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1970 March 18th Redondo High School Stanton Friedman 106

Understanding Audio Transcript

Recording structure

• [00:00] Opening remarks and introduction
• [22:51] Main address
• [01:09:50] Development of the main themes
• [01:44:07] Questions and closing discussion

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[00:00] Opening remarks and introduction

The following is a speech by Stanton Friedman at the Miracosta High School in Redondo Beach, California, on March 18, 1970. He is being introduced by Paul Wilson. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This evening we will hear and see a very interesting and informative lecture sponsored by the UFO Research Institute. My name is Paul Wilson, president of Southern California in Los Angeles County for some 40 years, and as a research scientist employed in this community, it is a distinct privilege to introduce to you on behalf of the UFO Research Institute my friend, Mr. Stanton T. Friedman.

He is a nuclear physicist, a fellow scientist, and past president of the UFO Research Institute. This evening on the subject, Flying Saucers Are Real. Through his continuing research and broad professional background, Mr. Friedman is eminently qualified to lecture and discuss this controversial issue or controversial subject of unidentified flying objects and flying saucers. ...by TRW Systems in Redondo. ...by TRW Systems in Redondo Beach in the development of nuclear electric generators for spacecraft.

He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in physics from the University of Chicago and has more than 13 years of experience in the development of advanced nuclear propulsion systems for applications in airplanes and rockets and nuclear power systems for spacecraft. ...employers include General Electric, Westinghouse Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company, Western Division. In addition to his activities in other professional societies, Mr. Friedman is a member of the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization

and, as mentioned previously, past president of the UFO Research Institute. He has addressed approximately 100 audiences, ...he has addressed approximately 100 audiences, and is one of the largest group of scientists and professional people across the United States and Canada. ...of only 12 scientists who provided testimony to a congressionally sponsored UFO symposium and has also appeared on many TV programs including The Joe Pines Show. He has studied and investigated the subject of UFOs for some 11 years and has been lecturing for the past three.

...during this last year, I have been privileged to attend two of his many lectures, ...during this last year, I have been privileged to attend two of his many lectures, end two of his many lectures. The first was a presentation to a large group of scientists and engineers at Westinghouse Research Laboratories near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And the second was during a UFO convention held in Southern California last September. His presentations were extremely interesting, highly informative, and educational. And I have observed, as a true scientist, he does not draw hasty conclusions from limited information, but presents the facts and evidence as it has been observed. Following his lecture tonight, there will

be a question and answer period. And as I am sure that there will be questions in many of our minds, I particularly urge you to participate as time permits. A newcomer to Southern California, a new friend and resident. Thank you very much, Paul. I'll give Paul a chance to sit down front. Can we have a housewife up a little bit? I'd like to see who's there and keep track of the people who go to sleep. For later comment, anyway. I hope none of you came here expecting to hear a comedian's presentation about flying saucers. Surely the comedians and the cartoonists have had their say on this subject, and it's time that more of these scientists and engineers

got into this. I have three reasons for doing what may seem to be a very unusual thing, that is, for a physicist to be traipsing around the countryside saying flying saucers are real and taking on the likes of Joe Pine may seem like a very peculiar thing indeed. The reasons are, first, that the scientific community, the news media too, have been derelict in their responsibility to the public. They have not given sufficient attention, in a sensible kind of way at least, to flying saucers. It's time we did.

The second reason is that as a taxpayer, I am helping to support the development of a variety of advanced propulsion systems, which I think would benefit from studying systems that seem to have solved the problems that the way the UFOs have. Certainly there's a market for a high-speed flying object capable of right-angle tracking, but certainly there's a market for a high-speed flying object capable of right-angle tracking. Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you very much, John. of right-angle turns and vertical flight and hovering.

For those of you who live near the L.A. airport, I think you'd also throw in the notion that if it can fly silently, you'd like it too. The third reason is that there's a mental health problem in the United States. A lot of mental health problems in the United States, I guess, but the one I'm concerned about are the millions of people who have observed UFOs and who have been confronted with ridicule. I think it's time we lifted what I call the laughter. As a matter of fact, a noted psychiatrist about a year or so ago

published an article in a medical journal, UFOs, Dilemma or Delusion, in which he was convinced that a number of UFO observers that he had talked to had indeed seen what they claimed to have seen, with no evidence for delusion, but that they were being driven in the direction of intelligence, insanity, by the attitude of ridicule that they received from their fellow human beings. Now, UFOs are sort of a peculiar subject in a lot of ways. The most obvious one is that we have to talk about something that I don't have a piece of to show you, and I also have not arranged it so that at the right time in my talk,

a little green man comes trotting by on the stage and I can say, you know, there's one of the pilots, that proves they're real. Now, what we have to make do with it, reports of strange things. That's not the usual milieu of the physicist, but maybe we can do better later if enough of us get into the act. Okay, citing reports. There are basically three kinds of citing reports.

The first are those reports by competent observers of strange phenomena, which they cannot understand, but which can be identified by competent investigators, spending enough time, money, and effort. The number of things that have been misidentified is very long. The list of such things is very long. Perhaps 80% of the citings fall into this category, but a study of identifiable flying objects

tells us nothing about the ones that can't be identified. So having acknowledged that the great majority of UFOs are indeed identifiable, let's go on to the other categories. And I must interrupt myself to say something I should have said at the beginning. Everything you will hear me say is my view and my view only. Some other people may share it, but it certainly doesn't represent the viewpoint of, say,

the American Nuclear Society, to which I belong, the other professional societies to which I belong, and certainly not the viewpoint of TRW Systems. So please, don't anybody, leave here saying, TRW believes in UFOs, or is working on UFOs, or cares one way or another about UFOs.

