Introduction by Jan L. Aldrich On two previous occasions the Congress of the United States has conducted open hearings on the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects. On April 5, 1966 the House Armed Services Committee held public hearings, and on July 29th, 1968, the U. S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science and Astronautics convened a one-day Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, chaired by then-Indiana Congressman J. Edward Roush. However, these two occasions were not the only time that the subject was discussed by legislators. Project Blue Book documents, newspaper stories and letters in the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) files show that on a number of occasions UFOs had been privately discussed in executive session of various committees and subcommittees. However, the July 29, 1968 Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects was unique in the respect that it provided Congressmen and Committee staff with the opportunity to ask questions of the participants, and the results were made accessible to the public through the government printing office. Since the late fifties, NICAP had struggled to get Congressional attention focused on the UFO phenomenon and the official handling of UFO investigations. During this period the Project Blue Book files had only been available to a few select individuals. While the Blue Book files contained an extensive collection of UFO reports, they were hardly definitive. In fact, NICAP probably had just as many well-investigated cases in its own files. However, the denial of public access to the Project's files seemed like a cover up, and something on which to focus the request for Congressional action. NICAP developed a number of proposals they hoped Congress would help implement: (a)the public release of official UFO files from the USAF Project Blue Book and other agencies, (b)a review and reform of the USAF UFO investigation methods, (c)an end to the mistreatment of some UFO witnesses, who NICAP felt were unfairly categorized in press statements or ordered into keeping silent about their experiences, and (d)a review of possible threats to US national security, which NICAP thought were being ignored. Congressman L. C. Wyman requested the type of hearings that NICAP proposed and entered a resolution into the House to authorize the Committee on Science and Astronautics to conduct a wide-ranging hearing, complete with witnesses and subpoena powers. Indiana Congressman J. Edward Roush, an advocate of serious attention for the UFO problem, thought the action premature, and wanted to wait until the Condon Committee, then underway at the University of Colorado, had delivered its final report. In the meantime he proposed a Symposium and became the driving force behind it. The Symposium that resulted was not what NICAP had hoped for. Rather than examining the USAF's handling of UFO investigations, or the details of the then in-progress University of Colorado study, the discussion was confined to an exchange of views and evidence presented by the participants. The Symposium consisted of six scientists presenting their views on UFOs to the committee: Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Chairman, Department of Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois and at the time a scientific consultant to the USAF on UFOs for almost two decades; Prof. James E. McDonald, Department of Meteorology, and Senior Physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, who had conducted a multi-year full time investigation of the UFO problem; Dr. Carl Sagan, Associate professor of astronomy, Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Dr. Robert L. Hall, Head, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois; Dr. James A. Harder, Associate professor of civil engineering, University of California; and Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, Jr. Senior scientist, System Sciences Corp., North Sepulveda Boulevard, El Segundo, California who had also done extensive analysis of UFO films. These scientists also participated in discussions with the Congressmen and their staff after the initial presentations and some had written statements read into the record. A number of other scientists who did not appear before the committee but submitted written statements were: Dr. Donald H. Menzel, Director of the Harvard University Observatory, author of a number of books and articles on UFOs; Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, Division of Counseling and Testing, University of Dr. Garry C. Henderson, Senior Research Scientist, Space Sciences, General Stanton T. Friedman, Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory; Dr. Roger N. Shepard, Department of Psychology, Stanford University; and Dr. Frank B. Salisbury, Head, Plant Science Department, Utah State University, NASA consultant and author of UFO articles. The Symposium represented a variety of opinions on UFOs, from the advocacy of Dr. James McDonald to the skepticism of Dr. Donald H. Menzel, who felt that any consideration of the problem was a complete waste of time. Representative Roush's defeat in the next Congressional elections was the end of UFO hearings "On the Hill." With the nation's interest consumed by the war in Viet Nam there could be no further action into public hearings without the support of at least one dedicated Congressman from the committee. J. Edward Roush maintained his interest in UFOs and later accepted a position on NICAP's Board of Governors. In his introduction to the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, Dr. Condon pointed out that the Symposium might be viewed as a counterbalance of opposing views to the University of Colorado study. While to a certain extent this may be true, most of the scientists' presentations were introductory in nature and did not go into detailed analyses. Regardless, the Symposium represents diverse opinions on UFOs that were held among a number of scientists who had taken more than a cursory glance at the phenomenon. The Sign Historical