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(La biographie du Dr. McDonald suit :)
Né : Duluth (Minnessota), 7 mai 1920.
Adresse personnelle : 3461 East Third St., Tucson, Ariz.
Formation :
Université d'Omaha, Omaha (Nebraska), B.A. (Chimie) 1942.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. (Météorologie) 1945.
Université d'Etat de l'Iowa, Ames, Ia., Ph.D. (Physique) 1951.
Carrière professionnelle :
Instructor, Dept. de Physique, Université d'Etat de l'Iowa, 1946-49.
Professeur assistant, Dept. of Physique, Iowa State University, 1950-53.
Checheur physicien. Projet de Physique des Nuages, Université de Chicago, 1953-54.
Professeur assistant, Dept. de Physique, Université d'Arizona, 1954-56, Professeur, 1956-57.
Directeur adjoint. Institut de Physique Atmosphérique, Université d'Arizona, 1954-57.
Professeur, Dept. de Météorologie, et Physicien Senior, Institut de Physique Atmosphérique, 1958 à aujourd'hui.
Autres activités :
Marine U.S., 1942-45, renseignement naval et aérologie.
Membre, Panel on Weather and Climate Modification, National Academy of Sciences, 1965-present
Membre, ESSA-Navy Project Stormfury Advisory Panel, 1966-present.
Membre, American Meteorological Society Commission on Publications, 1966- present.
Membre, Advisory panel for weather modification. National Science Foundation, 1967-present.
Affiliations professionnelles :
Association Américaine pour l'Avancement de la Science, American Meteorological Society, Sigma Xi, American Geophysical Union, Royal Meteorological Society, Arizona Academy of Science, American Association of University Professors.
Personnel : Marrié, 1945, Betsy Hunt: 6 enfants.
Domaines d'intérêt particulier :
Physique atmosphérique, Physique des nuages et des précipitations, optique météorologique, électricité atmosphérique, modification de la météo, phénomènes aériens non identifiés.
Dr. McDonald. Merci, M. Roush.
Je suis particulièrement ravi d'avoir cette chance de fournir des commentaires et suggestions sur la base de ma propre expérience au comité, et je souhaite recommander le Comité sur la Science et l'Astronautique pour franchir cette première, et j'espère très significative étape, afin d'examiner le problème qui a intrigué tant de gens depuis 20 ans.
Comme le Dr. Hynek l'a souligné dans ses remarques, une des difficultés du problème dont nous parlons aujourd'hui est que la communauté scientifique, pas seulement aux Etats-Unis mais au niveau mondial, a eu tendance à écarter le problème ovni et à le considérer comme insensé. Le fait que tant de données anecdotiques soient impliquées a, on peut le comprendre, découragé nombre de scientifiques de prendre au sérieux ce qui, en fait, je pense est un sujet d'une importance scientifique extraordinaire.
J'ai étudié maintenant depuis près de 2 ans, à un niveau plutôt intensif, le problème ovni. J'ai interrogé plusieurs centaines de témoins dans des cas sélectionnés, et je suis étonné de ce que j'ai trouvé.
Je n'avais aucune idée que la situation ovni soit en quelque manière ce qu'elle semble réellement être.
Il y a un certain parallèle entre la lente renconnaissance du problème par le Dr. Hynek et ma lente reconnaissance du problème. J'ai été curieux des ovnis de manière courante pendant 10 ou 20 ans et ait même examiné des cas dans la région de l'Arizona du sud off and on rather casually, rencontrant principalement des laymen sincères ne reconnaissant pas une lumière de stroboscope d'avion, ou Vénus, ou un météore brillant, lorsqu'ils les voient. Il est assez vrai que de nombreuses personnes identifient mal des phénomènes naturels ; et mon expérience a été principalement mais pas entièrement limitée à cette sorte de cas.
Il y a 2 ans environ je devins plus que casually curious pour plusieurs raisons qui ne sont pas très pertinentes ici, et commençais à passer bien plus de temps et changeais rapidement mes notions sur le problème. Je visitais la base aérienne de Wright-Patterson, vit leur fichiers ovnis très impressionnants et surprenants, dont le schéma est complètement différent de ce que j'avais imaginé.
A la même époque, je contactais un certain nombre de groupes privés d'enquêtes sur les ovnis, l'un des meilleurs et les plus constructifs étant situé ici à Washington, le Comité National d'Enquêtes sur les Phénomènes Aériens ; contactais un autre des grands groupes nationaux, l'Organisation de Recherche sur le Phénomène Aérien, et trouvais à nouveau quelque peu à ma surprise, que des groupes amateurs opéraient on a shoestring basis, et souvent dédaignés par nous les scientifiques, faisaient, en fait, vraiment un travail d'enquête plutôt bon étant données leurs ressources, et avaient compilé dans leurs dossiers, par exemple au NICAP, de l'ordre de 10 000 ou 12 000 cas, dont j'ai vérifié de nombreux par la suite, et tous impliquant un problème qui a été perdu de vue, balaysé sous le tapis, ignoré, et qui nécessite maintenant d'être très rapidement mis au jour comme un problème demandant une attention scientifique très sérieuse et de très haut calibre.
Je voudrais souligner cela. Nous devons très rapidement avoir des gens très bons examinant ce problème, parce qu'il relever d'une préoccupation très sérieuse. Nous traitons ici de phénomène inexplicables, de phénomènes déroutants, qui ne seront pas éclaircis sans les meilleurs scientifiques.
Le périmètre de mes remarques ce matin, et le périmètre des remarques plus détaillées de ma déclaration préparée qui a été soumise, touche 2 grands domaines :
On m'a demandé de résumer les résultats de mes interviews de témoins ces 2 dernières années, ce que j'ai trouvé, les problèmes que j'ai rencontré et ainsi de suite ; et, en 2nd lieu de m'adresser aux catégories d'explications passées d'observations d'ovnis, qui s'articulent sur mon propre domaine de la physique atmosphérique.
Permettez-moi de me retourner très brièvement sur mon expérience. Dans les 2 dernières années j'ai pu consacrer une partie substantielle de mon temps à ce problème. J'ai me suis principalement concentré sur les témoins d'observations d'ovnis ayant vérifiés par certains des groupes indépendantes ; c'est-à-dire que je ne traitais plus, ces 2 dernières années, de données brutes d'origines où ses trouvaient principalement des phénomènes mal identifiés, mais au contraire des données filtrées, pré-triées, reposant très fortement sur des groupes comme le NICAP et l'APRO, ainsi que d'autres groupes de ce pays et d'autres groupes à l'étranger pour mes cas proéminents et mes éléments de fond.
J'ai également eu la chance d'interoger 75 ou 80 témoins en Australie, Nouvelle Zélande et Tasmanie, lorsque j'étais descendu dans cette région l'été dernier. Divers types d'explications atmosphériques avaient été invoqués dans les cas australiens. Je dois dire que nombre d'entre eux sont simplement raisonnables du point de vue scientifique tout comme de nombreuses que nous avons entendues dans ce pays. Mais je trouvais principalement en Australie que la nature des observations est similaire à celles aux Etats-Unis, des objets semblables à des disques, en forme de cigare, des objets sans ailes, sans moyens évidents de propulsion, se déplaçant souvent sans aucun bruit, faisant parfois des bruits, survolant des voitures, comme le Dr. Hynek l'a mis en avant, provoquant des interférences avec le système de démarrage, et le même type de réticence publique à faire des signalement était très évident.
Je veux souligner, comme une des idées reçues très importantes qui a été stimulée, qu'au lieu de traiter avec des témoins qui cherchent avant tout la notoriété, qui cherchent à raconter une belle histoire, qui se manifestent tous pour attirer l'attention, il s'agit généralement du contraire. Et c'est vrai en Australie également. Les gens ne souhaitent pas vraiment vous parler d'une observation d'ovni, ont peur des connaissances qui penseraient qu'ils sont "roulent sur la jante," comme disent les australiens. Encore et encore vous rencontrez cela. Les gens sont réticents à signaler ce qu'ils voient. Il existe un véritable couvercle de ridicule qui n'a été résolu par aucun groupe, il a juste évolué de la manière dont le problème dans son ensemble s'est dévoilé. Ce n'est pas complètement nouveau en science. C'est arrivé auparavant.
Je suis sûr qu'un certain nombre de personne à la table des participants sont familiers d'un chapitre intéressant de la science il y a des années lorsque les météorites, sur lesquelles la NASA et de nombreux scientifiques du monde entier ont aujourd'hui une très grande quantité d'informations scientifiques utiles, furent dédaignées et raillées comme non réelles. Il était considéré comme insensé que des paysans racontent des histoires sur les pierres tombant du ciel. Les efforts de quelques scientifiques pour jeter un oeil au problème et obtenir des données initiales furent simplement ignorés jusqu'à ce qu'un événement très inhabituel mais très réel intervienne dans le nord de la France, une pluie de météorites. Ils y envoyèrent alors un académicien éminent afin de jeter un oeil à ce dont ces gens parlaient, et by golly, les paysans apparurent avoir raison. Tout le monde au village, le prefet de police, les administrateurs locaux, tous les paysans avaient vu des pierres tomber du ciel, et pour la 1ère fois l'Académie française daigna jetter un oeil au problème. La météoritique était née.
Nous faisons ici face à une situation similaire en science. Nous avons tendu à l'ignorer parce que nous pensions que c'était insensé. Cela défie absolument toute explication, et par conséquent la situation a évolué where we can't get going because we aren't already going.
La communauté scientifique dans son ensemble ne prendra pas ce problème au sérieux parce qu'elle n'a pas de données scientifiques. Ils veulent des données instrumentales.
Pourquoi n'ont-ils pas de données instrumentales ? Parce que les scientifiques ne le prennent pas suffisamment au sérieux pour obtenir les données scientifiques. C'est comme celui de 20 ans qui ne peut avoir un emploi parce qu'il manque d'expérience, et qui manque d'expérience parce qu'il ne peut avoir d'emploi. De la même manière vous trouvez le scientifique souhaitant que vous lui donniez de bonnes lectures métriques et des traces de magnétomètre, et ainsi de suite : mais nous ne les avons pas encore parce que le corps collectif des scientifiques, dont moi-même, a ignoré les ovnis.
Me tournant vers certains des points forts de mon expérience des interviews, je mentionne d'abord le "couvercle de ridicule." Nous n'avons pas affaire à des chercheurs de publicités. Nous ne traitons pas, et là je concours avec les remarques du Dr. Hynek, nous ne traitons pas de religiosité et de cultisme. Ces personnes ne sont pas le moins du monde intéressées par des observations. Ils ont de fermes convictions totalement indépendantes des observations. Ils ne causent aucun bruit qui perturbe le signal réel.
Le général Samford de la Force Aérienne l'a bien dit, il y a 16 ans de cela. Le général Samford, alors Directeur du Renseignement, dit, et je l'appuie à 100 %, des observateurs crédibles observent des objets relativement incroyables. Ce fut dit il y a 16 ans de cela, et cela arrive toujours.
I will touch dans un moment ou deux sur une observation dans le district de M. Pettis qui illustre très bien cela, une observation cette année à Redlands, en Californie, au sujet de laquelle je pense le Dr. Harder pourrait en dire plus.
