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.

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