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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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,