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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eluded some of the leading citizens in the town. It was reported
nationally at that time but was soon forgotten.
I have interviewed one of the witnesses in a Washington State
sighting, at Longview, Wash., July 3, 1949. An air show was being
held and someone spotted the UFO because there was a sky-writing
aircraft overhead that some people were watching. They spotted the
first of three disc-like objects that came over Longview that morning.
The person whom I interviewed is a former Navy commander, Moul-
ton B. Taylor. He was the manager of the air show, so he got on the
public address system and got everybody to look at this object before
it crossed the skies. It was fluttering as it went across the sky. There
were pilots, engineers, police officers, and Longview residents in the
audience. Many had binoculars. Taylor estimated it to be about 10
minutes of arc in diameter. Because the aircraft was still skywriting
people continued to watch the sky. Two successive objects of the
same type flew over in the next 20 minutes. A total of three objects
came over, and they were from three different directions: one from
the north, one from the northwest, and one almost from the west,
quite clearly ruling out an explanation like balloons, which became
the official explanation. There were no balloon stations anywhere near
Longview, Wash., as a matter of fact, and the balloon explanation is
quite inadequate.
Here we have a case of over a hundred witnesses to the passage of
a wingless object moving at relatively high velocity. When the second
and third objects went over, someone had the presence of mind to
time the fluttering rate—it was 48 per minute.
Here again we have a multiple-witness case, a daytime sighting case,
and one which you can't quickly write off.
If time permitted I would talk about a number of radar cases. One
of the most famous is the Washington National Airport sighting. On
July 19, 1952, CAA radars and Andrews Air Force radars tracked un-
knowns moving at variable speeds from 100 miles an hour to over 800
miles an hour, and a number of airline 'pilots in the air saw these, and
were in some instances vectored in by the CAA radar people, and then
saw luminous objects in the same area that they showed on radar up
near Herndon and Martinsburg.
I talked to five of these CAA people. One can still go back and check
these old cases, I emphasize. I also talked to four of the airline pilots
who were in the air at the time. I have gone over the quantitative as-
pects of the official explanation that this was ducting or trapping of the
radar beams. That is quite untenable. I have gone over the radiosonde,
computed the radar refractive index gradient, and it is nowhere near
the ducting gradient.
Also it s very important that at one time three different radars,
two CA i
A and one Andrews Air Force Base radar, all got compatible
echos. That is extremely significant.
And finally from a radar-propagation point of view, the angles of
propagation, radar and visual, were far above any values that would
permit trapping, which makes this a case which is not an explained
case. It was an instance of unidentified aerial objects over our Capital,
I believe.
One could go on with many cases. I want to just briefly touch two
categories of atmospheric explanations that have been rather widely
discussed, and close with that.