Group wishes to express its thanks to the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) for their assistance in placing this record of the Symposium online.August, 2002. SYMPOSIUM ON UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS U.S. House of representatives, Committee on Science and Astronautics On-line Edition: Editorial Notes As with other documents placed on-line by NCAS, we have attempted to preserve most aspects of the "look and feel" of the symposium record as it was printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO): Page breaks and page numbering match the GPO document. We have enhanced the visibility of these breaks to account for the fact that the reader must scroll the document rather than turn physical pages. Typeset pages, such as those in the Symposium record, suffer from "widow and orphan" problems, where a word or a short line, or a portion of a hyphenated word, are on the wrong side of a page break. Where they were noticed, these text fragments were moved to the other side of the break. GPO used two font sizes for most of the document: larger for oral statements by committee members and witnesses, smaller for written statements entered into the record. We have preserved this size difference, but have not attempted to control exactly which font the reader sees; font settings for your browser remain under your control. Font size settings also remain under your control, but you will always see a difference in size between oral and written statements. OTHER ASPECTS OF "LOOK AND FEEL" Certain specific items in the Symposium record required individual treatment, either because they deviated from the general typographical conventions of the document, or because we found it necessary to introduce such deviations ourselves: In the GPO format of the original record, each speaker was identified as he spoke in much the same manner as actors in a dramatic script, but in a style that is time-consuming to code in HTML. That style uses all uppercase letters with capitals differentiated by size. Here is an example: MR. ROUSH: We will now hear from Dr. Hall. In place of this scheme, speaker identifications have been done in boldface with standard upper- and lowercase lettering. Some materials from Dr. Baker and Dr. Walker appear in typewritten form, apparently simply photocopied from their original papers and inserted into the record "as-is" by GPO. We have preserved this aspect of the GPO document. Your browser's "fixed-size" font should be set to a typewriter-like front such as Courier for this material to be seen in the form GPO intended. Dr. Salisbury's written statement was a photocopy of one of his journal publications, using a three-column magazine-style layout. This does not work well on the screen, so the columnar layout was eliminated. Also, certain graphic images in Dr. Salisbury's article were positioned badly (separated physically from their associated text); we took the liberty of placing these images with the text that refers to them. ERRORS IN THE ORIGINAL There were several kinds of errors in the Symposium record to be dealt with: Ordinary typos, where the correct spelling was obvious, were simply corrected without noting the correction. Omitted words, where the word that would fill the gap was fairly obvious, have been filled in with the filler word enclosed in square brackets. In some cases, the correct word[s] could not be determined; these have been flagged with the standard "sic" notation. Some lengthy transcription errors resulted in entire sentences being garbled. Correcting these involved an exercise of judgment as to what the speaker actually intended to say. Where they occur, they are explained with an "NCAS Editor's Note." TABLES AND GRAPHICS Tables and graphics in the Symposium record were of uneven quality, so preserving their information content in the transition from paper to monitor screen was a persistent problem: The photographs in the symposium record were standard halftone prints, made up of a large number of small dots similar to the photographs in a newspaper but with somewhat higher resolution. It was necessary to apply "gamma correction" and brightness/contrast adjustments to some of them, in order that the on-line images would display more shades of gray, plus some fine detail that had been obscured in the original raw scan. In other cases (mostly graphs and labeled drawings), the size adjustment necessary to fit the image to the screen resulted in an unacceptable loss of detail. In those cases, we have included a copy of the image in its original size, available as a link from the screen-fitting image. Even then, some fine detail such as small text labels might be obscure. In those cases, the image can be saved on your machine and viewed with an image editor that has a "zoom" feature. A number of image scans show noticeable "bleed-through" of text from the reverse side of the original page. GPO used unusually thin paper in printing the record, and we had only limited success in our efforts to correct this The physical appearance of the tables deviates from that of the tables as typeset in the original record. The HTML "table" construct has been utilized to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of the browser in the display of tabular data. The tables will expand and contract as the user moves the margins back and forth to enhance readability. The data in the tables are unaltered. NAVIGATION We have incorporated a number of features similar to those in the Colorado report, to assist the reader in moving through the Symposium record: Each item in the table of contents is a link to the contribution of a single Symposium participant. Some participants were witnesses, appearing in person and giving oral testimony; these participants also contributed written statements for inclusion in the record. Other participants did not appear in person, but provided written statements. Inside each main item is a set of sub-links to the testimony and written statement[s] of the participant. In some cases, these written statements are themselves provided