Symposium on unidentified flying objects: hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, second session, July 29, 1968.

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.