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.
“The Advance”52 pages
53 east. It then hovered a short time and moved off with acceleration to the northwest. Di8C2188i071,—The Redlands University trio inquired concerning radar detection, but were informed that the nearest radar was at March AFB, Riverside, and the beam clearing intervening ridges could not detect so low a target over Redlands. An interesting aspect of press coverage of UFOs, a very characteristic aspect, is illustrated here. The local Redlands -area papers carried only short pieces on the event; beyond that no press coverage occurred, as far as I have been able to ascertain. Evidently even the state wires did not carry it. (I think this fact deserves verystrong emphasis. One has to see national clipping -service coverage, drawing upon many small-town papers, to gain even a dim glimpse of the astonishing number of UFO reports that occur steadily, but go unreported on state and national wires so that none but very diligent UFO investigators have any appreciation of the true frequency of UFO sightings. This is no "press clampdown", no censorship; wire editors simply "know" that there's nothing to all this nonsense about UFOs. A local story will be run simply for its local interest, but that interest falls off steeply with radial distance from the observation site.) Thus, we must confront a situation, developed over 20 years, in which over a hundred citizens in a city of about 30,000 population can see an utterly unconventional aerial machine just overhead and, almost by the time the dogs have stopped barking, press and officialdom are uninterested 4 Dr. Seff told me just last week that he had en- countered a Redlands University coed who had seen the object (he hadn't inter- viewed her previously), and she seemed still terrified by the incident. I believe that your Committee must recognize an unfilled scientific obligation to get to the bottom of such matters. 8. Many other multiple-witness cases could be cited, some from my own inter- viewing experience, far more from other sources within this country and abroad. An October 28, 1954 sighting in Rome was estimated to have been viewed by thou- sands of people, one of whom was U.S. Ambassador Clare Booth Luce (Ref. 10) with her embassy staff. Mrs. Luce said it had the shape of a silver dollar and crossed the skies in about 30 seconds. A now -famous group of sightings of June 26/27, 1959, near Boianai, New Guinea, was observed by several dozen witnesses, • the principal one of whom I interviewed in Melbourne, in 1967, Rev. Wm. B. Gill. Bloecher (Ref. 8) describes a number of mid -1947 incidents where the witness - totals ranged from dozens up to well over a hundred persons..: Hall (Ref. 10) cites more recent instances. Many other sources could be cited to show that the intimation that UFOs are never seen except by lone individuals driving along some remote back road (a frequent setting, to be sure!) does not accord with the actual facts. Multiple-witness UFO cases are impressively numerous. WHY AREN'T UFO'S EVER SEEN IN CITIES? WHY JUST IN OUT-OF-THE-WAY PLACES? One cannot study the UFO problem long without being struck by the pre- ponderance of reports that come from somewhat remote areas, non -urban areas.Similarly, one cannot escape the conclusion that more UFOs are reported atnight than in day. For the latter, luminosity and its obvious effect on probability of chance visual detection may go far towards explaining the diurnal variation of UFO sightings (though I suspect that most students of the problem would conclude that there is a real excess of nighttime occurrences for quite unknown reasons). Why, some ask with respect to the geographical distribution, don't the UFOs, if real and if extraterrestrial, spend most of their time looking over our cities? That's what we'd do, if we got to Mars and found huge urban complexes, some skeptics insist. It is surprising to find scientists who do not see through the transparency of that homocentric fallacy. If it were true that we were under surveillance from some advanced civilization of extraterrestrial origin, the pattern of the observa- tions, the motivation of the surveillance, and the degree of interest in one versus another aspect of our planet could be almost incomprehensible to us. Aboriginal natives under anthropological observation must find almost incomprehensible the motives behind the strange things that the field -teams do, the odd things in which they are interested. But the cultural and the intellectual gulf that wouldseparate us from any intelligent beings commanding a technology so advancedthat they could cross interplanetary or interstellar distances to inspect us would be a gulf vastly greater than that which separates a Harvard field -anthropologist from a New Guinea native. And, for this reason, I think one must concede that, within the argumentation carried out under tentative consideration of an extra-
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.