As far as I know, they don't care anything about UFOs, at least yet. We may try to change that in the future, but that's another story. Okay, we have one kind of citing out of the way, all those citing which can be identified by enough work. The second kind of citing

are those reports by competent observers of strange phenomena about which not enough data is obtained to enable a competent investigator to make a judgment. These are insufficient information citing. A study of them tells us nothing about UFOs.

So the only citing we're interested in are the residue, the signal out of all this mess of noise. Those citing that we ought to be concerned about are the reports by competent observers, of strange phenomena in the sky or on the ground,

which they cannot identify, and which also cannot be identified by competent investigators spending enough time, money, and effort. Now some people think I just killed my talk because after all there aren't any such citing.

That's not the case. I maybe ought to tell you what I believe about flying saucers so that there won't be any confusion. I'm not trying to walk the fence or a tight rope between opinion and belief and what have you. I believe that the evidence is overwhelming

that the Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles. That doesn't mean I know why they're here, what they want, how they operate, why they don't talk to me and presumably to any of you. Only that I think the evidence is overwhelming.

By evidence we're primarily talking about citing reports. That's my third category. Now I mentioned before flying saucers is sort of a peculiar subject that's peculiar in another way. And that is that almost everybody has heard about flying saucers.

Gallup Poll four years ago now revealed an awareness score of like 96%. You know you can ask the whole population who the president is and you'll get a certain number who don't know. Well everybody's heard about flying saucers. And based on my own travels I'd say just about everybody

has an opinion about flying saucers. But the strange thing is that so few people have any real information. So few people have delved beyond the cartoonists and the comedians on an occasional newspaper article. There's a lot of misconceptions around. I run into them everywhere I go

judging by the questions I get asked. So I'd like to try to clear up the number of these misconceptions about you know who sees UFOs under what circumstances, what kind of sightings, what kind of data there really is. I'd like to do this by quoting a man

who's had a longer professional involvement with UFOs than anybody else I know. Dr. J. Allen Hynek is head of the Dearborn Observatory at Northwestern University, head of the Astronomy Department. He was Air Force consultant on UFOs from 1948 until June of 1969.

He personally investigated many hundreds of UFO sightings. I'm sure you're all familiar with him. You've seen his picture. He's got a goatee beard. He's better known as Mr. Swamp Gas. And contrary to what a lot of you may think, he does not believe that UFOs can be swept

under the Swamp Gas rug or any other rug. A few years ago, after about 18 years as a consultant to the Air Force, he finally decided it was time to inform his professional colleagues that there was something to this UFO question. And he wrote a letter to Science Magazine.

The official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest group of professional scientists in the world, really, in which he tried to clear up a lot of misconceptions about UFOs. It was really a rather mild letter,

but Science turned it down. He then told the editors of Science that he'd published it in the New York Times with a footnote saying that Science had turned it down and the editors graciously changed their mind. Now, I mention this little by-play simply because it's indicative of the official view

of the scientific community fewer than four years ago. I should mention, as a paid-up member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that in December of 1969, a three-session symposium was held on UFOs at the annual meeting in Boston, in which only professional scientists were involved.

The proceedings of that symposium will be published in the near future. It should make interesting reading. Anyway, I'd like to quote from Hynek's letter to Science to try to clear up these misconceptions, not because any of you hold these misconceptions, although there might be an occasional exception, but rather because maybe some of the people you know

are laboring under some false impressions and you can help straighten them out. So I'll quote from his letter. Bear with me on reading this, but I'd like to quote him accurately, and I hope if you're going to misquote somebody, it'll be him and not me. Okay, misconception number one.

UFO buffs report UFOs. His comment? The exact opposite is much nearer the truth. The truly puzzling reports come from people who have not given much or any thought to UFOs. Misconception number two. UFOs are reported by unreliable, unstable, and uneducated people.

His comment? This is, of course, true. But UFOs are reported in even greater numbers by reliable, stable, and educated people. The most articulate reports come from obviously intelligent observers. Misconception number three. UFOs are never reported by scientifically

trained people. His comment? This is unequivocally false. The very best, most coherent reports have come from scientifically trained people. Misconception number four. UFOs are never seen at close range and are always reported vaguely.

His comment? When we speak of the body of puzzling reports, we exclude all those which fit the above description. I have in my files several hundred reports which are fine brain teasers. Misconception number five. The Air Force has no evidence

that UFOs are extraterrestrial or represent advanced technology of any kind. His comment? As long as they are unidentified, the question must obviously remain open. If we knew what they were, they would no longer be UFOs.

It would be IFOs, identified flying objects. No truly scientific investigation of the UFO phenomena has ever been undertaken. Let me interject here to say that that wasn't really true at the time he said it.

I'll let you know why in just a few moments. Back to Hynek. Misconception number six. UFO reports are generated by publicity. His comment? One cannot deny that there is a positive feedback.

A stimulated emission of reports when sightings are widely publicized. But it is unwarranted to assert that this is the sole cause of high incidence of UFO reports. And finally, number seven. Misconception number seven. UFOs have never been sighted on radar

or photographed by meteor or satellite tracking cameras. His comment? This statement is not equivalent to say that radar, meteor cameras, and satellite tracking stations have not picked up oddities

on their scopes or films that have remained unidentified. It has been lightly assumed that although unidentified, the oddities were not unidentifiable as conventional objects. So much for Hynek. That was a pretty mild letter at that.

Now, let me add two more misconceptions to his list, based on my own traipsing around. The first is that UFOs are some sort of peculiar American phenomenon. It turns out they've been observed in essentially every country, certainly in every continent,

including Antarctica, which is inhabited not so much by penguins but by scientists, and penguins aren't competent observers. And finally, the last misconception is that UFOs are somehow a space-age phenomenon. You know, we got out there

and the Russians got out there and so now people are looking up a little bit more and suddenly they see strange things and there's really nothing to it. Nonsense. The modern UFO era began in the mid-40s and actually there are thousands of reports

that predate the Second World War, many that predate 1900, and a few that go back thousands of years. So we are not dealing with a new space-age phenomenon. The terminology sometimes changes. They weren't always called flying saucers, but the descriptions basically

have been pretty much the same for a few thousand years. Okay, now I said that Hynek's statement that there hadn't been a scientific study of UFOs wasn't really true. What do I mean? Well, I've checked both the classified and the unclassified literature,

and so far as I can determine, there has been one detailed, scientific, official study of UFOs. I am not talking about the Condon Report, that is the study done at the University of Colorado. We'll go into that from time to time about why I don't think it was scientific.

