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.
“Lonnie Zamora”1 page
244 ticularly in France and Brazil, but oc- casionally also in the United States. 6. Boiani, New Guinea, June 26, 27, 1959. Sightings were similar on both evenings. On the evening of the 27th, Father W. B. Gill, a teacher and mis- sionary of the Anglican Church in New Guinea, came out of the dining hall at 6:45 p.m., looked up and saw Venusand then the large sparkling object. While he watched, some 39 othersjoined him (five were teachers, two were medical assistants, the rest were natives; 28 adult witnesses signed a statement) The object and two others that hovered at a greater distance are shown in the figure (see p. 15) as an artist's concep- tion (the witnesses had no cameras but made pencil sketches during the obser-vation). As the UFO hovered nearby, man -shaped forms appeared on the "top deck" and seemed to be working on something. Occasionally, there was a bright blue, thin beam of light which projected toward the sky. The object itself had an orangeish cast, and the "men" appeared to be dressed in silver suits of some kind. The most seen at one time were four. When one of the figures appeared to glance over the crowd, Gill waved his arm, and the figure returned the gesture. Gill and some of the natives then raised both arms, and two of the figures on the object did the same. The object came lower but did not land. The sighting lasted until 7:20 when the blue spot- light went out and the object moved into a cloud. The witnesses, the time, and the de- tail make this an exceptionally good sighting, one of the best on record. The only available explanation other than the spaceship one would seem to be acomplex hoax perpetrated by Gill and all of his associates. 7. Exeter, New Hampshire, Septem- ber 3, 1965. A remarkable sighting occurred rather recently in New Hamp- shire and was studied and documented by several UFO investigators but par- ticularly by Mr. John G. Fuller, a columnist for the Saturday Review. He has assembled his results into book form (Fuller, 1966), and a preliminary account was published in Look Maga- zine (February 22, 1966). The sight- ings are remarkable not only because of their nature but in a very real sense because of Mr. Fuller's investigation. The basic sightings occurred in the early morning hours (about 2:00 a.m. Fig. 7. The terrain of the Socorro, New Mexico, sighting, April 24, 1964. Zamora first sighted the object (at position X) from position A, interpreting it is an auto- mobile. He parked at position B. The square indicates the dynamite shack. to 4:00 a.m.). Patrolman Eugene Ber- trand of Exeter had checked on a parked car and found a woman who told him that a huge and silent air- borne object had trailed her from the town of Epping 9 miles away. The object had brilliant flashing red lights and kept within a few feet of her car. Developing tremendous speed, it had disappeared among the stars. The patrolman could not believe the story and had not even taken the woman's name. When Bertrand checked into the police station, Norman Muscarello had just arrived and told his story. He had also seen a large dark object with bril- liantly flashing lights hover above a field through which he had been walk-ing on his way home. Patrolman Ber- trand accompanied him back to thescene. Although nothing could be seen at first, horses on a nearby farm and dogs in nearby houses began making a great deal of noise, and then Musca- rello screamed, "I see it, I see it!" Patrolman Bertrand turned and ob- served the brilliant roundish object moving toward them like a leaf flutter- ing from a tree. Its red lights along the sides were so brilliant that the en- tire area was bathed in light. It came within about 100 feet of the two wit- nesses, hovering with a rocking motion, absolutely silent. The lights seemed to be dimming or pulsating from left to right and then from right to left, taking about 2 seconds for each cycle. The lights were so brilliant that it was diffi- cult to make out the shape of the object itself. It darted, turned rapidly, slowed down, and performed other such ma- neuvers. Patrolman David Hunt had heard the radio conversation between Bertrand and the station in Exeter and drove to the site, witnessing the object for a few minutes before it disappeared. A B-47 flew over shortly after, provid- ing an extreme contrast to the object which they had previously witnessed. In Fuller's study of the case, he was able to find some 60 different people who had witnessed similar objects over a period of several days or weeks in the fall of 1965. Muscarello was so impressed by his sighting that he and his mother waited on a mountainside nearly every evening for 3 weeks fol- lowing the event. On one of these evenings, they again witnessed the ob- ject. Other people in the area would park by high tension lines (in the Exeter sightings, the objects were fre- quently associated with power lines) and watch for the objects, occasionally being rewarded with the sight of one. This sighting is not only a good one because of the detail, the number of witnesses, and the several occasions in- volving comfortable intervals of time, but it adds one other extremely en- couraging note. If Muscarello and other New Hampshire residents could go out and watch for the objects, oc- casionally being able to see them, why couldn't properly equipped scientific investigators do the same? Except for the Fatima incident, none of the other sightings have had much element of predictability. This may be simply because we have not taken the time or trouble to really look for it. Yet, it is not uncommon to find cases in which an object seen at one time returned on a later occasion (e.g., the New Guinea instance). Serious scientific investigation of the phenomenon might be possible if it were desired by the scientific commu- nity. If a project could be set up by a number of scientists, it might be fea- sible to have everything in readiness for another wave of sightings such as that at Exeter or the subsequent one in the Michigan swamps. When such a wave appeared (and the proper kind of publicity might help in detecting it— although it could also contribute to the generation of a wave of fraudulent sightings!), the team of researchers might converge immediately upon the area and carry out some sort of previ- ously planned program of investigation. If the investigators themselves were too
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.