Une autre caractéristique de l'interview des témoins est la tendance du témoin d'ovni à se tourner d'abord non pas vers l'hypothèse qu'il regarde un vaisseau spatial, mais plutôt qu'il doit s'agir d'une ambulance là-bas avec une lumière rouge clignotante ou qu'il s'agit d'un hélicoptère là-haut. Une interprétation conventionnelle est d'abord considerée ; seulement alors le témoin sort-il de la voiture ou voiture de patrouille et réalise que la chose est arrêtée au milieu des airs et recule et a 6 lumières brillantes, ou quelque chose comme çà. Seulement après une 1ère hypothèse économique le témoin, dans ces cas impressionnants, va plus loin dans ses hypothèses, et réalise finalement qu'il regarde quelque chose qu'il n'a jamais vu avant.
J'aime la phrase du Dr. Hynek pour cela, l'escalade d'hypothèses. Cette tendance à prendre une supposition d'abord puis à upgrade it est si caractéristique que je souligne que c'est un point très important.
Puis, regardant le côté négatif, tous ceux d'entre nous qui ont examiné des cas ne sont parfois pas tranquilles quant à l'incapacité typique de la personne non scientiquement formée d'estimer les angles, de même comprendre ce que vous demandez lorsque vous demandez une estimation angulaire. Nous sommes tous conscients des erreurs grossières dans les distances, hauteurs et vitesses ainsi estimées.
Et je voudrais souligner à ceux qui citent la jury trial experience que la tendance d'un groupe de témoins d'un accident à venir avec des récits assez différents ne doit pas être surévaluée ici. Ces témoins n'arrivent pas, disons, d'un accident au coin de la rue en disant avoir vu une girafe tuée par un tigre. Ils parlent d'un accident. Ils se mélangent dans les détails. Il y a legally confusing difference of timing and distance, et ainsi de suite ; mais tous sont d'accord sur le fait qu'il s'agissait d'un accident automobile.
De même aussi lorsque vous avez affaire à des cas de témoins multiples dans les observations d'ovnis. Il y a un noyau impressionnant de cohérence ; tout le monde parle d'un objet qui n'a pas d'ailes, toutes les 10 personnes pourraient dire qu'il avait la forme d'un dôme ou quelque chose comme çà, et puis il y a des différences mineures quant à la taille qu'ils pensent qu'il avait, à combien de distance il se trouvait, etc. Ces dernières variations posent un problème très réel. It stands as a negative factor with respect to the anecdotal data, but it does not mean we are not dealing with real sightings of real objects.
Then there's the very real but not terribly serious problem of the hoaxers, fabricators, liars, and so on. You do encounter cases from time to time where you end up thinking, well, this person has some reason to have invented the whole story. Sometimes it is fairly apparent. Sometimes it takes a lot of digging to prove it.
I might say here that the independent investigative groups have done an excellent job. It takes a knowledge of human characteristics, not scientific expertise to detect lies and hoaxes.
Then there is the problem that you always have to be sure in talking with witnesses that you are not dealing with somebody already very enthusiastic about UFO's. You have to try to establish, and this is not always easy, whether he has prior knowledge of the whole UFO literature. Are you dealing with somebody who is just telling you again what he has read in a recent magazine in the barber chair?
I emphasize that my experience is that again and again you find people who were not really interested in UFO's until they saw one themselves. Then they suddenly became very, very concerned, as one more member of the public who has become a UFO witness; and in this body of citizens there are some very distressed persons who wish that the scientific community, or the Government, were doing something about this problem.
The types of objects that are being seen, and I state the word "objects" not "hazy lights," are spread over quite a range of types, a baffling range.
I want to use that word many times, because it speaks for my experience. The UFO problem is baffling. But there is a predominance of disc-shaped objects and elongated cigar-shaped objects, objects without wings, appendages, tails, and that sort of thing. Typically, wingless objects, disc- and cigar-shaped.
The same type of observations have been coming from all parts of the world, and have been for a number of years. My direct interviews with a witness in Australia speak for that global pattern.
Another characteristic that emerges is a quite fluctuatory frequency of sightings. Right now, in the past few months, there have not been very many really impressive cases that have come up; but last fall, for example, England had a wave of sightings which was unprecedented in the English experience, that led, for example, to a BBC documentary that has just been produced. It led also to a recently published study, that I got only a couple of weeks ago from the Stoke-on-Trent area in Staffordshire, 70 sightings in about a 2½ month period in this area. It happens that one of my colleagues is an English physicist from that very area. As he points out, these are no-nonsense people who are not airy-fairy types that would be on LSD), or seeing ghosts in the sky.
He is puzzled, and I am puzzled.
Well, there are many questions that are asked by skeptical scientists, skeptical members of the public; and skepticism, as Mark Twain said, is what gets you an education.
Il y a des questions comme : Pourquoi ne voit-on pas d'ovnis à l'étranger ? Pourquoi des ovnis ne sont-ils pas vu par des pilotes de ligne ? Pourquoi des ovnis ne sont-ils pas vu par des foules plutôt que par des personnes seules ? Pourquoi ne sont-ils pas détectés par les radars ? Pourquoi les observateurs météo et météorologues ne voient-ils pas d'ovnis ? Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de bangs soniques, ou pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas d'ovnis écrasés ?
Et finalement une question soulevée fréquemment : Si les ovnis viennent d'ailleurs, s'ils sont vraiment des appareils représentant une civilisation supérieure, pourquoi pas de contact ? C'est une question qui vient encore et encore, la plupart des personnes en savant assez sur le problème ovni pour réaliser qu'il doit y avoir quelque chose ne peuvent, dans leur première approche du problème, concevoir une visite depuis autre part, une surveillance, ou ce que vous voulez, sans contact.
I want to return to that point later, but I wish to emphasize that that is a fallacious question. If we were under surveillance from some advanced technology sufficiently advanced to do what we cannot do in the sense of interstellar travel, then, as Arthur Clarke has put it quite well, quoted in Time magazine the last week, we have an odd situation. Arthur Clarke points out that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. How well that applies to UFO sightings. You have a feeling you are dealing with some very high technology, devices of an entirely real nature which defy explanation in terms of present-day science. To say that we could anticipate the values, reasons, motivations, and so on, of any such system that has the capability of getting here from somewhere else is fallacious.
That is a homocentric fallacy of the most obvious nature, yet it is asked over and over again.
In my prepared statement I will be able to cover more of these points, of course.
The heart of the problem lies in citing cases, and I have investigated, personally, on the order of 300 cases dealing with key witnesses. I have looked as carefully as I can for all reasonable explanations.
There are many cases that fall apart when you investigate them. Then there are far too many that resist the best analysis that many of us have been able to subject them to.
Laissez-moi juste citer brièvement, pour prendre un cas récent plutôt qu'un ancien, l'exemple de Redlands, et peut-être que le Dr. Harder pourra vous fournir plus de détails.
Le 4 février de cette année, à 19 h 20, au-dessus d'une zone résidentielle dans cette ville d'une population de 30 000 habitants, un disque a été vu. 20 témoins ont été interrogés par des enquêteurs de l'Université de Redlands, le décrivant comme ayant des fenêtres, des ouvertures ou quelque chose de ce genre. Ils ont interrogé un peu plus d'une demi-douzaine d'entre eux et tous ont vu quelque chose à la base qu'ils ont décrit comme ressemblant à des réacteurs.
Cet objet stationnait à une hauteur estimée de 300 pieds environ. Les estimations varient, mais il en est sortit environ 300 pieds. Les citoyens sont sortis dans la rue parce que les chiens aboyaient et, parcequ'ils avaient entendu un bruit inhabituel, et rapidement il y avait des gens à peu près dans toute la rue. Il fut estimé que plus de 100 témoins étaient concernés, et 20 furent directement interrogés.
Là se trouvait un objet vu par de nombreuses personnes. Il stationna, puis fonça au double de son altitude environ, stationna à nouveau, et descendit à travers Redlands à courte distance, stationna à nouveau, et enfin décolla rapidement vers le nord-ouest.
Ce cas n'a reçu aucune attention scientifique au-delà de cette enquête du Dr. Philip Seff et de ses collègues. Il n'a pas reçu de notoriété publique. Il ne fut, en fait, que rapporté dans une courte rubrique du journal local et nulle part ailleurs sur les câbles. Cela arrive encore et encore.
Ici, par exemple, se trouvent les rapport pour 1 mois de l'automne dernier, clipping-service coverage on the things that get local coverage, but don't get on the wires, because in the present climate of the opinion, wire editors, like scientists, Congressmen, and the public at large, feel sure there is nothing to all this, and they don't put them on the wires. You have to go right to the local town to get press coverage in most cases.
Le cas de Redlands de février 1968, case illustrates that very well. Once in a while a case will get on the wires and receive national attention, but by and large, one just doesn't read about these cases in other parts of the country, because wire services don't carry them.
Laissez-vous vous parler d'un autre cas qui répond aux questions : Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de témoins multiples ? Pourquoi ne sont-ils pas vus en ville ? Pourquoi ne sont-ils jamais vus de jour ?
It is true that there is a preponderance of nighttime sights. Maybe this is merely a matter of luminosity.
It is also true that there seem to be more reports from rather remote areas, say desert areas or swampy areas, than in the middle of cities. But there are city observations. And it is also true there are more individual witness cases than sightings by large crowds. But in every instance there are striking exceptions to this.
In New York City, on November 22, 1966, a total of eight witnesses, members of the staff of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, were the witnesses in a good case. I interviewed William Leick, of that staff, the manager of the office there. I heard about it through a NICAP report. It did not appear in the papers, as I will mention. William Leick had been looking out the window, saw an object over the U.N. building. It was hovering, and as he talked to a colleague he realized there was something odd about it, so they walked out on the terrace. Soon they had six others out on the terrace. This was at 4:30 in the afternoon. It was kind of a cushion-shaped object, as he described it, and had no wings. It was rocking a little from time to time, blinked in the afternoon sun a little bit, had kind of an orange glow. All eight were watching, and after it hovered for several moments it rose vertically and then took off at high speed. There is an example of midtown sighting in New York where the witnesses are staff members of a responsible organization. Leick, himself, had been trained in intelligence, in World War II. There is no reason at all to think he and his colleagues would invent this.
They did call a New York paper, but to say they weren't the least bit interested. There was no report published in a New York paper. Next they called a local Air Force office but no one came to investigate it. It came to my attention because one of the members of the staff knew of NICAP and sent NICAP a report.
This sort of thing has happened over and over again. The ridicule lid keeps these out of sight; too many of them are occurring to delay any longer in getting at this problem with all possible scientific assistance.
A famous multiple-witness instance occurred in Farmington, N. Mex., on March 17, 1950. I interviewed seven witnesses there. A very large number of objects were involved. There were several different groups of objects, all described as disc-shaped objects. They were explained as Skyhook balloons, officially, so I checked into that.
I finally established that there was no Skyhook balloon released anywhere in the United States on or near that day. The witnesses included some of the leading citizens in the town. It was reported nationally at that time but was soon forgotten.