I'm talking about a study that was done at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, a well-recognized scientific technological organization. It was completed way back in 1955. The study covered every sighting in the Air Force files from 1947 through 1952, a total of 2,199 sightings,

which is a pretty good sampling, especially when you consider that the Condon Report only considered about 90. They weighted every sighting as to quality, and they categorized all of these sightings, aircraft, balloon, astronomical, categories like that, and they published a report.

A big, fat report. Project Blue Book Special Report Number 14. Never made public. It wasn't classified, incidentally. It was just never made public. For a number of years they said it wasn't available at all. It is now available in two versions,

a privately published version, which is listed on that bibliography that you picked up at the back, I hope. And if you want to get a copy of the whole thing, you can get every page duplicated by the government printing office at a cost of something like 20 cents a page for about 70 bucks.

It's over 340 pages. You can get a copy. That's hardly wide distribution. Okay. It wasn't made public, but a press release was given very wide distribution at the completion of this study. And I'd like to quote from the press release,

which may sound very odd indeed for a physicist, because after all, nobody believes press releases, but in this case I think it's useful. So let's turn on the slide projector and look at the first slide very quickly. This is the cover of the privately published version of Project Blue Book Special Report 14. That's an artist's conception of the Avro car,

the Canadian vehicle which never got off the ground. Let's look at the next slide. Don't confuse Blue Book Special Report 14 with Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book funded it, but the progress reports that come out since are nothing at all like Special Report 14. Now this is the press release I mentioned,

[22:51] Main address

complete with the official seal of the Department of Defense way back in October 1955. The important part here is this last paragraph. Commenting on this report, Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles said, quote, On the basis of this study, we believe that no objects such as those popularly described as flying saucers

have overflown the United States. I feel certain that even the unknown 3% could have been explained as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been available. There are apparently two factual statements there. Even the unknown 3%, and even these could have been explained

if more data had been available. It sounds like my final category of reports has just disappeared. That's what it sounds like, and that's what many people think is the case about UFOs. Very few reports that are listed as unidentified, and even these could be explained if more data had been available.

So, no problem. Not worth any scientific effort. Well, let's take a look at the data and see what it shows, as opposed to what the press release shows. Let's look at the next slide. This is a breakdown. See, the slide's breaking down a little bit.

Here are the six categories. Other, incidentally, includes, you know, searchlights on clouds, hoaxes, geese. The ones we're interested in are the unknowns. 34 out of a total of 2,199, or 19.7%, Secretary of the Air Force said even the unknown three, a slight discrepancy.

Equally interesting are these reports listed as insufficient information. It's made crystal clear in this document that if there wasn't enough data available about a sighting, it was not and could not be labeled as unknown. It had to be labeled as insufficient information. The Air Force said even the unknowns could have been identified if more data had been available.

Not enough data, it was not an unknown. Now, at this point, the skeptic might say, hey, wait just a minute. You told us they evaluated the quality of these sightings. How do we know that all those fancy unknowns up there aren't really lousy sightings? Well, at this moment, you don't. So let's go to the next slide.

Let's see a breakdown by quality. Four categories, the number in each, the percent of the total, and then the unknowns in each category. Now, look at the excellent reports. Fewer than 10% got labeled as excellent. That's an indication that they set pretty tough criteria. They really had to be good sightings.

It would have been 25% if they had been equally distributed. Okay, out of the excellent sightings, meaning good observer, good circumstances, long duration, et cetera, one out of three were labeled as unknown. Out of the good sightings, one out of four. Doubtful and poor, fewer than one out of six. The better the quality of the sighting,

the higher the percentage that got labeled as unknown. Now, if we had a similar chart for those for which the label was finally insufficient information, we'd find just the reverse. The poorer the sighting, the more likely it was to be labeled insufficient information. There's nothing magic about this. This is exactly what you'd expect

if the unknowns were indeed different from all the others. But that raises a serious question. If the unknowns were not aircraft, and they were not astronomical, and they were not balloons, and they were not others, and they were not those for which there wasn't enough information, what in the world?

Whoops, let me change that. What out of the world? Let's turn the slide projector off. Let's talk a little and turn the house lights up a bit. Let's talk a little bit about some other data in this report. The guys who did this study were a perfectly rational kind of people. For example, they said that in order for a sighting to be labeled as an unknown, would take agreement on the part of all three final judges.

Any one of them could label it anything else, but if it was going to be an unknown, which were obviously the sightings of most interest, then all three judges had to agree. Second thing they did was to say that if there's any report of creatures with the sighting, throw it in the wastebasket. There's no justification for that, but I suppose the feeling was, you know,

if you're a kook to see a flying saucer, you're a kookier kook if you claim to have seen a creature. We'll talk some more about creatures later. But the other thing they did that was really impressive, incidentally, was they asked this question. They said, look, how do we know that we haven't missed the boat here somehow? That maybe the unknowns aren't really the same as the knowns, only somehow we didn't get the data straight,

we didn't check carefully enough. They said, let's compare the two categories, the knowns, aircraft, astronomical, balloon, etc., and the unknowns, on the basis of such characteristics as color, speed, number of objects seen, duration of the sighting, that sort of thing. They used a computer, even though this was way back in the early 50s,

and they did a chi-square statistical analysis, which I won't go into except to say that the data is in the report. Six characteristics, knowns versus unknowns. The conclusions of this analysis are quite striking. They found that the probability was less than one percent, less than one percent that the unknowns are really misidentified knowns. That's how different the characteristics were. That doesn't quite prove that the unknowns are different.

