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.
“Nevers”43 pages
87 a kind of grid, a kind of crisscross pattern, a rectangular area. This is a photograph taken near Cochran, Ontario, in Canada. What we are looking at are swaths cut by loggers through the forest. They cut many swaths in parallel, then another parallel sequence of swaths atright angles. Then the snow fell, heightening contrast, so that is thereason for the tic-tac-toe pattern. The sequence of straight lines there is anomalous. You would not expect it by geological processes. If you found that on another planet you would begin to expect there is life there. This is a photograph at about a tenth of a mile resolution, and is far better than the best photographs we have of Mars. The photo- graphs we have of Mars are, of course, better than of any other planet. Therefore, to exclude intelligent life on another planet photographi- cally is certainly premature. We could not exclude life on earth with this same sort of resolution. However, there are other reasons why intelligent life on the otherplanets of this solar system are moderately unlikely. To continue this sequence of photographs I should say there are only about one in a thousand photographs where this resolution of the earth gives any sign of life. The next photograph,however, shows a resolution about three times i better. That is a Gemini capsule n the lower left-hand corner and we are looking at the vicinity of the Imperial Valley in California. You are just on the verge of resolving the contour patterns of fields, for agricultural purposes. The next slide shows us an area between Sacramento and San Fran- cisco, which has a very clear geometric pattern. It is quite obvious that this is the result of some intelligent activity on the earth. You can see an airport, a railway, the monotonous pattern of hous- ing developments in the upper right. You can see the patterns of con- tour fields. And this is such a highly geometrized picture, that it is clearly the result of some intelligence. However, a photograph taken of this same area, only let's say 100,000 years ago, when there certainly was lots of life on earth, would shownone of these features, because these are all the signs of our presenttechnical civilization. So even though the earth was full of life, and human bein g s werevery much in evidence 100,000 years ago, none of this would be i detect- able by such photography. To detect individual organisms on earth, we have to have a photographic resolution about 10 times better than this, then we occasionally see things like these in the next slide. All those little dots casting shadows are cows in a field in California. There are other ways of detecting intelligent life on the earth. From the vantage point of Mars, detecting, say,the lights of cities at night, is extremely marginal, and in fact the only way of doing it would beto point a small radio telescope at the earth, and then as the North American Continent turned toward Mars, there would be this blast of radio emission from domestic television transmission that pro- longed scrutiny would indicate some sign of intelligent life on theearth. In fact, it is radio communications which is the only reasonable method of communications over very large distances. It is a remark-able fact that the largest radio telescope on the earth at the present time, the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, is capable of communicating
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.