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.
“Socorro, New Mexico”2 pages
1 225 various more -or -less obscure or ill-defined cases falling somewhere within the "triangle." (Indeed, to throw all such intermediate cases together, without ade- quate regard for the reliability or credibility of each report—as some investiga- tors have tended to do for the purposes of compiling over-all statistics concerning "UFO activity"—can, I think, lead to a largely uninterpretable picture. For, there is then no way of assessing or parceling out the "noise" contributed by the contactee, the prankster and, of course, the many well-meaning citizens who, under unusual circumstances, will continue to misidentify familiar phenomena.) Rather, we stand to learn most from an intensive study into those numerous cases represented by the remaining "corner" of the triangle in which converging evidence from apparently involuntary, independent, and responsible witnessesstrongly points to the occurrence of an objective phenomenon of an unexplained character. The potential contribution of psychological techniques to the study even of purely physical phenomena Even though our primary interest is, then, on the unexplained objective and presumably physical phenomena that may give rise to such UFO reports, our problem remains as much a psychological as a physical one. For, the vast bulk of the data upon which we must base our scientific investigation comes—not from physical recording or measuring devices—but solely from one or more human observers. Moreover these are observers who were not, evidently, selected for their powers of observation or description and who have good reason to be re- luctant as well—particularly in view of the likelihood of ridicule, often en- couraged, curiously, by the very investigators who profess to be seeking the truth (cf., Fuller, 1966, pp. 211-220; Weitzel, 1967). It is here, surely, that we have been most glaringly remiss in our attempts to put the investigation of UFO's on a scientific footing. We have, simply, failed to make anywhere near full use of the one recording and measuring instrumentat our disposal; namely, our unwitting human witness. Now it is true that one of the more exotic psychological techniques, hypnotic regression, has already been attempted with interesting—if considerably less than conclusive results in at least one UFO case of a rather sensational nature (Fuller, 1967). However, although astonishing claims have sometimes been made for the kind of detail that can be recovered under hypnosis (e.g., by Mc- Culloch in von Foerster, 1952, p. 100), the results of controlled experiments on accuracy of recall have generally been less impressive (Reiff & Scheerer, 1959). More reliable, in my opinion, are some techniques based on certain psychological facts of a more mundane but better understood character. The power of methods guided by recognition rather than description in thereconstruction of a fleeting event It is, I suppose, a fact familiar to us all that we can take in and remember much more information than we can readily communicate to others. Contrast, for example, how easily we recognize the face of a friend in a crowd with how difficult it is to describe that face so that any other person could then do it for us. Quite generally, our powers of recognition exceed our powers of description (and, indeed, surpass anything that we have yet been able to accomplish by physical instrument or machine). In an experiment on recognition memory, I once pre- sented human subjects with over 600 different pictures, one right after the other, and then found that they could immediately distinguish between those "old" pictures and otherwise completely comparable "new" pictures with median ac- curacy of over 98% ( Shepard, 1967). Even when the test was not given until aweek later, the discriminations between "old" and "new" pictures were still 92% correct. Moreover, the advantage of recognition over verbal description should become especialy pronounced when the object or event to be remember is un- familiar and, so, not uniquely or succinctly "captured" by readily available terms or labels. Over and over again, witnesses of "UFO's" have provided descriptions that, while they strongly suggest that a clear view was obtained of some well-defined but extraordinary object or phenomenon, leave the investigator frustratingly in the dark as to its precise appearance or behavior. A closely viewed, "spinning metallic" object is said, for example, to have been "mushroom -shaped" or to haveresembled "an inverted top." But what does this mean? What sort of mushroom? With or without the stalk? And what on earth ( !) is referred to, precisely, by "a 30 foot inverted top?"
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.