerous, see for example Ref. 38, which includes stopping of car engines and headlights, and interference with radio and TV reception, magnetic speedometers, and watches. 22. Could these conceivably be related to a propulsion scheme? There is an enormous amount of work available concerned with magnetoaero- dynamics. I received a NASA bibliography with more than 3000 references. Ref. 39 contains abstracts of more than 800 publications dealing with interactions between vehicles and plasmas. Much of this work is classified because ICBM nose cones are surrounded by plasmas. In any event, there is a body of technology which I have studied and which leads me to believe 2 that an entirely new approach to high speed air and space propulsion could be developed using the interactions between magnetic and electric fields with electrically conducting fluids adjacent to the vehicles to produce thrust or lift and reduce or eliminate such other hypersonic flight problems as drag, sonic boom, heating, etc. These notions are based existing technology such as that included in Ref. 40 through 49 though one would expect that a considerable development effort would be required. 23. Have any electromagnetic propulsion systems been operated? So far as I know no airborne system has been operated which depended on electromagnetic forces for propulsion. At Northwestern, turning on a magnet inside a simulated re-entry vehicle with a plasma around it resulted in a change in the color of the plasma and its location relative to the vehicle. However, an electromagnetic submarine has actually been built and successfully tested. It is described in some detail in References 50-52. 24. Can an EM submarine really be related to a UFO? Dr. Way's electromagnetic submarine which, incidentally, is silent and would be quite difficult to detect at a distance is directly analagous to the type of air- borne craft I envision except that the shape of the aircraft would most likely he lenticular and the electrically conducting seawater would be replaced with an electrically conducting plasma of ionized air. 25. Would lenticular vehicles fly? I certainly think so. We seem to believe that airplanes have the only possible shape probably because the Wright brothers plane had the same outline which in turn was like that of birds. As pointed out by Chatham in Ref. 53, flight is still only a byproduct of high forward velocity leading to the need for long runways and high speed landings and takeoff. Present airplanes are quite obviously ineffi- cient in terms of fuel consumption, payload fraction, and volume of air and air- port space per passenger. After all the SST will only carry a few hundred passen- gers though it will occupy the space of a football field capable of holding at least ten times as many people. Fuel weight is greater than payload weight and neither Footnotes at the end of article. 97-818 0-68---15
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.