It says it's highly unlikely that they're the same. Of special interest were things like the duration of the sighting. You know, a lot of people think that UFO reports are just flashes of light across the sky. Not at all. The average unknown was observed far longer than the average known, 70 percent for more than a minute, 45 percent for more than five minutes.

There's a lot of other data in this document, including, for example, mention of radar unknowns. I don't mean just observations made on radar, but observations that finally had to be labeled as unknown. There's even an indication of radar and visual, simultaneous radar and visual unknowns. I mention this because some of you may have seen a CBS TV special about four years ago now, supposedly devoted to UFOs,

but in actuality about 95 percent concerned with IFVs. Anyway, in the course of this program, a North American Air Defense Command spokesman got up and said, we have never seen one on radar. I don't know where he got his data, but it wasn't from the official Air Force files. Hynek has also mentioned radar unknowns, incidentally. How many sightings per degree of latitude and longitude,

how many sightings per month over a several year period, all kinds of data. It's well worth examining for those who want to see information on UFOs. And as I mentioned before, it covers 2,200 sightings. The Condon Report covers really fewer than 90, with no attempt to categorize by quality or to categorize by type of thing observed,

and no attempt to segregate the unknowns either, incidentally, which should have been the focus of the study. Okay, back to Blue Book Special Report 14. Now, the skeptic at this point might say, hey, look, you know, that was 1955, before the space age got rolling. Surely we've learned a heck of a lot about what goes on up there since then.

And besides, I've looked at the progress reports the press releases for the last four or five years, and the percentage of unknowns is one, two, maybe three in a bad year. Isn't it rather deceptive to show this data instead of the later data, which makes use of a lot more scientific talent? Well, it is true

that we've gotten out into space. We know more about what's going on up there. And it certainly is true that the press releases show only a few percent unknown. It is not true that a great deal of scientific effort has been expended on the investigations of UFOs. Never since this time, 1955,

have as many members of the scientific community, technological community, been involved in investigating UFOs. The Condon Report doesn't come close in the depth of study that this document, this study went into. That does leave the question then, how come the percentage of unknowns has been so low,

just one or two percent, when at this time it was 19.7 percent? Surely that means something for why the percentage of unknowns is ostensibly so low. The answer is deception on the part of the Air Force. They happen to be the government bodies,

stuck with the UFO program, at least until last December. Nobody has it right now. Maybe the scientific community will finally get involved. Now what do I mean when I say deception? And please, I don't have it in for the Air Force. I won't say some of my best friends

are in the Air Force or anything like that. But I have worked on Air Force programs and contracts. I do admire many people in the Air Force. They just happen to have been stuck and done a lousy job on the UFO problem. Why they've been in the UFO business for so long, I don't know. Since more than ten years ago,

it was stated that UFOs represent no threat to the security of the United States. They should have been turned over to NASA. NASA has been approached and has rejected the notion of getting involved with UFOs. What do I mean? I mean saying three percent unknowns

when it was really 19.7 percent. I mean saying even these could have been identified if more data had been available and that wasn't the case at all. There are a number of nitpicking things that they've monkeyed with statistics about over the years that I won't go into. There are two major aspects of the deception, though,

that bother me and should bother you. First is that in many, many cases, the explanation given out by the Air Force simply doesn't match the data as reported by the observer. Now, as a member of APRO and of NICAP, two big UFO groups, I get their bi-monthly publications,

I get the flying saucer review, and from time to time in each of these, you'll find specific cases in which it is perfectly clear that the explanation given out by the Air Force did not match the data. As an example, about three, four years ago in the central part of the United States,

thousands of people claim to have seen UFOs in the sky, including a couple of Air Force radar installations which had sent enough the next day to deny that they had observed these on radar. It's against the rules to admit any such things, incidentally. But who admitted it the night before when approached by radio and television stations? Anyway, thousands of people, including newsmen.

Well, the official explanation came out a few days later. There was a temperature inversion, and what people had really seen all over Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, were three stars. And they named the stars. One astronomer in Oklahoma City, fortunately, had the good sense to check.

And he found that those three stars were observable only from the other side of the Earth at the time of the sighting. And this kind of thing has happened in case after case after case. When you look at the data, the explanation simply doesn't match. I think that that is terribly unfair

to the people who report things, as well as being unfair to the general public, who expect a better deal than that. That's one major deception. To say that things are something that they could not have been is not honest, shouldn't be legal, is unfair.

But the deception that bothers me the most is really the whole attitude toward the subject. And again, the Air Force shares this with the scientific community and with the news media, by and large. And the attitude goes something like this. Now, I'm paraphrasing. This is my notion of how these three groups

in general have thought. They said this. They said, look, by dint of much hard work and the expenditure of large amounts of money and people's effort, we have been able to explain the great majority of sightings as relatively conventional phenomena

seen under unconventional circumstances. That's true, incidentally. Therefore, we can explain everything that people have reported as relatively conventional phenomena seen under unconventional circumstances. That conclusion is nonsense. It's ridiculous.

The job of science has been, hopefully will be, and certainly is, to focus on the data that's relevant to the problem at hand. In the case of UFOs, that means you sort and sift the sightings, you throw away the chaff, and you keep the wheat.