with sub-links. In almost every case, the reader is no more than five or six pages away from a "BACK" link that leads eventually all the way to the title page. Graphic images are shown as "thumbnails" that link to the full screen-size version of that same image. This strategy promotes more rapid loading of the main text pages for each participant. The browser's "back-arrow" returns the reader to the place where the thumbnail appears. All the graphic images from the Symposium have been collected into an additional set of thumbnails, linked off the main table of contents, for convenience in browsing these images. Dr. McDonald's written statement contained an extensive numbered and dated list of sightings that he described in some detail to support his position. Many of these cases have also been described and commented on by other writers and investigative groups. For the convenience of the reader who might wish to compare the views of these other investigators with those of Dr. McDonald, an auxiliary table of contents (linked off the table of contents and from Dr. McDonald's statement) containing links to his case descriptions has been provided. It lists the cases both chronologically and grouped by type in the same manner as Dr. McDonald grouped them. Jim Giglio, NCAS Editor and Workgroup Coordinator January 2001 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Beth Wolszon of the University of Minnesota library located a copy of the Symposium record and provided a photocopy for scanning. Jim Giglio did the optical scanning and HTML coding of the record, and coordinated a team of NCAS volunteers who proofread the on-screen result. The proofreaders who performed this crucial, tedious, and often under- appreciated task, were Lynn Francis, Mary Pastel, Neil Inglis, Tim Scanlon, Barry Blyveis, and Zoe Ann Lapinski. Additional proofreading and corrections for the Sign Historical Group edition was performed by Candy Peterson and John Stepkowski of SHG. Sign Historical Group edition placed online, May 2002. 90th CONGRESS 1st SESSION IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES October 17, 1967 Mr.WYMAN submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Rules 1 Resolved, That the Committee on Science and Astro- 2 nautics, acting as a whole or by subcommittee, is authorized 3 and directed to conduct a full and complete investigation and 4 study of unidentified flying objects. 5 For the purpose of carrying out this resolution the com- 6 mittee or subcommittee is authorized to sit and act during the 7 present Congress at such times and pierces within the United 8 States, including any Commonwealth or possession thereof, 9 whether the House is in session, has recessed, or has ad- 10 journed, to hold such hearings, and to require, by subpoena or 11 otherwise, the attendance and testimony of such witnesses 12 and the production of such books, records, correspondence, 1 memorandums, papers, and documents, as it deems necessary; 2 except that neither the committee nor any subcommittee 3 thereof may sit while the House is meeting unless special 4 leave to sit shall have been obtained from the House. Sub- 5 penas may be issued under the signature of the chairman of 6 the committee or any member of the committee designated by 7 him, and may be served by any person designated by such 8 chairman or member. 9 The committee shall report to the House as soon as 10 practicable during the present Congress the results of its 11 investigation and study, together with such recommendations 12 as it deems advisable. Any such report which is made when 13 the House is not in session shall be filed with the Clerk of 14 the House. November 21, 1967 James E. McDonald, Senior Physicist The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona 85721 Dear Dr. McDonald: I too have noted that Congressman L.C. Wyman recently introduced legislation asking for an investigation of unidentified flying objects by the Committee on Science and Astronautics. As you well know I am keenly interested in the whole problem of UFO's and I too feel that the appropriate committee to undertake an investigation would be the Science and Astronautics Committee of which I am a member. However, it would seem to me unwise and precipitate to undertake such an investigation before the University of Colorado people under Dr. Condon's leadership finish their research and submit a report. I realize that this will be some ten months hence, but I cannot justify in my own mind taking additional action before this is completed. At that time I intend to assess the situation and to make my decision accordingly. The very people one would need to question as witnesses before the Science and Astronautics Committee would be those individuals engaged in the research at the University of Colorado. They could hardly be expected to respond until their project is terminated. Please keep in touch with us, and alert us to any information you think important. With warmest personal regards, I remain Yours sincerely, J. EDWARD ROUSH Member of Congress COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND ASTRONAUTICS GEORGE P. MILLER, California, Chairman The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:05 a.m., in room 2318, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. J. Edward Roush (chairman of the symposium) presiding. Mr. Roush. The committee will be in order. Today the House Committee on Science and Astronautics conducts a very special session, a symposium on the subject of unidentified flying objects; the name of which is a reminder to us of our ignorance on this subject and a challenge to acquire more knowledge thereof. We approach the question of unidentified flying objects as purely a scientific problem, one of unanswered questions. Certainly the rigid and exacting discipline of science should be marshaled to explore the nature of phenomena which reliable citizens continue to report. A significant part of the problem has been that the sightings reported have not been accompanied by so-called hardware or materials that could be investigated and analyzed. So