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.
“Scientific American”26 pages
228 witness describing what he saw as completely as he can, in his, own words, and without any cues (whether verbal or pictorial) that might bias him in one direction or another; second, the recording of his responses to the standardized, pictorial materials; and third (if the case seems to warrant it) the full recon- struction of a new picture with the help of a suitably trained artist. Such a new picture, if sufficiently novel or well-defined, might then be incorporated in future revisions of the materials used for the second phase of the interview. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure would depend very heavily upon the amount of thought, care, skill and, above all, pretesting that went into the preparation of the materials. The arrays of alternative shapes should of course include all types of shapes that have been clearly described, sketched, or (allegedly) actually photographed by some previous witness of at least reason- able reliability. One helpful attempt at systematizing the kinds of shapes that have been reported has in fact already been published (see Hall, 1964, p. 144). However, more extensive and refined work would be necessary in order to cover the great variety of reported shapes, and to do this in a sufficiently concrete and realistic manner to promote recognition and, possibly, further specification by witnesses. The use of photographs of alleged UFOs as a source of concrete test materials Since photographs represent an especially tempting vehicle for the hoaxter and, in addition, are easily faked, they are individually of little value as evi- dence—except in the rare cases in which there were independent, corroborating eyewitnesses. Photographs purporting to be of UFOs are, however, surprisingly numerous. (I myself have assembled well over 150 distinct such photographs merely from published reports.) Moreover, since at least one of these photo- graphs might be authentic and since we have no sure way of knowing in advance which one it might be, we can not afford to eliminate any distinct type that hasn't already been proved to be a fraud. In the meantime, moreover, the other, spurious photographs can serve (in somewhat the same way as the non-suspects in a police "line-up") as a means of assessing consistency of choice or, contrary- wise, mere guessing on the part of different witnesses. The accompanying figure reproduces drawings in which I have tried to portray, as accurately as I could, representative objects from 63 of these photographs. The greater contrast of the drawings renders them more readily duplicatable than the original photographs. Moreover, I was also able in this way to reduce them all to uniform size and to eliminate background details which, although useful for estimating size or gauging authenticity, are only distracting for present purposes. Some of the photographs are from well documented or widely publi- cized cases while others are of more obscure or dubious origin. At least two cases have subsequently been admitted to be hoaxes, while circumstances sur- rounding some of the others make them difficult to dismiss in this way.
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.