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.

86
in
the astronaut
training
program
in
Houston.
In
addition
to
well
over
a
hundred
scientific
papers,
and
several
articles
written
for
the
Encyclopedias
Britannica
and
Americana,
Dr. Sagan
is
co-author
of
"The
Atmospheres
of
Mars
and
Venus"
(1961), "Planets" (1966),
and
"Intelligent
Life in
the
Universe."
(
1966).
STATEMENT OF
DR.
CARL
SAGAN,
DEPARTMENT
OF ASTRONOMY,
CORNELL
UNIVERSITY,
ITHACA,
N.Y.
Dr.
SAGAN.
Thank
you
very
much,
Congressman Roush.
As
I
understand
what
the
committee
would
like
from me,
is
a
dis-
cussion
of
the
likelihood
of
intelligent extraterrestrial
life,
and
sincethis
estimate
is
to
be
made
in
this
symposium,
clearly
it
is
the
hypo-
thesis
that
unidentified
objects
are
of
extraterrestrial
origin
which
the committee
must
have
in
mind.
I'm
delighted
to
tell
about contemporary
scientific
thinking
along
these
lines,
but
let
me
begin
by
saying
that
I
do
not think the
evidence
is
at
all
persuasive,
that
UFO's
are
of
intelligent extraterrestrial
origin
nor
do
I
think the
evidence
is
convincing that
no
UFO's
are
of
intelligent extraterrestrial
origin.
I
think
as each
of
the preceding speakers
has
mentioned,
but
per-
haps
not
sufficiently
emphasized,
that the
question
is
very
much
an
open
one,
and
it
is
certainly
too
soon
to
harden
attitudes
and
make
any
permanent
contentions
on
the
subject.
I
find
that the
discussion, like
elsewhere,
is
best
evaluated
if
we
con-
sider
the
question
of
life
on
earth.
I
suppose
that
if
you
had
all
your
prejudices
removed and
were
concerned with the
question
of whether
the
earth
was
populated
by
life
of
any
sort,
how
would you
go
about
finding
out?
If,
for
example,
we
were
on some
other planet,
let's
say
Mars, and
looking at the
Earth,
what
would
we
see?
Fortunately
we now
have
meteorolgical
satellite
photographs of the
earth
at
various
resolu-tions,
so
we
can answer
the
question.
The
first
large
slide.
This
is
a
photograph of
the
earth.
That
is
the
full
earth,
which
you
are looking at
which
is
primarily cloud
cover.
This
is
the
Pacific
Ocean.
You
can
see
southern
California in
the
upper
right,
and,
as ad-
vertised
by
the
local
chamber
of
commerce, you
can
see
it
is
cloud
free.
[Laughter.]
Dr. SAGAN.
Now,
it is
clear
that very
little
information
about
the
earth,
much
less possibility
of
life
on
it,
is
obtained
by a
picture
at
this
resolution.
The
next
large
slide
is
a
TIROS
photograph of
the earth at
about
1
-mile
resolution,
that
is,
things smaller
than a
mile cannot be
seen,
and
very prolonged
scrutiny
of the
entire eastern
seaboard
of
the
United
States
shows no
sign
of
life,
intelligent,
or
otherwise.
We
have
looked at several
thousand photographs of
the earth,
andyou
may
be
interested
to see
that there
is
no
sign of
life,
not only in
New
York
or Washington,but
also
in
Peking,
Moscow,London,
Paris,
and
so on.
The
reason
is
that
human
beings
have transformed the earth at
this
kind of
scale
very
little,
and
therefore the
artifacts
of
human
intelli-
gence are just
not
detectable
photographically in the daytime with
this
sort
of
resolution.
The
next
slide
shows one of the
few
successful finds
of
intelligentlife
on
earth that
we made down toward the lower
left
you can
see