You take your 434 sightings, and those are the ones you spend your effort on. Maybe the 77 unknowns, excellent unknowns. Let me give you some examples. You'll see what I mean, that this conclusion is not justifiable. Thomas Edison, quite a while ago now,

tried 900 different materials as filaments for his light bulb. None of them worked. Had he proved that you couldn't make a light bulb? No. He proved that none of these 900 would work. He kept going, and before he got to 1,000, he found one material that would work

as a filament in his light bulb. The fact that 99% didn't work didn't tell him anything about the one that did work. Drug companies, all told, look at something like 100,000 chemical compounds to come up with 25 that they wind up using to treat disease. Again, the fact that 99 plus percent aren't effective in treating disease

doesn't mean that there aren't some few that are. Now, I'm sure you could make up a parlor game, you know, true statements and false conclusions. 99% of the population is under seven feet tall. Wilt Chamberlain doesn't exist. 99% of the women around don't look like Brigitte Bardot. She doesn't exist. Let me give you a couple of other examples.

One in nuclear physics that particularly intrigues me. Several years ago, the theoretical physicist, the world, the physics world, that there really ought to be a particle, I gave it a name, the Omega Maison. You know, that's how they spend lots of our money looking for crazy little particles. Anyway, they told the experimentalists up at Berkeley,

told them to crank up their accelerator, which the experimentalists did. They put a beam of particles into a bubble chamber. Don't worry about what a bubble chamber is. You don't really need to know to understand this. And they took 30,000 pictures of what went on in the bubble chamber. It's a good way to keep graduate students busy for a long time. Anyway, 29,910 of those pictures showed no evidence whatsoever

for the existence of the Omega Maison. The experimentalists run right out and say, hey, you guys don't understand what's going on? They published a paper in one of the best physics journals saying that they had discovered the Omega Maison based on the data in 90 out of 30,000 pictures. Many fewer than 1%. One final example.

My colleagues in the American Nuclear Society would agree with me if I stood up and said 99% of the naturally occurring isotopes will not by themselves sustain a nuclear chain reaction. They'd think that I was a lot stranger than maybe some of them already think I am if I were to say that because the first statement is true that therefore I had proved that you couldn't have

a sustained nuclear chain reaction. You see, there's only one. Naturally occurring isotope, uranium-235. If you get enough of it together, you get a critical system, a nuclear chain reaction. The fact that all the others won't produce such a system doesn't tell us anything about the one that will. The notion is clear, I think.

If you want to study a subject like UFOs, focus your attention on UFOs, UFOs, non-insufficient information sightings. So far, I haven't really given you any data about UFOs. I've given you some information that you may not have been aware of. This points to the other real problem.

More scientists and engineers don't believe in UFOs. I'm not sure how many do, but I know that an awful lot of older academic scientists certainly don't believe in UFOs. But one reason is that they've paid a lot of attention to an astronomer, Dr. Donald Menzel, who wrote two books on UFOs. He was head of the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory,

a professor at Harvard. On the front of one of the books that he wrote, it says, one of the world's great scientists. So, you know, you can't get any more respectable than that. Anyway, he wrote two books on UFOs. And I have to admire his courage in speaking out.

I don't agree with what he said. But in his second book, published in 1963, he mentions at one time or another 135 different things that people saw in the sky and in some few cases on the ground. And he claims that he has explained everything, all the important sightings.

Strange thing, though. Fewer than 30 of those 135 things that he talks about were ever listed as unknowns. In addition, his explanations, even for those unknowns, turn out to be paper thin when it comes to reasoning. They're roughly the equivalent of my saying that this, this chair over here,

is really a cat. And you say, what kind of nonsense is that? It's a chair. It's not a cat. Well, I point out to you, it's got four vertical members. It's got a horizontal member.

It's got something that goes up at the back end. Doesn't that describe a cat? And chairs have something in common that doesn't make a cat a chair or a chair a cat. So a lot of people were put off by Menzel who shouldn't have been. The second biggest reason that scientists don't believe in UFOs

is that they don't know anything about them. I've talked to, God knows how many, thousands of scientists and engineers now. And I find that most of them know woefully little about UFOs. So I'd like to take you on a quick tour through some of the best literature.

And then we'll check to see how many of you have looked at any of this. It is hard to come by some of the literature. Let's turn on the slide projector. Turn down the lights. And we'll take a fast pass through some of the best sources of information. You'll see why people don't believe in UFOs

or don't know anything about them. All of these, except one, are listed on the bibliography that you should have picked up. But we'll take a quick rundown. This is, appropriately enough, the UFO evidence. It's put out by the National Investigations Committee

on Aerial Phenomena. That's Donald Kehoe's outfit. He didn't write the report. Published in May of 1964 privately. It is not available in bookstores. Only available for NICAP. Now, what's in it? 180 pages, 8 1 2 by 11.

That doesn't tell you much. 746 unknowns are included in this report. Not 746 sightings, but 746 unknowns. And those who have compared say that the NICAP investigations in general were better than the Air Force investigations. NICAP has several thousand reports in its files.

Well, not only are there 746 unknowns, but they ask a lot of sensible questions. Are there any sightings by commercial pilots? And there'll be 10 pages of sightings by commercial pilots. Any by military pilots? 10 more pages. Any by police officers?

10 more pages. Any by scientists and astronomers? Another 10 pages. Any evidence of intelligent control? Another dozen pages or so. It's a quite comprehensive document. It's an excellent place to start for those who want to get some education about UFOs.

It is only available from NICAP. Let's look at the next slide. Outstanding UFO sighting reports. This is published by the UFO Information Retrieval Center, about which I'm sure none of you have been informed. It was printed by a computer programmed by a nuclear engineer at what was then the Martin Company,

Tom Olson. This contains 160 of the best sightings, culled from all sources, including the Air Force, foreign reports, what have you. What happened to who, where,

when, unbiased, got a computerized chronology, all kinds of other data, privately published. It's certainly a good place to start, though, for somebody who doesn't believe there are any good unknowns.

After the first hundred, it gets a little dull, as a matter of fact. This is available from the UFO Research Institute, home office Pittsburgh. It's listed on your bibliography. Excellent place to start.

