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.

35
bearing
in
the
hundreds
of
cases
I
have
now
personally
investigated.
Misinter-
preted
natural
phenomena
(Hypothesis
3)
do
explain
many
sincerely
-submitted
UFO
reports;
but,
as
I
shall elaborate
below,
efforts
to
explain
away
almostthe
entirety
of
all
UFO
incidents
in
such terms
have
been
based
on
quite
un-
acceptable reasoning.
Almost
no
one
any
longer
seriously
proposes
that the
truly
puzzling
UFO
reports
of
close
-range
sighting
of
what
appear
to
be
ma-
chines
of
some
sort
are
chance
sightings
of
secret
test
devices
(ours
or
theirs)
;
the reasons
weighing
against
Hypothesis
4
are
both obvious
and
numerous.
That
some
still
-not
-understood
physical
phenomena
of perhaps
astronomical
or
metero-
logical
nature
can
account
for the
UFO
observations
that
have
prompted
some
to
speak
in
terms
of
extraterrestrial
devices
would
hold
some
weight
if it
were
true
that
we
dealt therein
only
with
reports
of
hazy, glowing
masses comparable
to,
say,
ball
lightning
or
if
we
dealt
only
with
fast-moving
luminous
bodies racing
across
the
sky
in meteoric
fashion.
Not
so,
as
I
shall
enlarge
upon
below.
Jumping
to
Hypothesis
6,
it
seems
to receive
little
support
from
the
many
psychologists
with
whom
I
have
managed
to
have
discussions
on
this
possibility;
I
do
not
omit
it
from
consideration,
but,
as
ray
own
witness
-interviewing
has
proceeded,
I
regard
it
with
decreasing favor.
As
for
Hypothesis
8,
it
can
only
be
remarked
that,
in
all
of the
extensive
literature
published in
support
thereof,
practically
none
of
it
has enough
ring
of
authenticity
to
warrant
serious
attention.
A
bizarre
"literature"
of
pseudo
-scientific
discussion
of
communications between
benign
extraterrestrials
bent
on
saving the
better
elements of
humanity
from
some
dire
fate
implicit
in nuclear
-weapons
testing
or
other
forms
of
environmental
con-
tamination
is
certainly
obtrusive
on
any
paperback
stand.
That
"literature"
has
been
one
of
the
prime
factors
in discouraging
serious
scientists
from
looking into
the
UFO
matter
to
the
extent that
might have
led
them
to
recognize quickly
enough
that
cultism
and
wishful
thinking
have
essentially
nothing
to
do
with the
core
of the
UFO
problem. Again,
one
must
here
criticize
a
good
deal of
armchair
-
researching
(
done
chiefly
via
the
daily
newspapers
that enjoy
feature
-writing
the
antics
of
the
more
extreme
of
such
groups).
A
disturbing
number
of promi-
ment
scientists
have
jumped
all
too
easily,
to
the
conclusion
that only
the
nuts
see
UFOs.
The
seventh
hypothesis,
that
UFOs
may
be
some form
of
extraterrestrial
de-
vices,
origin
and
objective
still
unknown,
is
a
hypothesis
that
has
been
seriously
proposed
by
many
investigators
of the
UFO
problem.
Although
there
seems
to
be
some
evidence that
this
hypothesis
was
first
seriously
considered within
official
investigative
channels
in
1948
(a
year
after
the
June
24,
1947
sighting
over
Mt.
Rainier that
brought
the
UFO
problem
before
the
general
public),
the
first
open
defense
of that
Hypothesis
7
to
be based
on any
substantial
volume
of
evidence
was
made
by
Keyhoe
(Ref.
3)
in
about
1950.
His
subsequent
writings,
based
on
far
more
evidence
than
was
available
to
him
in 1950,
have
presented further
ar-
guments
favoring
an
extraterrestrial origin
of
UFOs.
Before
I
began
an
inten-
sive
examination of the
UFO
problem
in 1966,
I was
disposed to
strong
doubt
that the
numerous
cases
discussed
at
length in
Keyhoe's
rather dramatically
-
written
and
dramatically
-titled
books (Ref.
4)
could
be
real
cases
from
real
witnesses
of
any
appreciable
credibility.
I
had
the
same
reaction to
a
1956 book
(Ref.
5)
written
by
Ruppelt,
an
engineer in
charge of the
official
investigations
in the
important 1951-3
period.
Ruppelt
did
not
go as
far
as
Keyhoe
in suggesting
the
extraterrestrial
UFO
hypothesis,
but
he
left
his
readers
little
room
for
doubt
that
he
leaned
toward
that
hypothesis.
I
elaborate these
two
writers'
viewpoints
because, within
the past
month,
I
have had an
opportunity to
examine
in
detail
a
large
amount
of formerly
classified
official file
material
which
substantiates
to
an
almost alarming degree the
authenticity
and
hence the
scientific
import
of the
case-material
upon which
Keyhoe and
Ruppelt
drew
for
much
of
their discus-
sions
of
UFO
history in the 1947-53
period
(Refs.
6
and
7).
One
of
these sources
has
just
been
published
by
NICAP
(Ref. 7),
and
constitutes,
in
my
opinion,
an
exceedingly valuable addition to the
growing
UFO
literature.
The
defense of
the
extraterrestrial
hypothesis
by Keyhoe, and
later
many
others
(still
notwithin
what
are
conventionally
regarded as
scientific
circles),
has had
little
im-pact
on
the
scientific
community, which based
its write-off
of the
UFO
problem
on
press accounts
and
official
assurances that careful investigations
were
turn-
ing
up
nothing that suggested
phenomena beyond
present
scientific
explana-
tion.
Hypothesis
No.
7
has thus
received short
shrift
from
science to date.
As
One
scientist
who
has gone
to
some
effort
to try to
examine
the
facts,
I say thatthis
has been
an
egregious, if basically unwitting,
scientific
error—an
error that
must be
rectified
with
minimum
further delay.
On
the basis of the evidence
I