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
S . 23 civilization, why no contact?" This is a question that comes up again and again, since most persons who know enough about the UFO prob- lem to realize there must be something there, cannot, in their first view of the problem, visualize a visitation from elsewhere, surveillance, or what have you, without contact. I want to return to that point later, but I wish to emphasize that that is a fallacious question. If we were under surveillance from some advanced technology sufficiently advanced to do what we cannot do in the sense of interstellar travel, then, as Arthur Clarke has put it quite well, quoted in Time magazine the last week, we have an odd situation. Arthur Clarke points out that any sufficiently advanced tech- nology would be indistinguishable from magic. How well that applies to UFO sightings. You have a feeling you are dealing with some very high technology, devices of an entirely real nature which defy explan- ation in terms of present-day science. To say that we could anticipate the values, reasons, motivations, and so on,of any such system that hasthe capability of getting here from somewhere else is fallacious. That is a homocentric fallacy of the most obvious nature, yet it is asked over and over again. In my prepared statement I will be able to cover more of these points, of course. The heart of the problem lies in citing cases, and I have investigated, personally, on the order of 300 cases dealing with key witnesses. I have looked as carefully as I can for all reasonable explanations. There are many cases that fall apart when you investigate them. Then there are far too many that resist the best analysis that many of us have been able to subject them to. Let me just cite briefly, to take a recent case rather than an old one, the instance at Redlands, and perhaps Dr. Harder can fill you in in more detail. On February 4 of this year, at 7:20 in the evening,over a residential area in that city of population 30,000, a disc was seen. Twenty wit- nesses interviewed by University of Redlands' investigators, described it as having "windows" or "ports" or something of that sort. They in- terviewed a little over half a dozen of them and all saw something on the bottom that they described as "looking like jets." This object was hovering at an estimated height of about 300 feet. The estimates vary, but it came out about 300 feet. The citizens had gone out in the street because dogs were barking and, because they had heard an unusual noise, and pretty soon there were people all up and down the street. It was estimatea that more than 100 witnesses were involved, and 20 were directly interviewed. Here was an object seen by many persons. It hovered, then shot up to about double the height, hovered again, and moved down across Redlands a short distance, hovered once again, and then took off rapidly to the northwest. This case has not received any scientific attention beyond this in- vestigation by Dr. Philip Seff and his colleagues. It has not received public notoriety. This was,in fact, only reported in a short column in the local paper and not on the wires anywhere. That happens over andover again. Here, for example, are the reports for one month of last fall, clipping-service coverage on the things that get local coverage, but
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.