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
22 reason to have invented the whole story. Sometimes it is fairly ap- parent. Sometimes it takes a lot of digging to prove it. I might say here that the independent investigative groups have done an excellent job. It takes a knowledge of human characteristics, not scientific expertise to detect lies and hoaxes. Then there is the problem that you always have to be sure in talking with witnesses that you are not dealing with somebody already very enthusiastic about UFO's. You have to try to establish, and this is not always easy, whether he has prior knowledge of the whole UFO litera- ture. Are you dealing with somebody who is just telling. you again what he has read in a recent magazine in the barber chair? I emphasize that my experience is that again and again you find people who were not really interested in UFO's until they saw one themselves. Then they suddenly became very, very concerned, as one more member of the public who has become a UFO witness; and in this body of citizens there are some very distressed persons who wish that the scientific community, or the Government, were doing some- thing about this problem. The types of objects that are being seen, and I state the word "objects" not "hazy lights," are spread over quite a range of types, a baffling range. I.want to use that word many times, because it speaks for my ex- perience. The UFO problem is baffling. But there is a predominance of disc-shaped objects and elongated cigar-shaped objects, objects without wings, appendages, tails, and that sort of thing. Typically, wingless objects, disc- and cigar-shaped. The same type of observations have been coming from all parts of the world, and have been for a number of years. My direct interviews with a witness in Australia speak for that global pattern. Another characteristic that emerges is a quite fluctuatory frequency of sightings. Right now, in the past few months, there have not been 4 very many really impressive cases that have come up; but last fall, for example, England had a wave of sightings which was unprece- dented in the English experience, that led, for example, to a BBC documentary that has just been produced. It led also to a recently published study,that I got only a couple of weeks ago from the Stoke- on-Trent area in Staffordshire, 70 sightings in about a 21/2-month period in this area. It happens that one of my colleagues is an English physicist from that very area. As he points out, these are no-nonsense people who are not airy-fairy types that would be on LSD, or seeing ghosts in the sky. He is puzzled,and I am puzzled. . Well, there are many questions that are asked by skeptical scien- tists, skeptical members of the public; and skepticism, as Mark Twain said,is what gets you an education. There are questions like."Why aren't TTFO's seen abroad?" "Why aren't UFO's seen by airline pilots?" "Why aren't UFO's seen by crowds of people rather than by lone individuals?" "Why aren't they tracked by radar?" "Why don't weather observers and meteorolo- crists see UFO's?" "Why aren't there sonic booms,or why aren't there crashed UFO's?" Finally, a very frequently raised question,"If the UFO's are from somewhere else, if they are really devices that represent some high
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.