I have interviewed one of the witnesses in a Washington State sighting, at Longview, Wash., July 3, 1949. An air show was being held and someone spotted the UFO because there was a sky-writing aircraft overhead that some people were watching. They spotted the first of three disc-like objects that came over Longview that morning. The person whom I interviewed is a former Navy commander, Moulton B. Taylor. He was the manager of the air show, so he got on the public address system and got everybody to look at this object before it crossed the skies. It was fluttering as it went across the sky. There were pilots, engineers, police officers, and Longview residents in the audience. Many had binoculars. Taylor estimated it to be about 10 minutes of arc in diameter. Because the aircraft was still skywriting people continued to watch the sky. Two successive objects of the same type flew over in the next 20 minutes. A total of three objects came over, and they were from three different directions: one from the north, one from the northwest, and one almost from the west, quite clearly ruling out an explanation like balloons, which became the official explanation. There were no balloon stations anywhere near Longview, Wash., as a matter of fact, and the balloon explanation is quite inadequate.
Here we have a case of over a hundred witnesses to the passage of a wingless object moving at relatively high velocity. When the second and third objects went over, someone had the presence of mind to time the fluttering rate -- it was 48 per minute.
Here again we have a multiple-witness case, a daytime sighting case, and one which you can't quickly write off.
Si le temps le permet je voudrais parler d'un certain nombre de cas radar. Un des plus fameux est l'observation de l'Aéroport National de Washington. Le 19 juillet 1952, les radars de la CAA et de la base aérienne d'Andrews repérèrent des inconnus se déplaçant à des vitesses variant de 100 miles/h à plus de 800 miles/h, et un certain nombre de pilotes de ligne dans les airs les virent, et were in some instances vectored in by the CAA radar people, and then saw luminous objects in the same area that they showed on radar up near Herndon and Martinsburg.
I talked to five of these CAA people. One can still go back and check these old cases, I emphasize. I also talked to four of the airline pilots who were in the air at the time. I have gone over the quantitative aspects of the official explanation that this was ducting or trapping of the radar beams. That is quite untenable. I have gone over the radiosonde, computed the radar refractive index gradient, and it is nowhere near the ducting gradient.
Also, it is very important that at one time three different radars, two CAA and one Andrews Air Force Base radar, all got compatible echoes. That is extremely significant.
And finally from a radar-propagation point of view, the angles of propagation, radar and visual, were far above any values that would permit trapping, which makes this a case which is not an explained case. It was an instance of unidentified aerial objects over our Capital, I believe.
One could go on with many cases. I want to just briefly touch two categories of atmospheric explanations that have been rather widely discussed, and close with that.
Meteorological optics is a subject, that I enjoy and have looked into over the years rather carefully, and I must express for the record my very strong disagreement with Dr. Donald H. Menzel, former director of Harvard Observatory, whose two books on the subject of UFO's lean primarily on meteorological explanations. I have checked case after case of his, and his explanations are very, very far removed from what are well-known principles and quantitative aspects of meteorological optic objects. He has made statements that simply do not fit what is known about meteorological objects.
I would be prepared to talk all day on specific illustrations but time will not permit more.
Secondly, there has more recently been a suggestion made by "Aviation Week" Senior Editor Philip J. Klass, that the really interesting UFO's are atmospheric-electrical plasmas of some type similar to ball lightning, but perhaps something different, something we don't yet understand but are generated by atmospheric processes.
The first time anyone tried the ball lightning hypothesis was in Air Force Project Grudge, back in 1949. The Weather Bureau was asked to do a special study of ball lightning. I recently got a declassified copy of that, and the Air Force position at that time, and since then was that ball lightning doesn't come near to explaining these sightings. I concur in that. When you deal with multiple-witness cases involving discs with metallic luster, definite outline, seen in the daytime, completely removed from a thunderstorm, perhaps seen over center Manhattan, or perhaps in Redlands, Calif., they are not ball lightning or plasmas.
In weather completely unrelated to anything that could provide a source of energy, the continuous power source required to maintain a plasma in the face of recombination and decay of a plasma, Klass' views just do not make good sense.
It is just not reasonable to suggest that, say the BOAC Stratocruiser that was followed by six UFO's for 90 miles up in the St. Lawrence Valley in 1954 was followed by a plasma, or that these people in Redlands were looking at a plasma, or that the 20 or so objects that went over Farmington were plasmas.
One of the most characteristic features of a plasma is its very short lifetime and exceedingly great instability, as some of your members will know from your contact with fusion research problems. The difficulty of sustaining a plasma for more than microseconds is a very great difficulty. To suggest that clear weather conditions can somehow create and maintain plasmas that persist for many minutes, and fool pilots with 18,000 flight hours into thinking that they are white- and red-domed discs, to take a very famous case over Philadelphia where the pilot thought he was about 100 yards from this dome-disc, is unreasonable. It is not a scientifically well-defended viewpoint.
To conclude, then, my position is that UFO's are entirely real and we do not know what they are, because we have laughed them out of court. The possibility that these are extraterrestrial devices, that we are dealing with surveillance from some advanced technology, is a possibility I take very seriously.
I reach that hypothesis, as my preferred hypothesis, not by hard fact, hardware, tailfins, or reading license plates, but by having examined hundreds of cases and rejected the alternative hypothesis as capable of accounting for them.
I am afraid that this possibility has sufficiently good backing for it, despite its low a priori ability, that we must examine it. I think your committee, with its many concerns for the entire aerospace program, as well as our whole national scientific program, has a very special reason for examining that possibility. Should that possibility be correct, if there is even a chance of its being correct, we ought to get our best people looking at it. Instead, we are collectively laughing at this possibility.
To meet Mr. Rumsfeld's request, let me remark on Dr. Hynek's two recommendations. I strongly concur in the need for some new approach. I am sure Dr. Hynek was not suggesting there be one single UFO committee. In fact, he said, "not a one-shot approach." A pluralistic approach to the problem is needed here.
The Defense Department is already supporting some work on it. NASA definitely has a need to look at this problem. We have to pay very serious attention to the problem and get a variety of new approaches.
The other point Dr. Hynek mentioned was that we try to look at this on a worldwide basis. This is crucially important. We are dealing with a real problem here, and I insist it is a global problem. We can study it in the United States, but if we ignore what is happening in France and England -- one of the greatest UFO waves that ever occurred was in France -- would be a serious mistake. I strongly urge that your committee consider holding rather more extensive Hearings in which a larger segment of the scientific community is given the opportunity to talk pro and con on the issue, hearings aimed at getting a new measure of scientific attention to this important problem.
Merci.
M. Roush. Merci, Dr. McDonald, pour votre présentation. Comme nous l'avons expliqué il y a un moment, nous sommes pressés par le temps. Nous are entertaining questions de membres du comité.
M. Bell. Dr. McDonald, je veux vous féliciter pour votre intéressante déclaration. Mais qu'est-ce qui vous amène à croire que, quoi que soient ces phénomènes, ils sont extraterrestres ?
Quels faits avez-vous ?
D. McDonald. Puis-je dire que je n'utiliserai pas le mot "croire." Je dirais l'"hypothèse" qu'ils sont une surveillance extraterrestre, est l'hypothèse que je considère actuellement comme la plus probable.
Comme je l'ai mentionné, il ne s'agit pas de faits au sens de preuves incontestables, mais traitant de cas après cas où les témoins ont montré une crédibilité que je ne peux contester. Ca m'impressionne. Cela n'a rien à voir avec des phénomènes géophysiques ou astronomiques ; ils semblent être des dispostifs semblables à des appareils et des machines. Je devrais vous répondre en termes des cas après cas sur lesquels moi et d'autres ont enquêté, pour rendre çà clair. C'est cette très grande masse de témoignages impressionnants de témoins, de données de détection radar sur des objets à ultra-haute-vitesse se déplaçant parfois à plus de 5000 miles/h, d'ovnis, d'observations radar et visuelles combinées, et tout simplement trop d'autres éléments cohérents suggérant que nous avons affaire à des appareils semblables à des machines venus d'ailleurs.
M. Bell. Des photos ont-elles été prises ?
Dr. McDonald. Oui ; il y a eut des photos de prises.
Par exemple, une photographie prise dans l'Ohio, par un avion de reconnaissance photo de l'Air Force le 24 mai 1954. I recently have looked a little more closely at the data. This was explained as an undersun, but that idea is subject to quantitative observation. The angles just do not fit. There is a very important case at Edwards Air Force base with two witnesses, where they got photographs of the object. Unfortunately, in this case I have not seen the photo, but I have talked with the persons who took it. There are photographs, but not nearly as many as we would like. We would like to have lots of them. In a case in Corning, Calif., a police officer, one of five witnesses, had a loaded camera in his patrol car, 20 paces from where he watched the object, didn't even think of getting his camera. He said he was too flabbergasted to think of it. That is a part of the problem.
M. Roush. M. Hechler.
M. Hechler. Avez-vous examiné de quelconques rapports de communication par ces objets ?
Dr. McDonald. Oui ; le problème du contact est très important. Il y a une catégorie de contact, pas au sens d'un serrage de mains, mais plutôt light response. J'ai un fichier sur plusieurs d'entre eux, et j'en cherche d'autres. Par exemple, à Shamokin (Pennsylvanie), Kerstetter est le nom du témoin, il travaille pour une banque à Shamokin. J'ai parlé au président de la banque au sujet de sa fiabilité et eut de très bonnes recommandations. L'année dernière, lui et sa femme et sa famille étaient en voiture près d'une arête montagneuse à Shamokin, virent une chose stationnant au-dessus de la montagne, comme les lumières clignotantes d'un theater marquee. Il avait une lampe-torche. Il ne connaissait pas le code Morse, mais cela n'était vraiment pas grave. Il envoya des flashes lumineuses dans divers ordres et reçus les lumières en retour de la chose. La même chose arriva à Newton (New Hampshire) en août de l'année dernière, où plusieurs personnes virent un objet arrivant au-dessus d'eux. Ils eurent la même idée et se signalèrent avec une lampe-torche. Ce n'était pas du Morse, ce n'était pas trait point, puis trait trait trait, et cela revint avec des signaux lumineux répliqués, sans erreur. La même chose arriva en Virginie Occidentale, où un pharmacien, nommé Sommers, fit cela avec ses phares. Alors que j'étais en Australie, je parlais de chasseurs sortis chasser le kangourou. Un disque arriva au-dessus, un dit : donne-leur du Morse ; le flash revint faithfully, et ils partirent en vitesse. Est-ce un contact ? Je ne sais pas. Personne got any intelligence out of it either way, if you will pardon the whimsy. Il serait terrible qu'en fait cela soit de la surveillance et notre technologie ait été représentée par la lampe-torche toujours prête [Rire].
We may be flunking our exam.
M. Roush. M. Downing.
M. Downing. Je suis intéressé par votre témoignage. A la page 10 de votre déclaration écrite, vous dites qu'il est malheureux qu'aucune version acceptable de la Référence 6 n'existe, bien qu'il ait été possible d'en obtenir une dans le statut d'une acceptabilité limitée.
Pourquoi n'est-il pas disponible ?
Dr. McDonald. Eh bien, c'était un document de l'Air Force. Cela fut achevé en 1949. Ils furent classés jusqu'à il y a quelques années en arrière. Personne ne pouvait y avoir accès, parce qu'ils étaient sous une classification du DoD. Mais la règle de 12 ans expira, et le Dr. Leon Davidson parvint à obtenir une copie.