Let's look at the next one. Unidentified Flying Objects, Greatest Scientific Problem of Our Time, by Dr. James E. MacDonald. This was published by the UFO Research Institute when it was known as the Pittsburgh Subcommittee of NICAP.

Dr. MacDonald is a professor at the University of Arizona, Department of Upper Atmosphere Physics. He's a physicist. He spent almost three years working full-time, or almost full-time,

on UFOs. Jim started as a skeptic, visited NICAP, visited Blue Book, has personally interviewed over 500 witnesses of UFOs, both in the United States

and in Australia. His conclusions are that what was passing for a scientific study wasn't that at all, that the Air Force investigations were pretty much a farce, that the case

seemed to point, at this time at least, this was late 67, in the explanation that extraterrestrial was the least unsatisfactory explanation. It's a nice way of hedging. He has since come out

much more strongly for extraterrestrial hypothesis. 25,000 words in this document of a serious scientist who spent a great deal of time studying the UFO phenomena. And it was concluded, greatest scientific problem

of our time. Let's look at the next one. Here's the best source of information for scientists and engineers. This is the symposium that Paul mentioned. House Committee on Science

and Astronautics, July 29, 1968, had six scientists testify in person, including Dr. Hynek, Dr. McDonald, an engineer from up at University of California, Berkeley,

a sociologist, a psychologist, Carl Sagan, an astronomer. Six guys testified in person. Six more of us were asked to submit something in writing.

There's another scientist from this area, Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, chief scientist at Computer Systems Corporation. I just forgot the name of his company. But anyway,

an excellent document, 247 pages, small print on UFOs. Dr. Menzel is represented also. Actually, 10 out of the 12 seem to come out reasonably strong for extraterrestrial,

at least for information, but it is not the definitive work. There is no section on unknowns, strangely enough. There is no reference in this document

to Project Blue Book Special Report 14. Menzel didn't mention it in his book either, incidentally, even though he claimed to have full access to all the Air Force files.

Not even mentioned. He didn't have to deal with those 434 unknowns that way. Now, Condon doesn't mention it either. Although, he did mention

that he had the full access to all the Air Force files, not even mentioned. He didn't have to deal with those unknowns. Although,

in Condon's case, I know that he was informed about Blue Book Special Report 14 because I informed him and have an acknowledgement in writing from him. Why he doesn't mention it,

I don't know. It's rather peculiar, though. In science, you usually talk about past work. It was certainly the largest,

most expensive, most extensive study done. Still is, for that matter. So, another reason for not believing

in UFOs is, of course, that you're not referred to the right data. So, valuable, big, heavy.

Let's look at the next one. Here's a minority report. UFOs? Yes. Where the Condon Committee went wrong. David Saunders

is a psychologist who was chief co-investigator, was fired by Dr. Condon because he, Saunders,

didn't agree with the way things were going and was willing to speak up about them. There's an article in Book Magazine

that went into this in some detail. But both together make an interesting picture. Let's turn off the lights. Let's look at the next slide,

too, but we can turn off the lights while we're at it. There's a few more references on UFOs. There's a heck of a lot of stuff been written.

Okay, let's turn off the projector, turn off the lights. I have to ask a question. How many people here have read all six of those documents,

or seven? Well, Paul has. He's done his homework. Good. Three. Got about three hundred

or so. Okay. So, in my scientific audiences, I practically never find anybody who's read all and rarely find

more than, say, six people who've read at least two. The obvious reason that scientists don't believe in UFOs,

they don't know anything about them. They haven't done their homework. Let's look at the arguments that are made by the scientific

community, though. Maybe I'm not being fair. Let's look a little bit deeper at the arguments made against UFOs

by the educated non-believers. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the main argument was that the things that people claim to have observed

are impossible. Therefore, they couldn't have observed them. Things can't go that fast in the atmosphere. They burn up.

This is reports, supposedly, of UFOs going 10,000 miles an hour as observed on radar. And one scientist proved

that things can't go 10,000 miles an hour in the atmosphere without burning up. Now, that particular argument

isn't made anymore. Because I think you're all aware that our entire space and defense program, both are based

on the notion that you can go much faster than 10,000 miles an hour in the atmosphere without burning up. We don't expect our astronauts

to come back toasted. We don't expect our ICBMs to be burned up before they get reused to solve

the problem the way the guy who proved it couldn't be done solved it. What he should have said

was, not that it's impossible, but, we don't know how. Which is a

very, very, different notion. Now, we don't hear that argument anymore.

But we do hear another it's impossible kind of so it had a serious essay on UFOs. Serious for time, anyway. They gave the pro and con arguments. And included among the anti-UFO arguments was one that went something like this.

They say, look, we acknowledge that there's probably life throughout the universe, that some of this life is probably more advanced than we are. We even have concluded that on the average, advanced civilizations are about 300 light years apart. Now, interesting conclusion, incidentally. We have data on one maybe advanced civilization, our own, and somehow we can tell the average distance between advanced civilizations. But anyway, advanced civilizations are 300 light years apart. At current astronaut velocities, orbital velocities of 17,500 miles an hour,

it would take 170,000 years to go 300 light years. Obviously, the trip is impossible. That's what they say. You can't get here from there. Now, this is progress, because not too many years ago, they would have said there isn't life anyplace else besides the Earth. So we're making a little progress. Now, what did Dr. Condon say about the question of travel to the stars?

Let me quote you what he said. Travel of men over interstellar distances in the foreseeable future seems now to be quite out of date. Out of the question. Foreseeable future. Next page. It is safe to assume that no intelligent life outside our solar system has any possibility of visiting Earth in the next 10,000 years.

