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
238 40 t‘ 1 3P .053 094 1005 1018 . 30 Fig. 1. UFO sightings and the oppositions of Mars. The dotted line represents "re- liable" sightings in the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, 3190 E. Kleindale Road, Tucson, Arizona. They were supplied by C. E. Lorenzen. The solid line represents sightings assembled from published reports by M. G. Quincy and presented by Jacques and Janine Vallee (1962). Quincy showed no records for 1964, and these were obtained from Michel (1958). Obviously there is no cor- relation between UFO sightings and the distance to Mars in 1947 and 1957, but the Vallies calculated correlation co-efficients for the other years and found that the ob- served correlation would be expected to occur due to chance alone less than one time in a thousand trials (they transposed all sightings two months to account for the lag apparent in 1952, 1954, and 1956). It is interesting to note that the two sighting curves agree so closely, although they obviously include many different data. A third curve, prepared by E. Buelta in Bar- celona, Spain, also agrees closely. physical activity of certain UFO's (Menzel and Boyd, 1963). In several "good" sightings (those which, for rea- sons discussed below, do not readily fit any of the remaining four hypothe- ses), UFO's have appeared to acceler- ate at tremendous rates or even make right-angle turns while traveling at speeds of several hundred or thousand miles per hour. Although they move in the atmosphere at velocities which surely exceed that of sound, no sonic booms are heard (they are often essen- tially silent) nor do they appear to burn up with frictional heat. The skep- tic says: "Granted that we have a lot left to learn about our universe, we surely don't expect the fundamental laws to be rejected. That we may re- fine them as Einstein did, it is true, but inertia is inertia, and a right-angle turn at several thousand miles per hour is a simple physical impossibility." This may be the most compelling argument against the spaceship hy- pothesis, but there are two counter- arguments. First, one can simply re- ject the above statement. I do not see how Newton's laws could be so flagrantly violated, but others (Loren- zen, 1962; Michel, 1958; Vallee and Vallee, 1966) have come up with various suggestions. Perhaps inertia is the gravitational interaction between an object and all other objects in the universe. If this gravitational attrac- tion could some way be severed (some mysterious antigravity shield surround- ing the spacecraft, for example!), then right-angle turns at high speeds might be feasible. Would the surrounding antigravity field also nullify the sound barrier problem? Some think so. I haven't the faintest idea, but we could be wrong about what is impossible. Second, one might remember that not all UFO's perform "impossible" feats. The topic is sufficiently interesting if only one UFO proves to be a spaceship from Mars! Another argument against the space- ship idea concerns the lack of formal contact with the UFO occupants. Since visiting spaceships ought to be piloted by some sort of intelligent beings, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that they would desire contact with other intelligent beings, namely us? Or why hasn't a flying saucer landed on the United Nations Building to establish formal diplomatic relations? This argument assumes that we can understand the motives of an extra- terrestrial being. Of course we cannot. How could we know the minds of such beingi? To inductively extrapolate from our own current sociological ap- proaches to those of other intelligent entities would be to commit the logical sin of extrapolation in a most flagrant manner. It is easy to imagine several reasons why the extraterrestrials might not want to contact us. Did they plant us here as a colony many thousands of years ago and are carefully observ- ing our evolutionary development? Do they envy us for our natural resources and want to conquer us, although pres- ent logistic problems make such an ef- fort impossible? Are they waiting for us to straighten out our wars and race problems? Are they simply uninter- ested in us as contemporaries, prefer- ring to observe us as specimens? Ento- mologists study the honeybees very carefully but make no diplomatic con- tact with the queen! InOine the Aborigines of Central Australia, who are still in the stone age and who have not even developed the bow and arrow. They have had no contact at all with modern civilization. What happens when a jet plane flies overhead and one of them observes it? When he tells of the huge, shiny bird that didn't flap its wings, had no feet, made an ear-splitting roar, and even had smoke coming out of its tail, surely his fellows assume that he is crazy. Or if the phenomenon becomes so common that it must be accepted as real, they could hardly be expected to deduce from it the conditions of our modern civilization, let alone our mo- tives. "Why," they might ask, "don't the intelligent beings who guide this mighty bird land and trade bone nose- pieces with us?" Actually, many of the Aborigines, even those who have come in contact with civilized men, still in- terpret the airplane in a religious con- text, as witness the establishment of the cargo cults among these peoples (Worsley, 1959). We cannot, then, eliminate the spaceship hypothesis, although some of the arguments against it are quite impressive. We should, in deference to the scientific method, examine with a completely open mind any evidence which might be marshalled in favor of the hypothesis. Let us consider the four alternatives to it. 11. Conventional Phenomena Misinterpreted Given certain special circumstances, nearly anyone can be confused and amazed by the appearance of some conventional object which under other circumstances might cause no bewil- derment whatsoever. What psycho- logical factors lead to such misinter- pretations? In various instances, re- ported UFO's have clearly been dem- onstrated to be balloons, kites, birds, conventional aircraft, artificial satel- lites, planets and stars, meteors, clouds, natural electrical effects such as ball lightning (Klass 1966), and optical effects such as reflections, mirages, sun- dogs, and defractions caused by inver- sion layers in the atmosphere (see Menzel and Boyd, 1963, and Air Force files). Let us consider the level of certainty in classifying a given sighting here. Often, the sighting may be placed here with absolute certainty. A balloon reported as a UFO was never out of sight of its launchers. A perplexing light in the sky takes form as an air- plane as its gets closer.
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.