Il est accessible au sens où si j'accepte de payer 90 $ pour des photocopies je peux aujourd'hui l'avoir. Il n'est pas publié au sens d'être accessible dans toute bibliothèque du pays. Ma Référence 7, que la NICAP vient juste de publier, est accessible aux scientifiques dans tout le pays. La question est celle de l'Air Force qui a pour politique de ne pas publier de tels élements, et qu'ils aient été classés. Je pense que le comité Moss et le NICAP are to be highly praised to get out in the open Reference 7.
M. Downing. Y'a-t-il une raison pour laquelle ceci est classé ?
Dr. McDonald. Il y a une raison compréhensible pour laquelle l'Air Force a eut à classer cela. Un objet aérien non identifié, par présomption, est hostile jusqu'à preuve du contraire. So there has been this unfortunate, but entirely understandable measuring of these two areas. The national defense mission of the Air Force has necessitated they have some part of the UFO problem inevitably, and they got it in the first instance. They have long since told us there is no hostility here, hence the scientific curiosities going unattended because it doesn't fall under the defense mission, in other words to be transferred into NASA, NSF, or something like that. That does not mean the Air Force won't continue to watch unidentified objects on the millisecond basis. But they not need worry about this other part of the problem. I think it is understandable, but needs changing.
Mr. Roush. Mr. Pettis.
Mr. Pettis. Mr. Chairman, Doctor.
I was a little bit interested in your observations about this UFO sighting in my hometown of Redlands.
I might observe that Redlands is a rather conservative community, when people in Redlands say they saw something, they saw something. I did not happen to be in Redlands that particular date, so I did not see this.
But I would like to observe this, that having spent a great deal of my life in the air, as a pilot, professional and private pilot, I know that many pilots and professional pilots have seen phenomena that they could not explain.
These men, most of whom have talked to me, have been very reticent to talk about this publicly, because of the ridicule that they were afraid would be heaped upon them, and I'm sure that if this committee were ever to investigate this, or bring them in here, there probably would have to be a closed hearing, Mr. Chairman.
However, there is a phenomena here that isn't explained.
I think probably we ought to do a little looking into this, is my personal opinion.
M. Roush. M. Ryan.
M. Ryan. Oui, merci M. le président.
D'abord je voudrais vous féliciter, M. Roush, pour votre intérêt pour les questions de ce sujet, et le président de l'ensemble du comité pour avoir arrangé des auditions sur ce problème.
Je pense qu'il est important que ce comité ne s'écarte pas de sa juridiction, mais qu'il explore avec grande attention les propositions qui ont été faites par les témoins ici, et qu'il ait un champ d'exploration continu sur l'ensemble de cette question. Je veux féliciter le Dr. McDonald pour having been persistent in presenting his views to the various members of the committee, helping to bring about these hearings.
Je me demandais, Dr. McDonald, si vous would care to evaluate le projet de recherche à l'Université du Colorado, et commenter là-dessus ?
M. Roush. M. Ryan, puis-je juste dire que nous sommes tous d'accord sur le fait que ce n'est pas le lieu pour discuter de ce projet particulier, et que le but du symposium n'était pas d'aller dans les activités d'une autre branche du gouvernement, mais plutôt d'explorer cela comme un phénomène scientifique.
Je suis sûr que le Dr. McDonald sera très heureux de conférer avec vous en privé là-dessus, mais si vous pouviez montrer une certaine restriction ici, la présidence vous en serait vraiment reconnaissante.
M. Ryan. Bien, laissez-moi reformuler ma question.
Au regard du fait qu'il y a une étude menée par un projet à l'Air Force, et l'Université du Colorado, pensez-vous que quoi que ce soit d'autre doive être fait par une branche quelconque du gouvernement ?
Dr. McDonald. Absolument, oui.
M. Ryan. Que recommandez-vous ?
Dr. McDonald. I think that we need to get a much broader basis of investigation of UFO's, as I did say, a few moments ago, it would be very salutary to have a group in NASA looking at this problem, and to have some NASA support of independent studies. It would be very good for the National Science Foundation to support, say, some university people interested in it. It would be good to have the Office of Naval Research et cetera involved.
We don't deal with many other important problems, space, or molecular biology or health without a pluralistic approach, a multiplicity of research programs. I don't want to touch a frayed nerve here. This problem of duplication is sometimes lamented. But by and large I think you will agree we would gain from having a lot of different people with slightly different points of view going at every problem. At the moment everything is focused through one agency, and everything now hinges on that one particular program you have asked me about, and my answer was, we very definitely need some independent programs.
I am on record elsewhere than here in my specific views on that project.
Mr. Ryan. En regardant en arrière à la page 14, vous avez écrit une lettre à l'Académie Nationale des Sciences, concernant ce projet. Avez-vous eu une quelconque réaction de la part de l'Académie Nationale des Sciences ?
Dr. McDonald. Oui, j'ai reçu une lettre du Dr. Seitz, disant que pour le moment nous devions laisser le projet Colorado poursuivre son cours. That was the gist of the answer.
Mr. Roush. I would appreciate it, if we dispensed with that. Let me say that the National Academy is undertaking an evaluation of the University of Colorado project, and this will be published.
Mr. Ryan. I'm suggesting maybe this committee should make an investigation of the University of Colorado project.
Chairman Miller. That is something we don't have authority to do here.
Mr. Ryan. To what extent, Dr. McDonald, have sightings been picked up by radar, and to what extent have those that have been picked up been explored? [*NCAS Editor's Note: There was an apparent garble in the original; the second clause in the sentence read "and what extent of those that have been picked up been explored?" ]
Dr. McDonald. Well, there are many such sightings, I dare say there are thousands of military radar sightings that were for the short period unidentified. Then they identify them. But here is an impressive number of both military and civilian radar sightings that defy radar explanation in terms of unknown phenomena. Most of these deficiencies are well understood, so one can be fairly sure that many of these unidentified radar cases have no conventional explanation.
In a case where a P-61 flew over Japan, back some years ago, made six passes at an unidentified object it was getting radar returns on, and the pilot saw it visually. Here you are dealing with an unknown. Then there was a case in Michigan where a ground radar detected an object at 600 miles an hour coming in over Saginaw Bay. The pilot got a radar return, and also saw a vast luminous object; the object turned in a very sharp 180 degree turn and went back, and eluded the F-94. Here you are dealing with a case where radar propagation anomalies will not explain it. There was one radar in the airplane at 20,000 feet and one radar on the ground, both showing the object. There are many cases like that which I could enlarge on.
Mr. Ryan. Let me ask a further question: In the course of your investigation and your study of UFO sightings, have you found any cases where contemporaneously with the sighting of UFOs allegedly, there were any other events which took place, which might or might not be related to the UFO's ?
Dr. McDonald. Yes. Certainly there are many physical effects. For instance, in Mr. Pettis' district, several people found the fillings in their mouth hurting while this object was nearby, but there are many cases probably on record of car ignition failure. One famous case, was at Levelland, Tex., in 1967. Ten vehicles were stopped within a short area, all independently in a 2-hour period, near Levelland, Tex. There was no lightning or thunder storm, and only a trace of rain. There is another which I don't know whether to bring to the committee's attention or not. The evidence is not as conclusive as the car stopping phenomenon, but there are too many instances for me to ignore. UFO's have often been seen hovering near power facilities. There are a small number but still a little too many to seem pure fortuitous chance, of system outages, coincident with the UFO sighting. One of the cases was Tamaroa, Ill. Another was a case in Shelbyville, Ky., early last year. Even the famous one, the New York blackout, involved UFO sightings. Dr. Hynek probably would be the most appropriate man to describe the Manhattan sighting, since he interviewed several witnesses involved. I interviewed a woman in Seacliff, N.Y. She saw a disk hovering and going up and down. And then shooting away from New York just after the power failure. I went to the FPC for data, they didn't take them seriously although they had many dozens of sighting reports for that famous evening. There were reports all over new England in the midst of that blackout, and five witnesses near Syracuse, N.Y., saw a glowing object ascending within about a minute of the blackout. First they thought it was a dump burning right at the moment the lights went out. It is rather puzzling that the pulse of current that tripped the relay at the Ontario Hydro Commission plant has never been identified, but initially the tentative suspicion was centered on the Clay Substation of the Niagara Mohawk network right there in the Syracuse area, where unidentified aerial phenomenon has been seen by some of the witnesses.
This extends down to the limit of single houses losing their power when a UFO is near. The hypothesis in the case of car stopping is that there might be high magnetic fields, d.c. fields, which saturate the core and thus prevent the pulses going through the system to the other side. Just how a UFO could trigger an outage on a large power network is however not yet clear. But this is a disturbing series of coincidences that I think warrant much more attention than they have so far received.
M. Ryan. As far as you know, has any agency investigated the New York blackout in relation to UFO?
Dr. McDonald. None at all. When I spoke to the FPC people, I was dissatisfied with the amount of information I could gain. I am saying there is a puzzling and slightly disturbing coincidence here. I'm not going on record as saying, yes, these are clear-cut cause and effect relations. I'm saying it ought to be looked at. There is no one looking at this relation between UFO's and outages.
M. Roush. Our time is really running short, Mr. Ryan.
M. Ryan. One final question. Do you think it is imperative that the Federal Power Commission, or Federal Communications Commission, investigate the relation if any between the sightings and the blackout?
Dr. McDonald. My position would call for a somewhat weaker adjective. I'd say extremely desirable.
M. Roush. Merci.
Merci, Dr. McDonald.
Table des matières alternative pour études de cas d'observations individuels.
James E. McDonald, Physicien Sénior, Institut de Physique Atmosphérique, et Professeur du Département de Météorologie de l'Université d'Arizona, Tucson (Arizona)
I should like first to commend the House Committee on Science and Astronautics for recognizing the need for a closer look at scientific aspects of the long-standing puzzle of the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). From time to time in the history of science, situations have arisen in which a problem of ultimately enormous importance went begging for adequate attention simply because that problem appeared to involve phenomena so far outside the current bounds of scientific knowledge that it was not even regarded as a legitimate subject of serious scientific concern. That is precisely the situation in which the UFO problem now lies. One of the principal results of my own recent intensive study of the UFO enigma is this: I have become convinced that the scientific community, not only in this country but throughout the world, has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance. The attention of your Committee can, and I hope will, aid greatly in correcting this situation. As you will note in the following, my own present opinion, based on two years of careful study, is that UFOs are probably extraterrestrial devices engaged in something that might very tentatively be termed "surveillance."
Si l'hypothèse extraterrestre se révèle exacte (et je souligne que les éléments actuels ne pointent que dans cette direction mais ne peuvent être décrits comme constituant une preuve irréfutable), alors clairement les ovnis deviendront un problème scientifique de la plus haute priorité. Je pense que vous seriez d'accord que, même s'il y avait une chance infime de l'exactitude de cette hypothèse, les ovnis demanderaient la plus grande des attentions. En fait, cette chance semble à certains de nous loin d'être triviale. Nous partageons le point de vue du vice-amiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, ancien directeur de la CIA, qui dit il y a 8 ans de cela, Il est impératif que nous apprenions d'où viennent les ovnis et quel est leur but (Ref. 1) Votre comité étant concerné non seulement par les larges aspects de notre programme scientifique national mais aussi par la poursuite de notre programme spatial entier, et puisque ce programme spatial a été attaché pendant des années au but dramatique de la recherche de la vie dans l'univers, je soumets que le sujet du Symposium d'aujourd'hui mérite éminemment votre attention. En fait, je dois dire, pour information, que je pense qu'aucun autre problème dans votre juridiction n'est d'une importance scientifique et nationale comparable. Ce sont des mots forts, et je les pèse.
