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
26 Meteorological optics is a subject that I enjoy and have looked into over the years rather carefully, and I must express for the record my very strong disagreement with Dr. Donald H. Menzel, former director of Harvard Observatory, whose two books on the subject of UFO's lean primarily on meteorological explanations. I have checked case after case of his, and his explanations are very, very far removed fromwhat are well-known principles and quantitative aspects of meteor- ological optic objects. He has made statements that simply do not fit what is known about meteorological objects. I would be prepared to talk all day on specific illustrations but time will not permit more. Secondly, there has more recently been a suggestion made by "Avia- tion Week" Senior Editor Philip J. Klass, that the really interesting UFO's are atmospheric -electrical plasmas of some type similar to ball lightning, but perhaps something different, something we don't yet understand but are generated by atmospheric processes. The first time anyone tried the ball lightning hypothesis was in Air Force Project Grudge, back in 1949. The Weather Bureau was asked to do a special study of ball lightning. I recently got a declassified copy of that, and the Air Force position at that time, and since then was that ball lightning doesn't come near to explaining these sight- ings. I concur in that. When you deal with multiple-witness cases in- volving discs with metallic luster, definite outline, seen in the day- time, completely removed from a thunderstorm, perhaps seen over center Manhattan, or perhaps in Redlands, Calif., they are not ball lightning or plasmas. In weather completely unrelated to anything that could provide a source of energy, the continuous power source required to maintain aplasma in the face of recombination and decay of a plasma, Klass' views just do not make good sense. It is just not reasonable to suggest that, say the BOAC Strato- cruiser that was followed by six UFO's for 90 miles up in the St. Lawrence Valley in 1954 was followed by a plasma,or that these peoplein Redlands were looking at a plasma, or that the 20 or so objects that went over Farmington were plasmas. One of the most characteristic features of a plasma is its very short lifetime and exceedingly great instability, as some of your members will know from your contact with fusion research problems. The diffi- culty of sustaining a plasma for more than microseconds is a very great difficulty. To suggest that clear weather conditions can somehow cre- ate and maintain plasmas that persist for many minutes, and fool pilots with 18,000 flight hours into thinking that they are white- and red -domed discs, to take a very famous case over Philadelphia wherethe pilot thought he was about 100 yards from this dome -disc, is un- reasonable. It is not a scientifically well-defended viewpoint. To conclude, then, my position is that UFO's are entirely real and we do not know what they are, because we have laughed them out of court. The possibility that these are extraterrestrial devices, that we are dealing with surveillance from some advanced technology, is a possi-bility I take very seriously. I reach that hypothesis, as my preferred hypothesis, not by hard fact, hardware, tailfins, or reading license plates, but by having ex-
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.