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.
“Nevers”43 pages
231 that the evidential value at least of still photographs depends entirely upon the surrounding circumstances. An isolated photograph about which little is known, no matter how impressive it may appear in itself, is essentially worthless—except, possibly, in cases in which sophisticated photogrammetric analysis yields further detail tending to confirm the verbal account of the photographer. (I have heard that this as happened in at least one case; viz., that of the controversial series of Polaroid photographs—one of which is represented in A8—taken by a (Yali- fornia state highway employee, Rex Heflin, near Santa Ana in August 1965.) The photographs most worthy of further intensive investigation would seem to be those for which there also were reported to be many eyewitnesses as well as other, corroborating photographs—as in the celebrated case of the "saturn- shaped" object (Al) that was said to have been photographed from an oceano- graphic vessel near the Brazilian island of Trindad in January 1958 (see Lorenzen, 1966, pp. 145453, 164-174). The assessment of the representativeness of a set of recognition test -materials Even though an extensive effort is made to represent every sort of shape that has been reliably described, sketched, or photographed, the possibility will remain that the collection of proposed test materials will not be sufficiently representa- tive. Certain types of completely fraudulent shapes may unnecessarily inflate the already unwieldly collection and, more seriously, some significant types may still be missing. There are, however, ways of assessing the representativeness of any proposed collection of shapes. One is, simply, to have people describe these shapes and then to look for any pronounced departures of the relative frequencies of the various descriptive terms used from the corresponding relative frequencies inreports issuing from actual sightings of UFOs. My research assistant, Miss Shelley Meltzer, carried out an exploratory attempt at this sort of thing that may help to illustrate some of the relevant considerations. From our total sample of photographs, 75 that seemed suitably representative were selected for this preliminary study. These included most of the 63 already ' portrayed in the accompanying figure, but those that were known or strongly suspected to be fraudulent were eliminated and a number of others of less sharply defined shape were added (since many reports indicate that the shape was not clearly'visible). Each of 19 subjects, mostly students at Harvard University, then looked through one of three subsets of 25 of these photographs and, for each, attempted to describe the pictured object in their own words. (Immediately fol- lowing that, each subject then looked through another subset of 25 and, this time, indicated the appropriateness for each photograph of each term in a flocd set that we had listed in advance on a 'standardized rating sheet. However this part of the experiment will not be considered in any detail here.) Of most imme- diate interest are the descriptive labels spontaneously produced in the 19 x 25 or 475 subject -photograph encounters. These could now be compared with the descriptive labels appearing in a sample of 206 different representative reports of actual UFO sightings that Miss 'Meltzer had alread extracted (for a different purpose) from a number of sources (mostly Edwards, 1906; Hall, 1964; Michel, 1967; Olsen, 1966; Ruppelt, 1956; and Vallee, 1965). The accompanying table lists those descriptive terms that pertain to visual appearance but, for purposes of comparison with the mostly black -and -white photographs, excludes the many references to (chromatic) color. With one ex- ception ( #33), only terms that appeared at least twice in the sample of 206 actual reports are included, and these arranged in order of decreasing frequency of occurrence in that sample.
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.