In addition to your Committee responsibilities with respect to science and the aerospace programs, there is another still broader basis upon which it is highly appropriate that you now take up the UFO problem: Twenty years of public interest, public puzzlement, and even some public disquiet demand that we all push toward early clarification of this unparalleled scientific mystery. I hope that our session here today will prove a significant turning point, orienting new scientific efforts towards illumination of this scientific problem that has been with us for over 20 years.
It has been suggested that I review for you my experiences in interviewing UFO witnesses here and abroad and that I discuss ways in which my professional experience in the field of atmospheric Physique and meteorology illuminates past and present attempts at accounting for UFO phenomena. To understand the basis of my comments, it may be helpful to note briefly the nature of my own studies on UFOs.
I have had a moderate interest in the UFO problem for twenty years, much as have a scattering of other scientists. In southern Arizona, during the period 1956-66, I interviewed, on a generally rather random basis, witness in such local sightings as happened to come to my attention via press or personal communications. This experience taught me much about lay misinterpretations of observations of aircraft, planets, meteors, balloons, flares, and the like. The frequency with which laymen misconstrue phenomena associated with fireballs (meteors brighter than magnitude 5), led me to devote special study to meteor Physique; other topics in my own field of atmospheric Physique also drew my closer attention as a result of their bearing on various categories of UFO reports. This period of rather casual UFO-witness interviewing on a local basis proved mainly educational; yet on a few occasions I encountered witnesses of seemingly high credibility whose reports lay well outside any evident meteorological, astronomical, or other conventional bounds. Because I was quite unaware, before 1966, that those cases were, in fact, paralleled by astonishing numbers of comparable cases elsewhere in the U.S. and the rest of the world, they left me only moderately puzzled and mildly bothered, since I came upon relatively few impressive cases within the environs of Tucson in those dozen years of discursive study. I was aware of the work of non-official national investigative groups like NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) and APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) ; but lacking basis for detailed personal evaluation of their investigative methods, I simply did not take their publications very seriously. I was under other misimpressions, I found later, as to the nature of the official UFO program, but I shall not enlarge on this before this Committee. (I cite all of this here because I regard it relevant to an appreciation, by the Committee, of the way in which at least one scientist has developed his present strong concern for the UFO problem, after a prior period of some years of only mild interest.) Despite having interviewed a total of perhaps 150-200 Tucson-area witnesses prior to 1966 (75 of them in a single inconclusive case in 1958), I was far from overwhelmed with the importance of the UFO problem.
A particular sighting incident in Tucson in early 1966, followed by the widely-publicized March, 1966, Michigan sightings (I, too, felt that the "swamp gas" explanation was quite absurd once I checked a few relevant points), led me finally to take certain steps to devote the coming summer vacation months to a much closer look at the UFO problem. Within only a few weeks in May and June of 1966, after taking a close look at the files and modes of operation of both private and official (i.e., Project Bluebook) UFO investigative programs, after seeing for the first time press-clipping files of (to me) astonishing bulk, covering innumerable intriguing cases I had never before heard of, and (above all) after the beginning of what became a long period of personal interviewing of key witnesses in important UFO cases, I rapidly altered my conception of the scientific importance of the UFO question. By mid-1966, I had already begun what became months of effort to arouse new interest and to generate new UFO investigative programs in various science agencies of the Federal government and in various scientific organizations. Now, two years later, with very much more background upon which to base an opinion, I find myself increasingly more concerned with what has happened during the past twenty years' neglect, by almost the entire scientific community, of a problem that appears to be one of extremely high order of scientific importance.
To both laymen and scientists, the impressive progress that science has made towards understanding our total environment prompts doubt that there could be machine-like objects of entirely unconventional nature moving through our atmosphere, hovering over automobiles, power installations, cities, and the like, yet all the while going unnoticed by our body scientific. Such suggestions are hard to take seriously, and I assure you that, until I had taken a close look at the evidence. I did not take them seriously. We have managed to so let our preconceptions block serious consideration of the possibility that some form of alien technology is operating within our midst that we have succeeded in simply ignoring the facts. And we scientists have ignored the pleas of groups like NICAP and APRO, who have for years been stressing the remarkable nature of the UFO evidence. Abroad, science has reacted in precisely this same manner, ignoring as nonsensical the report-material gathered by private groups operating outside the main channels of science. I understand this neglect all too well; I was just one more of those scientists who almost ignored those facts, just one more of those scientists who was rather sure that such a situation really could not exist, one more citizen rather sure that official statements must be basically meaningful on the non-existence of any substantial evidence for the reality of UFOs.
The UFO problem is so unconventional, involves such improbable events, such inexplicable phenomenology, so defies ready explanation in terms of present-day scientific knowledge, has such a curiously elusive quality in many respects, that it is not surprising (given certain features in the past twenty years' handling of the problem) that scientists have not taken it very seriously. We scientists are, as a group, not too well-oriented towards taking up problems that lie, not just on the frontiers of our scientific knowledge, but far across some gulf whose very breadth cannot be properly estimated. These parenthetical remarks are made here to convey, in introductory manner, viewpoints that will probably prove to be correct when many more scientists begin to scrutinize this unprecedented and neglected problem. The UFO problem is, if anything, a highly unconventional problem. Hence, before reviewing my own investigations in detail, and before examining various proposed explanations lying within atmospheric Physique, it may be well to take note of some of the principal hypotheses that have been proposed. at one time or another, to account for UFOs.
In seeking explanations for UFO reports, I like to weigh witness-accounts in terms of eight principal UFO hypotheses:
Because I have discussed elsewhere all of these hypotheses in some detail (Ref. 2), I shall here only very briefly comment on certain points. Hoaxes and fabrications do crop up, though in percentually [sic] far smaller numbers than many UFO scoffers seem to think. Some of the independent groups like APRO and NICAP have done good work in exposing certain of these. Although there has been a good deal of armchair-psychologizing about unstable UFO witnesses, with easy charges of hallucination and hysteria, such charges seem to have almost no bearing in the hundreds of cases I have now personally investigated. Misinterpreted natural phenomena (Hypothesis 3) do explain many sincerely-submitted UFO reports; but, as I shall elaborate below, efforts to explain away almost the entirety of all UFO incidents in such terms have been based on quite unacceptable reasoning. Almost no one any longer seriously proposes that the truly puzzling UFO reports of close-range sighting of what appear to be machines of some sort are chance sightings of secret test devices (ours or theirs) ; the reasons weighing against Hypothesis 4 are both obvious and numerous. That some still-not-understood physical phenomena of perhaps astronomical or meteorological nature can account for the UFO observations that have prompted some to speak in terms of extraterrestrial devices would hold some weight if it were true that we dealt therein only with reports of hazy, glowing masses comparable to, say, ball lightning or if we dealt only with fast-moving luminous bodies racing across the sky in meteoric fashion. Not so, as I shall enlarge upon below. Jumping to Hypothesis 6, it seems to receive little support from the many psychologists with whom I have managed to have discussions on this possibility; I do not omit it from consideration, but, as my own witness-interviewing has proceeded, I regard it with decreasing favor. As for Hypothesis 8, it can only be remarked that, in all of the extensive literature published in support thereof, practically none of it has enough ring of authenticity to warrant serious attention. A bizarre "literature" of pseudo-scientific discussion of communications between benign extraterrestrials bent on saving the better elements of humanity from some dire fate implicit in nuclear-weapons testing or other forms of environmental contamination is certainly obtrusive on any paperback stand. That "literature" has been one of the prime factors in discouraging serious scientists from looking into the UFO matter to the extent that might have led them to recognize quickly enough that cultism and wishful thinking have essentially nothing to do with the core of the UFO problem. Again, one must here criticize a good deal of armchair researching (done chiefly via the daily newspapers that enjoy feature-writing the antics of the more extreme of such groups). A disturbing number of prominent scientists have jumped all too easily, to the conclusion that only the nuts see UFOs.
The seventh hypothesis, that UFOs may be some form of extraterrestrial devices, origin and objective still unknown, is a hypothesis that has been seriously proposed by many investigators of the UFO problem. Although there seems to be some evidence that this hypothesis was first seriously considered within official investigative channels in 1948 (a year after the June 24,1947 sighting over Mt. Rainier that brought the UFO problem before the general public), the first open defense of that Hypothesis 7 to be based on any substantial volume of evidence was made by Keyhoe (Ref. 3) in about 1950. His subsequent writings, based on far more evidence than was available to him in 1950, have presented further arguments favoring an extraterrestrial origin of UFOs. Before I began an intensive examination of the UFO problem in 1966, I was disposed to strong doubt that the numerous cases discussed at length in Keyhoe's rather dramatically-written and dramatically-titled books (Ref. 4) could be real cases from real witnesses of any appreciable credibility. I had the same reaction to a 1956 book (Ref. 5) written by Ruppelt, an engineer in charge of the official investigations in the important 1951-3 period. Ruppelt did not go as far as Keyhoe in suggesting the extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis, but he left his readers little room for doubt that he leaned toward that hypothesis. I elaborate these two writers' viewpoints because, within the past month, I have had an opportunity to examine in detail a large amount of formerly classified official file material which substantiates to an almost alarming degree the authenticity and hence the scientific import of the case-material upon which Keyhoe and Ruppelt drew for much of their discussions of UFO history in the 1947-53 period (Refs. 6 and 7). One of these sources has just been published by NICAP (Ref. 7), and constitutes, in my opinion, an exceedingly valuable addition to the growing UFO literature. The defense of the extraterrestrial hypothesis by Keyhoe, and later many others (still not within what are conventionally regarded as scientific circles), has had little impact on the scientific community, which based its write-off of the UFO problem on press accounts and official assurances that careful investigations were turning up nothing that suggested phenomena beyond present scientific explanation. Hypothesis No. 7 has thus received short shrift from science to date. As one scientist who has gone to some effort to try to examine the facts, I say that this has been an egregious, if basically unwitting, scientific error -- an error that must be rectified with minimum further delay. On the basis of the evidence I have examined, and on the basis of my own weighing of alternative hypotheses (including some not listed above), I now regard Hypothesis 7 as the one most likely to prove correct. My scientific instincts lead me to hedge that prediction just to the extent of suggesting that if the UFOs are not of extramundane origin, then I suspect that they will prove to be something very much more bizarre, something of perhaps even greater scientific interest than extraterrestrial devices.
