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
80 I believe that the evidence is uncertain enough that one can only urge that competent scientists and engineers armed both with substantial information on UFO phenomena and with relevant information on power-system electrical engineering, ought to be taking a very close look at this problem. I am unaware of any adequate study of this potentially important problem. Note that a prob- lem, a hazard, could exist in this context without anything warranting the label of hostility. MISAPPLICATIONS OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS IN PAST UFO EXPLANATIONS 1. Genera/ comments Since the bulk of UFO reports involve objects reportedly seen in the air, it is not surprising that many attempts to account for them have invoked principles of atmospheric physics. Over the past twenty years, many of the official explana- tions of important UFO sightings have been based on the premise that observers were misidentifying or misinterpreting natural atmospheric phenomena. Dr. D. H. Menzel, former director of Harvard Observatory, in two books on UFOs (Ref. 24, 25), has leaned very heavily on atmospheric physics and particularly meteorological optics in attempting to account for UFO reports. More recently, Mr. Philip J. Blass, Senior Avionics Editor of Aviation Week, has written a book (Ref. 36) purporting to show that most of the really interesting UFO reports are a result of unusual atmospheric plasmas similar to ball lightning. Over the years, many others have made similar suggestions that the final ex- planation of the UFOs will involve some still not fully understood phenomenon of atmospheric physics. As a scientist primarily concerned with the field of atmospheric physics, these suggestions have received a great deal of my attention. It is true that a very small fraction of all of the raw reports involve misidentified atmospheric phe- nomena. It is also true that many lay observers seriously misconstrue astronomi- cal (especially meteoric) phenomena as UFOs. But, in my opinion, as has been emphasized above and will be elaborated below, we cannot explain-away UFOs on either meteorological or astronomical grounds. To make this point somewhat clearer, I shall, in the following, remark on certain past attempts to base UFO explanations on meteorological optics, atmospheric electricity, and radar pro- pagation anomalies. 2. Meteorological optical explanations Mirages, sundogs, undersuns, and various reflection and refraction phenomena associated with ice crystals, inversions, haze layers, and clouds have been in- voked from time to time in an attempt to account for UFO observations. From my study of the past history of the UFO problem and from an examination of recent "re-evaluations" of official UFO explanations, I have the strong impres- sion that many alterations of explanations for classic UFO cases that have been made in the official files in the last few years reflect the response to the writings of Menzel (especially Ref. 25). I have elsewhere (Ref. 2) discussed a number of specific examples of what I regard unreasonable applications of meteorological optics in Menzel's writings. Some salient points will be summarized here. A principal difficulty with Menzel's mirage 'explanations is that he typically overlooks completely stringent quantitative restrictions on the angle of elevation of the observer's line of sight in mirage effects. Mirage phenomena are quite common on the Arizona desert, but both observation and optical theory are in good accord in showing that mirage effects are confined to lines of sight that do not depart from the horizontal by much more than a few tens of minutes of arc. Under some extremely unusual temperature conditions in the atmosphere (high latitude regions, for example), one may get miraging at elevation angles larger than a degree, but these situations are extremely rare, it must be em- phasized. In Menzel's explanations and in certain of the official explanations, however, mirages are invoked to account for UFOs when the observer's line of sight may depart from the horizontal by as much as five to ten degrees or even more. I emphasize that this is entirely unreasonable. If it were the case that all UFOs were reported essentially at the observer's horizon, then one would have to be extremely suspicious that we were dealing with some unusual refraction anomalies. However, as has been shown by many cases cited above and has been long known to serious investigators of UFO phenomena, no fixed correlation exists. Some of the most interesting UFOs have been seen at close range di- rectly overhead, quite obviously ruling out mirage explanations. The 1947 sight- ing by Arnold near Mt. Rainer is explained officially and by Menzel as a mirage,
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.