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
227 of descent. Still, much more detailed information concerning such things as shape could presumably be extracted by techniques (akin to those already used in criminal cases) designed to take fuller advantage of the witnesses' usually untapped but vastly more discriminating powers of recognition. The point, here, is that such more detailed information is needed not merely for its own sake. It is needed, even before that, because the establishment of the very validity of the information in question hinges upon the demonstration of the kind of point -for -point correspondence between reports that becomes possi- ble only when those reports are sufficiently detailed. If two, unrelated witnesses both claim to have seen a disk -shaped object at about the same time and place this is not sufficiently compelling. (Evidently! For it has already happened many times.) But, if artists working with the two witnesses, independently, construct pictures of what appears to be the very same object or, alternatively, if the two witnesses independently point to the very same drawing or photo- graph in an array of 50 or more different pictures of such objects, then the coincidence becomes more interesting. (And, of course, if the pictures recon- structed or singled out in this way just once turned out to coincide, also, with an actual photograph taken at the time, we should at last have opened the door for the more precise measurements of physical science—including the sophisti- cated and powerful photogrammetric methods being developed for the analysis and interpretation of lunar photographs.) The establishment of a pre -tested and standardized procedure for reconstruct- ing information by the sort of psychologically oriented techniques envisaged here, moreover, would be incomparably cheaper than the implementation of other more physically oriented schemes that have sometimes been proposed— such as the construction of a far-flung network of automatic radar -and -camera stations. For, instead of having simultaneously to cover all possible sites in advance, we could simply move in to recover the desired information after an incident is first reported. There is, however, one unavoidable aspect of the psychologically oriented type of approach proposed here that I, anyway, regard as quite regrettable. To the extent that any detailed pictures reconstructed by these techniques are made publically available, we cannot guarantee that pictures obtained from sub- sequent witnesses will be suitably independent for our purposes. Consequently, rather tight security precautions would have to be imposed on the more detailed reconstructions, if the purely scientific purposes of the investigation are not to be compromised. The U8(3 of concrete stimuli to provide a basis for the independent, recognition - guided process of reconstruction The need for ensuring independence of information supplied by different wit- nesses is in fact so great that it is doubtful whether much reliance could safely be placed on different pictures reconstructed with the help of the same artist. Despite the best intentions of the artist, he might unwittingly guide different witnesses along somewhat similar channels by means of subtle, perhaps uncon- scious cues (cf., Rosenthal, 1966). Moreover, even if a different artist could be supplied for each witness, we would still be left with the problem of evaluating the likelihood that any two pictures constructed in this way could have turned out as similarly as they did by chance alone. For these reasons and for reasons of feasibility, convenience, and economy, it would be preferable to develop a standardized set of materials containing suit- ably representative and graded series of shapes to which each witness could independently respond. Some such materials would be needed, in any case, in order to provide stimuli suitable for tapping the witnesses' powers of recognition. Possibly even separate arrays should be constructed for distinguishable parts such as "domes" or other projections (just as separate series of eyes, or mouths may be helpful to the witness in criminal eases). By means of suitable standard- ization and control in the preparation and presentation of such materials, then, we could be reasonably sure that the responses of one witness are not unduly influencing the choices of another. Moreover, since each witness would make his choices from a pre -tested, fixed set of alternatives of known size, we would be in a favorable position to assess the probability that any coincidences of choice might have occurred merely by chance. All things considered, the best procedure might be to divide the questioning of a witness into the following three distinct phases: first, the recording of the
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.