Prior to 1966, I had interviewed about 150-200 persons reporting UFOs; since 1966, I have interviewed about 200-250 more. The basis of my post-1966 interviewing has been quite different from the earlier period of interviewing of local witnesses, whose sightings I heard about essentially by chance. Almost all of my post-1966 interviews have been with witnesses in cases already investigated by one or more of the private UFO investigatory groups such as NICAP or APRO, or by the official investigative agency (Project Bluebook). Thus, after 1966, I was not dealing with a body of witnesses reporting Venus, fireballs, and aircraft strobe lights, because such cases are so easily recognizable that the groups whose prior checks I was taking advantage of had already culled out and rejected most of such irrelevant material. Many of the cases I checked were older cases, some over 20 years old. It was primarily the background work of the many independent investigatory groups here and in other parts of the world (especially the Australian area where I had an opportunity to interview about 80 witnesses) that made possible my dealing with that type of once-sifted data that yields up scientifically interesting information so quickly. I wish to put on record my indebtedness to these "dedicated amateurs", to use the astronomer's genial term; their contribution to the ultimate clarification of the UFO problem will become recognized as having been of basic importance, notwithstanding the scorn with which scientists have, on more than one occasion, dismissed their efforts. Although I cite only the larger of these groups (NICAP about 12,000 members, APRO about 8,000), there are many smaller groups here and abroad that have done a most commendable job on almost no resources. (Needless to add, there are other small groups whose concern is only with sensational and speculative aspects.)
By frequently discussing my own interviewing experience with members of those non-official UFO groups whose past work has been so indispensable to my own studies, I have learned that most of my own reactions to the UFO witness-interview problem are shared by those investigators. The recurrent problem of securing unequivocal descriptions, the almost excruciating difficulty in securing meaningful estimates of angular size, angular elevation, and angular displacements from laymen, the inevitable variance of witness-descriptions of a shared observation, and other difficulties of non-instrumental observing are familiar to all who have investigated UFO reports. But so also are the impressions of widespread concern among UFO witnesses to avoid (rather than to seek) publicity over their sightings. The strong disinclination to make an open report of an observation of something the witness realizes is far outside the bounds of accepted experience crops up again and again. In my interviewing in 1947 sightings, done as a crosscheck on case material used in a very valuable recent publication by Bloecher (Ref. 8), I came to realize clearly for the first time that this reluctance was not something instilled by post-1947 scoffing at UFOs, but is part of a broadly disseminated attitude to discount the anomalous and the inexplicable, to be unwilling even to report what one has seen with his own eyes if it is well outside normal experience as currently accepted. I have heard fellow-scientists express dismay at the unscientific credulity with which the general public jumps to the conclusion that UFOs are spaceships. Those scientists have certainly not interviewed many UFO witnesses; for almost precisely the opposite attitude is overwhelmingly the characteristic response. In my Australian interviewing, I found the same uneasy feeling about openly reporting an observation of a well-defined UFO sighting, lest acquaintances think one "has gone round the bend." Investigators in still other parts of the world where modern scientific values dominate world-views have told me of encountering just this same witness-reluctance. The charge that UFO witnesses, as a group, are hyperexcitable types is entirely incorrect I would agree with the way Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, then Director of Air Force Intelligence, put it in a 1952 Pentagon press conference: "Credible observers have sighted relatively incredible objects."
Not only is the charge of notoriety-seeking wrong, not only is the charge of hyperexcitability quite inappropriate to the witnesses I have interviewed, but so also is the easy charge that they see an unusual aerial phenomenon and directly leap to some kind of "spaceship hypothesis." My experience in interviewing witnesses in the selected sample I have examined since 1966 is that the witness first attempts to fit the anomalous observation into some entirely conventional category. "I thought it must be an airplane." Or, "At first, I thought it was an auto-wrecker with its red light blinking." Or, "I thought it was a meteor -- until it stopped dead in midair," etc. Hynek has a very happy phrase for this very typical pattern of witness-response: he terms it "escalation of explanation", to denote the often rapid succession of increasingly more involved attempts to account for and to assimilate what is passing before the witness' eyes, almost invariably starting with an everyday interpretation, not with a spaceship hypothesis. Indeed, I probably react in a way characteristic of all UFO investigators; in those comparatively rare cases where the witness discloses that he immediately interpreted what he sighted as an extraterrestrial device, I back away from what is likely to be a most unprofitable interview. I repeat: such instances are really quite rare; most of the general population has soaked up a degree of scientific conventionalism that reflects the net result of decades, if not centuries of scientific shaping of our views. I might interject that the segment of the population drawn to Hypothesis 8 above might be quick to jump to a spaceship interpretation on seeing something unusual in the sky, but, on the whole, those persons convinced of Hypothesis 8 are quite uninterested in observations, per se. Their conviction is firm without bothering about such things as observational matters. At least that is what I have sensed from such exposure as I have had to those who support Hypothesis 8 fervently.
Evaluating credibility of witnesses is, of course, an ever-present problem at the present stage of UFO studies. Again, from discussions with other investigators, I have concluded that common sense and previous everyday experience with prevaricators and unreliable persons lead. each serious UFO investigator to evolve a set of criteria that do not differ much from those used in jury instructions in our courts (e.g. Federal Jury Instructions). It seems tedious to enlarge here on those obvious matters. One can be fooled, of course; but it would be rash indeed to suggest that the thousands of UFO reports now on record are simply a testimony to confabulation, as will be better argued by some of the cases to be recounted below.
Separate from credibility in the sense of trustworthiness and honesty is the question of the human being as a sensing system. Clearly, it is indispensable to be aware of psychophysical factors limiting visual discrimination, time estimation, distance estimation, angular estimation, etc. In dealing with the total sample of all observations which laymen initially label as UFOs, such factors play a large role in sorting out dubious cases. In the type of UFO reports that are of primary significance at present, close-range sightings of objects of large size moving at low velocities, or at rest, and in sight for many seconds rather than fractions of a second, all of these perceptual problems diminish in significance, though they can never be overlooked.
A frequent objection to serious consideration of UFO reports, made by skeptics who have done no first-hand case investigations, is based on the widely discrepant accounts known to be presented by trial-witnesses who have all been present at some incident. To be sure, the same kind of discrepancies emerge in multiple-witness UFO incidents. People differ as to directions, relative times, sizes, etc. But I believe it is not unfair to remark, as the basic rebuttal to this attack on UFO accounts, that a group of witnesses who see a street-corner automobile collision do not come to court and proceed, in turn, to describe the event as a rhinoceros ramming a baby carriage, or as an airplane exploding on impact with a nearby building. There are, it needs to be soberly remembered, quite reasonable bounds upon the variance of witness testimonies in such cases. Thus, when one finds a half-dozen persons all saying that they were a few hundred feet from a domed disk with no resemblance to any known aircraft, that it took off without a sound, and was gone from sight in five seconds, the almost inevitable variations in descriptions of distances, shape, secondary features, noises, and times cannot be allowed to discount, per se, the basically significant nature of their collective account. I have talked with a few scientists, especially some psychologists, whose puristic insistence on the miserable observing equipment with which the human species is cursed almost makes me wonder how they dare cross a busy traffic intersection. Some balance in evaluating witness perceptual limitations is surely called for in all of these situations. With that balance must go a healthy skepticism as to most of the finer details, unless agreed upon by several independent witnesses. There is no blinking that anecdotal data are less than ideal; but sometimes you have to go with what you've got. To make a beginning at UFO study has required scrutiny of such anecdotal data; the urgent need is to get on to something much better.
In interviewing UFO witnesses, it is important to try to ascertain whether the witness was, prior to his reported sighting, familiar or unfamiliar with books and writings on UFOs. Although a strong degree of familiarity with the literature of UFOs does not negate witness testimony, it dictates caution. Anyone who has done a lot of interviewing at the local level, involving previously unsifted cases, will be familiar with occasional instances where the witness exhibited such an obvious enthusiasm for the UFO problem that prudence demanded rejection of his account.
However, in my own experience, a much more common reaction to questions concerning pre-sighting interest in UFO matters is some comment to the effect that the witness not only knew little about UFOs beyond what he'd happened to read in newspapers, but he was strongly disinclined to take the whole business seriously. The repetitiveness and yet the spontaneity with which witnesses of seeming high credibility make statements similar to, "I didn't believe there was anything to all the talk about UFOs until I actually saw this thing," is a notable feature of the interview-experience of all of the investigators with whom I have talked. Obviously, an intending prevaricator might seek to deceive his interrogator by inventing such an assertion ; but I can only say that suspicion of being so duped has not been aroused more than once or twice in all of the hundreds of witnesses I have interviewed. On the other hand, I suppose that. In several dozen instances, I have lost interest in a case because of a witness openly stressing his own prior and subsequent interest in the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
Occasionally one encounters witnesses for whom the chance of prior knowledge is so low as to be almost amusing. An Anglican missionary in New Guinea, Rev. N. E. G. Cruttwell (Ref. 9), who has done much interviewing of UFO witnesses in his area, has described testimony of natives who come down into the mission area from their highland home territory only when they are wallaby-hunting, natives who could not read UFO reports in any language of the world, yet who come around, in their descriptions of what they have seen, to the communications-shortcut of picking up a bowl or dish from a nearby table to suggest the shape they are seeking to describe in native tongue. Little chance of bias gained from reading magazines in a barber-chair in such instances.
The scope of the present statement precludes anything approaching an exhaustive listing of categories of UFO phenomena: much of what might be made clear at great length will have to be compressed into my remark that the scientific world at large is in for a shock when it becomes aware of the astonishing nature of the UFO phenomenon and its bewildering complexity. I make that terse comment well aware that it invites easy ridicule; but intellectual honesty demands that I make clear that my two years' study convinces me that in the UFO problem lie scientific and technological questions that will challenge the ability of the world's outstanding scientists to explain as soon as they start examining the facts.
Those four categories do not exhaust the list by any means. But they constitute four commonly encountered categories that are of interest here. Examples will be found below.
Comme l'a dit Mark Twain, La foi est une grande chose, mais on peut douter qu'elle vous donne une éducation.
There are many questions that one encounters again and again from persons who have done no personal case-checking and who maintain a healthy skepticism about UFOs. Why don't pilots report these things if they are buzzing around in our skies? Why aren't they tracked on radar? Why don't our satellite and astronomical tracking systems get photos of UFOs? Why are they always seen in out-of-the way rural areas but never over large cities? Why don't large groups of people ever simultaneously see UFOs, instead of lone individuals? Why don't astronomers see them? Shouldn't UFOs occasionally crash and leave clear-cut physical evidence of their reality? Or shouldn't they at least leave some residual physical evidence in those alleged instances where the objects have landed? Shouldn't they affect radios and produce other electromagnetic effects at times? If UFOs are a product of some high civilization, wouldn't one expect something of the nature of inquisitive behavior, since innate curiosity must be a common denominator of anything we would call "Intelligence"? Why haven't they contacted us if they're from somewhere else in the universe and have been here for at least two decades? Is there any evidence of hostility or hazard? Are UFOs seen only in this country? Why didn't we see them before 1947, if they come from remote sources? And so on.
In the following sections, I shall show how some of these questions do have quite satisfactory answers, and how some of them still defy adequate rebuttal. I shall use mostly cases that I have personally investigated, but, in a few instances (clearly indicated), I shall draw upon cases which I have not directly checked but for which I regard the case-credentials as very strong.
Hoping that Committee staff personnel will be pursuing these matters further, I remark next on some of the more significant items in the UFO literature. All of these have been helpful in my own studies.
