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.
“Fuller”9 pages
226 Some psychologists have been expressly studying the ways in which people come to describe nearly nondescript objects to others (e.g., Krauss & Wein- heimer, 1964, 1966). Often a person will feel that the ambiguous term he comes up with (such, for example, as "an inverted top") does quite well. Possibly this is because he is picturing some particular interpretation (e.g., a particular toy that he played with as a child). For the listener who does not have that par- ticular picture in mind, however, the description may prove either meaningless or, worse, completely misleading (cf., Glucksberg, Krauss, & Weisberg, 1966). An indication of the same sort of problem is the tendency of witnesses to say things like "it looked about the size of a football." Further circumstances make clear that they must have been referring to its apparent visual size rather than Its real, physical size (which could, after all, hardly be estimated without also knowing its real, physical distance). More pertinently here, it appears that they were really talking more about its shape than its size. Possibly, the presence, so to speak, of a very vivid image in the mind of the witness causes him to lose sight of the total inadequacy of his verval encoding of that image. This problem is already implicitly recognized in certain situations of more ob- viously pressing practical concern. Investigators in cases of homicide do not rest content with the weak and fuzzy descriptions typically offered by a witness but,In addition, may employ a skilled artist (such as Richard Kenehan of the New York Police Department) to work with the witness in an attempt to reconstruct a usable likeness of the murderer's face. The witness may be asked to select eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, or ears from series that are systematically graded in size and shape. The witness can then help to adjust their positions on an outlined face. This will generally provide a sufficiently concrete stimulus to enable the witness, finally, to become reasonably explicit about further refinements con- cerning hair, complexions, lines, scars, asymmetries, and so on. In a number ofcases (such as the recent one in which Richard Speck was charged with the murder of several nursing students in Chicago) a likeness constructed in this way from a single surviving witness has proved remarkably accurate and, in more than one instance, has actually led to the apprehension of the criminal (cf., Schumach, 1958) .This provides perhaps the most directly pertinent substantiation for the one central point that I want to leave with those concerned with the investigation of UFO's. Briefly, it is this: Even when an event occurs without warning, leaves little time for careful observation and, indeed, occasions extreme fear or anxiety, the average witness often retains an accurate, almost photographicrecord of the event—a record, moreover, that can be largely recovered from him even though he lacks the words to describe it himself. Possibly then, in allow- ing our investigations to depend solely upon our informant's inadequate, his misleading and, yes, his sometimes even ludicrous choice of words, we have done both him—and ourselves—a telling disservice. The desirability of establishing a system permitting convergence of independent reconstructions Admittedly, in the case of UFO's, the value of information provided by a single, isolated witness—however detailed that information may be—is, by Itself, always quite small (except, of course, for the witness himself!). For, from the standpoint of any other person, there is always at least the possibility of hallucination, delusion or, more likely, just plain fabrication. This is amply pointed up by the relative lack of evidential value of the many quite detailed photographs purported to have been taken of UFOs by solitary witnesses. It is only when there turns up an otherwise inexplicably close correspondence between the information furnished by two or more independent witnesses that the evidence becomes at all compelling at the public or scientific level. But we do not provide for even the possibility of a close correspondence unless we elicit sufficiently detaailed information. Thus, when one person reports a "glowing mushroom -shaped object" while another, remote witness refers to the passage of an "inverted top," we have little basis for evaluating the likelihood that they have both observed a physical object—let alone the same physical object. Now it is true that certain rather suggestive regularities have already emerged in the more or less spontaneous reports of observers. Among the very most common, for example, are the frequent references to disk -like shapes, to extraordinary velocities, to abrupt simultaneous changes of color and direction and, perhaps most strikingly, to the so-called "pendulum" or "falling-leaf" type
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.