That's what he said. The basis for this is really no basis whatsoever. As a matter of fact, it's a very good basis for saying that what he said was nonsense. Out of the question of travel. Travel to the stars. Interstellar. There have been several studies which show that it's feasible. The most interesting to me was one published by several JPL scientists,

whose job, incidentally, is concerned with space hardware. I don't know why astronomers and people like Dr. Condon sound off about the feasibility of interstellar travel when they're not the guys who got us out there. We don't have space travel because of the astronomers. Because of hard-working engineers and scientists who are involved with hardware. Okay, this one study at JPL was published in 1963 in an obscure but very good journal, Acta Astronautica.

You know, that's the way to do this sort of thing. It's a good journal, you've published it, but nobody knows about it, so there's no fuss made. The title of the study was, The Feasibility of Interstellar Travel. They asked this question. Is it feasible with what we know today to consider trips to nearby stars and have the trip take a shorter time than a man's lifetime

and not violate the laws of physics? Now, why they threw that in, I don't know, since all new discoveries seem to violate the old laws, but they did throw that in as a condition. Their conclusions are quite intriguing. It is indeed feasible with what we know today to consider trips to nearby stars and the round-trip time would be shorter than a man's lifetime.

And we would not have to violate the laws of physics. Now, a point about the nearby stars, we're talking 10 or 12 light-years away. The same guys who tell us that the average distance between advanced civilization is 300 light-years also say that there are several candidates for life within, say, 12 light-years, and if you give them enough money, they'll study them with radio telescopes. So let's look 10 light-years away. What assumptions did these guys make?

Perfectly legitimate question. Two major assumptions. The first is that we would use staged vehicles. You know, a big one, a small one, a small one, and finally a tiny thing up at the top. That's the way we make all our space shots. Somebody proved 20 years ago, though, that you couldn't put a satellite in orbit.

He assumed a single staged vehicle. We don't do it that way. So the first assumption is quite rational, although, surprisingly enough, many of the early studies of the feasibility of interstellar travel assumed single staged vehicles. The second assumption was that we use fission or fusion. A-bombs or H-bombs, that sounds like,

which is a heck of a way to take a trip. There are lots of ways of taking trips, I don't need to tell you, but... Okay. What do they mean, fission or fusion? Oh, fission. That's what goes on in nuclear submarines. It's what goes on in power reactors. Power reactors that occasionally get built, when there aren't too many people protesting to keep them from getting built.

And you say, look, you can't go to a star in a submarine. That's true. But for more than ten years, there's been an active, ongoing program for the development of fission rocket reactors for space vehicle propulsion. I spent more than two years on the NERVA program. In December of 1968, Westinghouse Astronuclear Lab tested the NRX-A6 reactor, 1967 that was, come to think of it,

power level of 1,100 megawatts, more than half the power of Grand Coulee Dam, and something that would fit on a piano, and I could put my arms around. Tested it for an hour, which is plenty long for journeys around the solar system. In June of 68, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory tested the Phoebus 2B reactor. Names don't really mean anything, but... Power level 4,400 megawatts.

Twice the power of Grand Coulee Dam. And something that, again, you know, several feet in diameter. That's the most powerful nuclear reactor ever tested in the free world. A nuclear rocket reactor propulsion system. Given a few hundred million dollars in about seven years, it will have a man-rated, flight-ready nuclear rocket reactor. Fusion? Not so far along. There was an ongoing program at Erich at General Nucleonics.

I worked a year on that program. They did not successfully test hardware. It was modest in funding. Give them 20 years and 20 billion, and they too would be testing hardware. Now, why do I mention fission and fusion? That's the fusion propulsion program, the one at Erich at General Nucleonics. Fusion has also been suggested in another way, the Orion program. You throw an H-bomb out the back end of a spaceship, explode it, it gives a little push to the vehicle,

and you do it again, and pretty soon you're going pretty fast. It was a classified program. It apparently would work. Now, I mention fission and fusion not because I believe UFOs work by either one, but because some people say, if you can't tell me how it works, I won't believe that it can be done. Which is nonsense. Scientific progress, after all, comes from doing things differently, in a way in which the initial people trying to do something

couldn't imagine. See, I've left something out of this discussion. Talk about fission and fusion, because that's something we know a little bit about. But let's notice something. I've left out time. Time in the sense that man's history as a civilized being is, you know, maybe 100 years, maybe 1,000, 10,000, go back a million. The age of the Earth is about 5 billion years.

So our history as technological creatures is certainly a drop in the bucket. But let's notice our sun is a middle-aged star. There are stars older, there are stars younger. There's no reason to assume that another advancing technology, technological civilization, couldn't have gotten started a little bit before we did. Well, in the past 100 years, we've learned to go 1,000 times faster than we could just 100 years ago. And the rate of increase is greater today than ever before in our history. So if another civilization got started on its technological kick 100 years before we did,

you might expect it could go 1,000 years faster than we, 1,000 times faster than we. But let's face it. It could have gotten started 1,000 years before we did. If we're honest, we say it could have been 10,000 years. If we're humble, we say it could have been a million years. Who in his right mind can tell us what the technology will be even 1,000 years, no less, a million years from now? Because, as I mentioned, real progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way.

Lasers are not just better light bulbs, altogether different physics. Solid-state microcircuits that'll fit on the head of the pin, they perform the same function as vacuum tubes, but entirely different physics. Nuclear reactors are used as if they were furnaces, perhaps. But to make them work involves entirely different technology and science. You'd think we would have learned this lesson a long time ago, but we still have eminent scientists in every generation

telling us all the things that are impossible when the next generation goes out and does them routinely. Because they don't recognize that there will be new knowledge. That the laws of physics will be extended and expanded, not contracted. There's a noted astronomer in 1903 said that flight will never be possible except in something like a balloon, a lighter-than-air vehicle. And when he heard that the Wright brothers had flown a plane,

he said, well, maybe a pilot, but they'll certainly never carry any passengers. He didn't know anything about lift, incidentally. There was a guy who wrote a book in 1918 who proved that you couldn't fly fast enough. You could fly faster than 200 miles an hour. And it was generally accepted during the Second World War that the maximum speed for airplanes is the speed of sound. And maybe it is for propeller-driven planes, but we don't go faster than sound in propeller-driven planes.