One of the outstanding UFO references (though little-known in scientific circles) is The UFO Evidence, edited by R. H. Hall and published by NICAP (Ref. 10). It summarizes about 750 UFO cases in the NICAP flies up to about 1964. I have cross-checked a sufficiently large sample of cases from this reference to have confidence in its generally very high reliability. A sequel volume, now in editorial preparation at NICAP, will cover the 1964-68 period. Reference 8, by Bloecher, is one of the few sources of extensive documentation (here primarily from national newspaper sources) of the large cluster of sightings in a period of just a few weeks in the summer of 1947; its study is essential to appreciation of the opening phases of the publicly recognized UFO problem. Reference 7 is another now-accessible source of extremely significant UFO documentation; it is unfortunate that no generally accessible version of Reference 6 exists, though the Moss Subcommittee, through pleas of Dr. Leon Davidson, has managed to get it into a status of at least limited accessibility. I am indebted to Davidson for a recent opportunity to study it for details I missed when I saw it two years ago at Bluebook headquarters.
The 1956 book by Ruppelt (Ref. 8) is a source whose authenticity I have learned, through much personal cross-checking, is far higher than I surmised when I first read it a dozen years ago. It was for years difficult for me to believe that the case-material which he summarized could come from real cases. References 5 and 6, plus other sources, do, however, now attest to Ruppelt's generally high reliability. Similarly Keyhoe's books (Refs. 3 and 4) emerge as sources of UFO case material whose reliability far exceeds my own first estimates thereof. As a scientist, I would have been much more comfortable about Keyhoe's books had they been shorn of extensive direct quotes and suspenseful dramatizations; but I must stress that much checking on my part has convinced me that Keyhoe's reportorial accuracy was almost uniformly high. Scientists will tend to be put off by some of his scientific commentary, as well as by his style; but on UFO case material, his reliability must be recognized as impressive. (Perhaps it is well to insert here the general proviso that none of these sources, including myself, can be expected to be characterized by 100 per cent accuracy in a problem as intrinsically messy as the UFO problem; here I am trying to draw attention to sources whose reliability appears to be in the 90+% range.)
A useful collection of 160 UFO cases drawn from a wide variety of sources has been published by Olsen (Ref. 11), 32 of which he obtained directly from the official files of Project Bluebook, a feature of particular interest. A book devoted to a single short period of numerous UFO observations within a small geographic area, centering around an important sighting near Exeter, N.H., is Fuller's Incident at Exeter (Ref. 12). Having checked personally on a number of features of the main Sept. 3, 1965, sighting, and having checked indirectly on other aspects, I would describe Reference 12 as one of the significant source-items on UFOs.
Several books by the Lorenzens, organizers of APRO, the oldest continuing UFO investigating group in this country, contain valuable UFO reference material (Ref. 13). Through their writing, and especially through the APRO Bulletin, they have transmitted from South American sources numerous unusual sightings from that country. I have had almost no opportunity to cross-check those sightings, but am satisfied that some quite reliable sources are being drawn upon. An extremely unusual category of cases, those involving reports of humanoid occupants of landed UFOs, has been explored to a greater extent by APRO than by NICAP. Like NICAP, I have tended to skirt such cases on tactical grounds; the reports are bizarre, and the circumstances of all such sightings are automatically charged in a psychological sense not found in other types of close-range sightings of mere machine-like devices. Since I shall not take up below this occupant problem, let me add the comment that I do regard the total number of such seemingly reliable reports (well over a hundred came just from central France in the outstanding 1954 sighting wave in that country), far too great to brush aside. Expert psychological opinion is badly needed in assessing such reports (expert but not close-minded opinion). For the record, I should have to state that my interviewing results dispose me toward acceptance of the existence of humanoid occupants in some UFOs. I would not argue with those who say that this might be the single most important element of the entire UFO puzzle; I would only say that most of my efforts over the past two years, being aimed at arousing a new degree of scientific interest among my colleagues in the physical sciences, have led me to play down even the little that I do know about occupant sightings. One or two early attempts to touch upon that point within the time-limits of a one-hour colloquium taught me that one loses more than he gains in speaking briefly about UFO occupants. (Occupant sightings must be carefully distinguished from elaborate "contact-claims" with the Space Brothers;
I hold no brief at all for the latter in terms of my present knowledge and interviewing experience. But occupants there seem to be, and contact of a limited sort may well have occurred, according to certain of the reports. I do not regard myself as very well-informed on this point, and will say little more on this below.)
It is, of course, somewhat more difficult to assess the reliability of foreign UFO references. Michel (Ref. 13) has assembled a day-by-day account of the remarkable French UFO wave of the fall of 1954, translated into English by the staff of CSI (Civilian Saucer Intelligence) of New York City, a now-inactive but once very productive independent group. I have spoken with persons having first-hand knowledge of the French 1954 episode, and they attest to its astonishing nature. Life and The New Yorker published full contemporary accounts at the time of the 1954 European wave. An earlier book by Michel (Ref. 14), also available in English, deals with a broader temporal and geographic range of European UFO sightings. A just-published account of about 70 UFO sightings that occurred within a relatively small area around Stoke-on-Trent, England, in the summer and fall of 1967 (Ref. 15) presents an unusual cross-section of sightings that appear to be well-documented. A number of foreign UFO journals are helpful sources of the steady flow of UFO reports from other parts of the world, but a cataloging will not be attempted here. Information on some of these, as well as on smaller American groups, can be found in the two important books by Vallee (Refs. 16 and 17).
Information on pre-1947 UFO-type sightings form the subject of a recent study by Lore and Denault (Ref. 18). I shall return to this phase of the UFO problem below; I regard it as being of potentially very great significance, though there is need for far more scholarly and scientific research before much of it can be safely interpreted. Another source of sightings of which many may ultimately be found to fall within the presently understood category of UFO sightings is the writings of Charles Fort (Ref. 19). His curious books are often drawn upon for material on old sightings, but not often duly acknowledged for the mine of information they comprise. I am afraid that it has not been fashionable to take Fort seriously; it certainly took me some time to recognize that, mixed into his voluminous writings, is much that remains untapped for its scientific import. I cannot imagine any escalated program of research on the UFO program that would not have a subgroup studying Fortean reports documented from 19th century sources.
To close this brief compilation of useful UFO references, two recent commentaries (not primarily source-references) of merit may be cited, books by Stanton (Ref. 20) and by Young (Ref. 21).
Next, I examine a number of specific UFO cases that shed light on many of the recurrent questions of skeptical slant often raised against serious consideration of the UFO problem.
Cette question may come in just that form from personnes n'ayant essentiellement pas de connaissance de l'histoire des ovnis. Pour les autres qui savent bien qu'il y a eut "quelques" observations de pilotes, cela vient dans une forme modifiée , telle que, Pourquoi est-ce que les pilotes de ligne et militaires ne voient-ils pas tout le temps des ovnis s'ils sont dans notre atmosphère ? Comme réponse partielle, considérez les cas suivants (pour faciliter les références internes, je numéroterai l'ensemble des cas séquentiellement traités ici par la suite en détails).
Environ 1 semaine après l'observation maintenant fameuse du Mont Rainier par le pilote privé Kenneth Arnold, un équipage de DC-3 de United Air Lines observa 2 formations séparées de disques sans ailes, peu après avoir décolé de Boise (Réfs. 8, 10, 22, 28). J'ai localisé et interrogé le pilote, le capitaine Emil J. Smith, aujourd'hui avec le bureau de New York de United. Il confirma la fiabilité des récits précédemment publiés. Le vol 105 de United avait quitté Boise à 21 h 04. A environ 8 mn dehors, en route pour Seattle, grossièrement au-desuss de Emmet (Idaho), le co-pilote Stevens, qui repéré le 1er des 2 groupes d'objets, alluma ses phares d'atterrissage avec l'impression initiale que les objets étaient d'autres appareils. Mais, en les étudiant à nouveau devant le ciel du crépuscule, Smith et Stevens réalisèrent bientôt que ni des ailes ni des dérives n'étaient visibles sur les 5 objets devant. Après avoir appelé une hotesse, afin d'avoir la confirmation d'un 3ème témoin, ils regardèrent la formation un peu plus longtemps, appelèrent la CAA de Ontario (Oregon) pour tenter d'avoir une confirmation du sol, et virent alors la formation foncer en avant et dispparaître à grande vitesse au large à l'Ouest.
Smith insista en me disant qu'il n'y avait là aucun phénomène nuageux pouvant les amener à faire une confusion et qu'ils observèrent ces objets suffisamment longtemps pour être assez certain qu'il n'étaient pas des appareils conventionnels. Ils semblaient plats à la base, arrondis au sommet, me dit-il, et il ajouta qu'il semblait y avoir une sorte de rugosité perceptible sur le sommet, bien qu'il ne put affiner cette description. Presque immédiatement aprèq qu'ils aient perdu de vue les 5 premiers, une 2nde formation de 4 (3 en ligne et un 4ème au large sur le côté) arrivèrent devant leur position, voyageant à nouveau vers l'Ouest mais à une altitude légèrement plus élevée que les 8000 pieds du DC-3. Ils passèrent rapidement hors de vue à l'Ouest à des vitesses qu'ils considérèrent bien au-delà des vitesses alors connues. Smith insista sur le fait qu'ils ne furent jamais certains des tailles et des distances, mais qu'ils avaient eut l'impression générale que ces appareils à l'apparence de disques étaient sensiblement plus grands que les appareils ordinaires. Smith insista sur le fait qu'il n'avait pas pris au sérieux les histoires des actualités de la semaine précédente qui inventèrent le terme depuis persistant de "soucoupe volante". Mais, après avoir vu ce total de 9 appareils non conventionnels, sans ailes et à haute vitesse le soir du 4/7/47, il devint bien plus intéressé par le sujet. Néanmoins, en parlant avec moi, il souligna qu'il ne spéculerait pas sur leur véritable nature ou origine. J'ai parlé avec le personnel de United Air Lines qui a connu Smith pendant des années et se porte garant de sa fiabilité complète.
Discussion. -- L'observation United Air Lines du 4/7/47 est d'un intérêt historique parce qu'elle a à l'évidence reçu bien plus de crédit que tout autre des 85 signalements d'ovnis publiés dans les récits de presse le 4 juillet 1947 (voir Réf. 8). Même s'il ne s'agit pas de la plus impressionnate observation d'ovni par l'équipage d'un avion de ligne, elle est néanmoins significative. Elle a eut lieu par temps clair, s'est étalée sur un temps total estimé entre 10 et 12 mn, a été un cas avec des témoins multiples dont 2 observateurs expérimentés familiers des appareillages aériens, et a été faite au-dessus de l'échelle d'altitude de 1000 pieds (climb-out) ce qui, combiné au fait que les 9 objets ont été vus au-dessus de l'horizon, exclut complètement les phénomènes optiques comme une explication prête. Il est officiellement listé comme Non Identifié.
Une autre observation fameuse d'avion de ligne des premières années est le cas de Chiles-Whitted des Eastern Airlines (Refs. 3, 5, 6 , 10, 23, 24, 25, 26). An Eastern DC-3, en route from Houston to Atlanta, was flying at an altitude of about 5000 ft., near Montgomery at 2:45 a.m. The pilot, Capt. Clarence S. Chiles, and the co-pilot, John B. Whitted, both of whom now fly jets for Eastern, were experienced fliers (for example, Chiles then had 8500 hours in the air, and both had wartime military flying duty behind them). I interviewed both Chiles and Whitted earlier this year to cross-check the many points of interests in this case. Space precludes a full account of all relevant details.
