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.

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had no idea that the actual UFO situation is anything like what it
really appears to be.
There is a certain parallel between Dr. Hynek's slow recognition of
the problem and my slow recognition of the problem. I have been
curious about UFO's in a casual way for 10 or 20 years and have even
checked cases in the southern Arizona area off and on rather casually,
mainly encountering sincere laymen who do not recognize an aircraft
strobe light, or Venus, or a bright fireball, when they see them. It is
quite true that many persons misidentify natural phenomena; and
my experience was mainly but not entirely limited to that sort of case.
About 2 years ago I became more than casually curious for several
reasons that are not too relevant here, and began to spend much more
time and very quickly changed my notions about the problem.I visited
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,saw their very impressive and sur-
prising UFO files, the pattern of which is entirely different from what
I had imagined.
At the same time, I contacted a number of private investigating
UFO groups, one of the best and most constructive located here in
Washington, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe-
nomena; contacted another one of the large national groups,the Aerial
Phenomenon Research Organization, and found again somewhat to
my surprise,that these amateur groups operating on a shoestring basis,
and frequently scorned by us scientists, were, in fact, doing really a
rather good investigative job within their resources, and had com-
piled in their files, for instance in NICAP, on the order of 10,000 or
12,000 cases, many of which I have subsequently checked, and all of
which imply a problem that has been lost from sight, swept under the
rug, ignored, and now needs to be very rapidly brought out into the
open as a problem demanding very serious and very high-caliber
scientific attention.
I wish to emphasize that. We must very quickly have very good
people looking into this problem, because it appears to be one of very
serious concern. We are dealing here with inexplicable phenomena,
baffling phenomena, that will not be clarified by any but the best
scientists.
The scope of my remarks this morning, and the scope of my more
detailed remarks in my prepared statement which has been submitted,
deal with two broad areas:
I have been asked to summarize the results of my interviewing of
witnesses in the last 2 years, what I found, the problems I have en-
countered and so on; and, secondly to address myself to the categories
of past explanations of UFO sightings, that hinge on my own field of
atmospheric physics.
Let me turn very briefly to my experience. In the past 2 years I
have been able to devote a substantial part of my time to this problem.
I have mainly concentrated on witnesses in UFO sightings that have
already been checked by some of the independent groups; that is, I
was no longer, in the last 2 years, dealing with original raw data
where it was primarily misidentified phenomena, but rather, I was
dealing with presifted, presorted data,leaning very heavily on groups
like NICAP and APRO,and other groups in this country and other
groups abroad for my leads and background material.