Chiles pointed out to me that they first saw the object coming out of a distant squall-line area which they were just reconnoitering. At first, they thought it was a jet, whose exhaust was somehow accounting for the advancing glow that had first caught their eyes. Coming almost directly at them at nearly their flight altitude, it passed off their starboard wing at a distance on which the two men could not closely agree: one felt it was under 1000 ft, the other put it at several times that. But both agreed, then and in my 1968 interview, that the object was some kind of vehicle. They saw no wings or empennage, but both were struck by a pair of rows of windows or some apparent openings from which there came a bright glow "like burning magnesium." The object had a pointed "nose", and from the nose to the rear along its underside there was a bluish glow. Out of the rear end came an orange-red exhaust or wake that extended back by about the same distance as the object's length. The two men agreed that its size approximated that of a B-29, though perhaps twice as thick. Their uncertainty as to true distance, of course, renders this only a rough impression. There is uncertainty in the record, and in their respective recollections, as to whether their DC-3 was rocked by something like a wake. Perception of such an effect would have been masked by Chiles' spontaneous reaction of turning the DC-3 off to the left as the object came in on their right Both saw it pass aft of them and do an abrupt pull-up, but only Whitted, on the right side, saw the terminal phase in which the object disappeared after a short but fast vertical ascent By "disappeared", Whitted made clear to me that he meant just that; earlier interrogations evidently construed this to mean "disappeared aloft" or into the broken cloud deck that lay above them. Whitted said that was not so; the object vanished instantaneously after its sharp pull-up. (This is not an isolated instance of abrupt disappearance. Obviously I cannot account for such cases.)
Discussion. -- This case has been the subject of much comment over the years, and rightly so. Menzel (Ref. 24) first .proposed that this was a "mirage", but gave no basis for such an unreasonable interpretation. The large azimuth-change of the pilots' line of sight, the lack of any obvious light source to provide a basis for the rather detailed structure of what was seen, the sharp pull-up, and the high flight altitude involved all argue quite strongly against such a casual disposition of the case. In his second book, Menzel (Ref. 25) shifts to the explanation that they had obviously seen a meteor. A horizontally-moving fireball under a cloud-deck, at 5000 ft., exhibiting two rows of lights construed by experienced pilots as ports, and finally executing a most non-ballistic 90-degree sharp pull-up, is a strange fireball indeed. Menzel's 1963 explanation is even more objectionable, in that he implies, via a page of side-discussion, that the Eastern pilots had seen a fireball from the Delta Aquarid meteor stream. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Ref. 2), the radiant of that stream was well over 90 away from the origin point of the unknown object. Also, bright fireballs are, with only rare exceptions, not typical of meteor streams. The official explanation was shifted recently from "Unidentified" to "Meteor", following publication of Menzel's 1963 discussion (see Ref. 20, p. 88).
Wingless, cigar-shaped or "rocket-shaped" objects, some emitting glowing wakes, have been reported by other witnesses. Thus, Air Force Capt. Jack Puckett, flying near 4000 ft. over Tampa in a C-47 on August 1, 1946 (Ref. 10, p. 23), described seeing "a long, cylindrical shape approximately twice the size of a B-29 with luminous portholes", from the aft end of which there came a stream of fire as it flew near his aircraft. Puckett states that he, his copilot, Lt. H. F. Glass, and the flight engineer also saw it as it came into within an estimated 1000 yards before veering off. Another somewhat similar airborne sighting, made on January 22, 1956 by TWA Flight Engineer Robert Mueller at night over New Orleans, is on record (Ref. 27). Still another similar sighting is the AAL case cited below (Sperry case). Again, over Truk Is., in the Pacific, a Feb. 6, 1953, mid-day sighting by a weather officer involved a bullet-shaped object without wings or tail (Ref. 7, Rept. No. 10). Finally, within an hour's time of the Chiles-Whitted sighting. Air Force ground personnel at Robins AFB, Georgia, saw a rocket-like object shoot overhead in a westerly direction (Refs. 3, 5, 10, 6). In none of these instances does a meteorological or astronomical explanation suffice to explain the sightings.
Another of the many airline-crew sightings of highly unconventional aerial devices that I have personally checked was, like Cases 1 and 2, widely reported in the national press (for a day or two, and then forgotten like the rest). A check of weather data confirms that the night of 1/20/51 was clear and cold at Sioux City at the time that a Mid-Continent Airlines DC-3, piloted by Lawrence W. Vinther, was about to take off for Omaha and Kansas City, at 8:20 p.m. CST. In the CAA control tower, John M. Williams had been noting an oddly manenvering light high in a westerly direction. Suddently the light abruptly accelerated, in a manner clearly precluding either meteoric or aircraft origin, so Williams alerted Vinther and his co-pilot, James F. Bachmeier. The incident has been discussed many times (Ref. 4,5, 10, and 28), but to check details of these reports, I searched for and finally located all three of the above-named men. Vinther and Bachmeier are now Braniff pilots, Williams is with the FAA in Sacramento. From them I confirmed the principal features of previous accounts and learned additional information too lengthy to recapitulate in full here.
The essential point to be emphasized is that, shortly after Vinther got his DC-3 airborne, under Williams' instructions to investigate the oddly-behaving light, the object executed a sudden dive and flew over the DC-3 at an estimated 200 ft. vertical clearance, passing aft and downward. Then a surprising maneuver unfolded. As Vinther described it to me, and as described in contemporary accounts, the object suddenly reversed course almost 180°, without slowing down or slewing, and was momentarily flying formation with their DC-3, off its port wing. (Vinther's dry comment to me was: "This is something we don't see airplanes do.") Vinther and Bachmeier agreed that the object was very big, perhaps somewhat larger than a B-29, they suggested to newspapermen who interviewed them the following day. Moonlight gave them a good silhouetted view of the object, which they described as having the form of a fuselage and unswept wing, but not a sign of any empennage, nor any sign of engine-pods, propellers, or jets. Prior to its dive, it had been seen only as a light; while pacing their DC-3, the men saw no luminosity, though during the dive they saw a light on its underside. After about five seconds, the unknown object began to descend below them and flew under their plane. They put the DC-3 into a steep bank to try to keep it in view as it began this maneuver; and as it crossed under them, they lost it, not to regain sight of it subsequently.
There is much more detail, not all mutually consistent as to maneuvers and directions, in the full accounts I obtained from Vinther, Bachmeier, and Williams. The dive, pacing, and fly-under maneuvers were made quickly and at such a distance from the field that Williams did not see them clearly, though he did see the object leave the vicinity of the DC-3. An Air Force colonel and his aide were among the passengers, and the aide caught a glimpse of the unknown object, but I have been unable to locate him for further cross-check.
Discussion. -- The erratic maneuvers exhibited by the unknown object while under observation from the control tower would, by themselves, make this a better-than-average case. But the fact that those maneuvers prompted a tower operator to alert a departing aircrew to investigate, only to have the object dive upon and pace the aircraft after a non-inertial course-reversal, makes this an unusually interesting UFO. Its configuration, about which Vinther and Bachmeier were quite positive in their remarks to me (they repeatedly emphasized the bright moonlight, which checks with the near-full moon on 1/20/51 and the sky-cover data I obtained from the Sioux City Weather Bureau), combines with other features of the sighting to make it a most significant case. The reported shape (tailless, engineless, unswept aircraft of large size) does not match that of any other UFO that I am aware of; but my exposure to the bewildering range of reported configurations now on record makes this point less difficult to assimilate. This case is officially carried as Unidentified, and, in a 1958 publication (Ref. 29), was one of 12 Unidentifieds singled out for special comment. A contemporary account (Ref. 28), taking note of a then recent pronouncement that virtually all UFOs are explainable in terms of misidentified Skyhook balloons, carried a lead-caption. "The Office of Naval Research claims that cosmic ray balloons explain all saucer reports. If so, what did this pilot see?" Certainly it would not be readily explained away as a balloon, a meteor, a sundog, or ball lighting. Rather, it seems to be just one more of thousands of Unidentified Flying Objects for which we have no present explanations because we have laughed such reports out of scientific court. Bachmeier stated to me that, at the time, he felt it had to be some kind of secret device, but, in the ensuing 17 years, we have not heard of any aircraft that can execute instantaneous course-reversal. Vinther's comment to me on a final question I asked as to what he thinks, in general, about the many airline-pilot sightings of unidentified objects over the past 20 years, was : Nous n'avons pas des hallucinations.
Il y a bien plus de pilotes privés que de pilotes de ligne, et il n'est donc pas surprenant qu'il y ait plus d'observations d'ovnis de la part des premiers que des derniers. Un ingénieur et ancien pilote de P-38 de la Force Aérienne, Joseph J. Kaliszewski, volant pour le programme de ballon Skyhook de General Mills sur des missions de suivi de ballon, observa des objets non-conventionnels en 2 jours successifs en octobre 1951 (réfs. 5, 7, 10). Les 2 furent signalées via les canaux de la compagnie à l'agence enquêtrice officielle (Bluebook), dont le rapport (réf. 7) décrit les témoins comme très crédibles et comme des observateurs expérimentés de ballon en haute altitude. Le 10 octobre, à environ 10 h 10, Kaliszewski et Jack Donaghue se trouvaient à 6000 ft pieds dans leur avion, montant vers leur ballon cible, lorsque Kaliszewski repéra un objet étrange traversant le ciel d'Est en Ouest, beaucoup plus haut et derrière notre ballon (qui était proche de 20000 pieds à ce moment). Lorsque j'ai interrogé Kaliszewski, il m'a confirmé que cet objet avait une leur particulière sur lui, traversant derrière et au-dessus de notre ballon d'Est en Ouest très rapidement, venant d'abord dans une légère plongée, leveling off for about a minute and slowing down, then into a sharp left turn and climbing at an angle of 50° to 60° into the southeast with a terrific acceleration. The two observers had the object in view for an estimated two minutes, during which it crossed a span of some 45 of the sky. No vapor trail was seen, and Kaliszewski was emphatic in asserting that it was not a balloon, jet, or conventional aircraft.
The following morning, near 0630, Kaliszewski was flying on another balloon mission with Richard Reilly and, while airborne north of Minneapolis, the two of them noticed an odd object. Quoting from the account submitted to the official agency (Ref. 7, Rept. No. 2) :
"The object was moving from east to west at a high rate and very high. We tried keeping the ship on a constant course and using the reinforcing member of the windshield as a point. The object moved past this member at about 50 degrees per second. This object was peculiar in that it had what can be described as a halo around it with a dark undersurface. It crossed rapidly and then slowed down and started to climb in lazy circles slowly. The pattern it made was like a falling oak leaf inverted. It went through these gyrations for a couple minutes and then with a very rapid acceleration disappeared to the east. This object Dick and I watched for approximately 5 mn.
Shortly after, still another unknown object shot straight across the sky from west to east, but not before Kaliszewski succeeded in radioing theodolite observers at the University of Minnesota Airport. Two observers there (Douglas Smith, Richard Dorian) got fleeting glimpses of what appeared to them to be a cigar-shaped object viewed through the theodolite, but could not keep it in view due to its fast angular motion. In my conversations with Kaliszewski about these sightings, I gained the impression of talking with a careful observer, in full accord with impressions held by three other independent sources,