We use jets or rockets. So I think we need a lot more humility when we try to evaluate what the world of the future will be. And you can pretty much disbelieve any eminent scientist when he tells you that something is impossible, at least based on past history. Okay, let's get on to some of the trickier questions. We can indeed go to the stars.

Condon, incidentally, despite these two sentences, was aware of the published studies that show that it's feasible. Why he chose to ignore them, I don't know. Let's look at the next slide. I'll turn the house lights down a little bit. We'll talk about a slightly different question. Isn't this really the question? You know, never mind the sausage.

You see the guys who are driving. Now, I'm sure some of you must be thinking, hey, I don't believe that a nuclear physicist believes in little green men. Well, again, if we look at the data, we find that the evidence for the existence of creatures on the surface of this planet who come from someplace else is pretty strong. Let's look at the next slide.

I don't expect a picture of a little green man. If I had one of those, I wouldn't be here. This is one of the best collections of information. Flying saucer occupants, Coral and Jim Lorenzen are the heads of APRO, the Aerial Phenomenal Research Organization. If you're going to have an opinion about UFOnauts or humanoids,

you ought to learn something about what people have observed. And remember that the laughter curtain is much worse with regard to landings. And creatures than it is with just things in the sky. Let's look at the next one. No little green men. The humanoids, a survey of worldwide reports of landings of unconventional aerial objects and their alleged occupants.

It's a special issue of the Flying Saucer Review published in England October 66. This is a long-winded way of saying saucers on the ground and the guys who are riding in them. This is the best collection of data on the subject. This is the most recent one on landings. Until a very new book came out. So new I just got it over the weekend

and we'll talk about that in a minute. Anyway, what's in this document up here? It's not very sensational if you can say that anything about extraterrestrial creatures isn't sensational. Reports from all over the world of landed crafts, vehicles, what else can you call something that comes down from the sky, sits on the ground,

the guys get out, get back in and take off. If that isn't a vehicle, what is it? Anyway, lots of stories of this sort of thing. The best article in it is by Dr. Jacques Vallée, Ph.D. from Northwestern, incidentally, mathematics, The Pattern of UFO Landings. He gives a little detail about 200 landings

that occurred in 1954 alone. 156 of them in France, which is where he was. So he could check them out. How were those things seen? Did the observations agree? What kind of people saw them? What time of day were they seen? Answers are interesting.

The number of sightings was inversely proportional to population density, which is a long-winded way of saying out in the boondocks is where the landings occurred. Almost all the landings occurred after, say, 8 p.m. and before 8 a.m. Men, women, and children saw these things, described them in the same way. There were many multiple witness landings, several multiple witness, multiple independent witness landings,

people seeing the same thing, not knowing somebody else was observing it. The descriptions of the creatures and the vehicles agreed. The vehicles were five meters in diameter, saucer-shaped. Now, let's face it. Something on the ground is very, very different from something in the air. In the air, you can't tell how far away, how fast, how big. Only relative.

On the ground, when you recover your widths, you can make some measurements, because you have a frame of reference. They're seen in front of a building, in front of a road, in front of a hillside. You'd think that the focus of UFO researchers would be on the landing. It isn't. Blue Book, Special Report 14, as I mentioned, they threw out the landings with creatures. Dr. Condon makes jokes about landings,

and with Frank Edwards' laughs at George Adamski, and that's it. He doesn't discuss Vallee's work with landings. Even though, again, he was informed of it. That's the easy way out. I believe that the case can be made that people have observed

[01:09:50] Development of the main themes

extraterrestrial creatures on the surface of this earth. The UFO Research Institute has investigated some cases in which that was the only conclusion we could come. We could either call the people that we would report it to as liars, flat out, or we had to accept their testimony as indicating extraterrestrial creatures. And frankly, we just don't believe that most people are liars. Our entire judicial system accepts the notion that most people are pretty decent witnesses. We can go into some specific questions about witnesses later.

Anyway, it seems to me pretty darn important that we face up to the data. It's easy to laugh about, you know, take me to your leader. You know what's the funniest thing about those jokes? There's no leader to be taken to. There isn't anybody who speaks for this planet. Talking about little green men, we have here Extraterrestrial Life, a bibliography by NASA with a thousand references to the search for extraterrestrial life.

You know something? There is no mention of UFOs at all. You'd think there would be. We are not alone. An excellent book by Walter Sullivan of the New York Times, science editor of the New York Times, talks about the search for extraterrestrial life, mentions UFOs once.

The book by Sagan and Shklovsky, Intelligent Life in the Universe. There's a funny story about UFOs, but that's it. What all this reminds me of is really the kind of sick story of the robin who won the nest building contest. The judge of the contest comes over and says, You know, Mrs. Robin, you've built a beautiful nest. But there's one thing I don't understand.

How come the hole in the bottom of the nest? I love laying eggs and I hate raising children. That's what she said. And a lot of the scientists who claim to be interested in the search for extraterrestrial life are pretty much the same way. We want to look out there and not down here. You see, what we're really dealing with here is a philosophical question, an extension of the Copernican discoveries.

Strange to say, a lot of people think that intelligent people thought the Earth was flat at the time of Columbus, which really isn't so, incidentally. A lot of people forget that for a good deal of time after Columbus, all educated people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. That the sun and the moon and the stars and the other planets revolved about the Earth and that the Earth was in the middle. And who ruled the Earth? Man.

And Copernicus said, no, the sun's in the middle. And somebody else got burned at the stake for espousing those viewpoints. Copernicus didn't publish them until the year in which he died, incidentally. Until 1927 or so, it was believed that the sun was the center of the universe. And again, that man was on top of the heap. Then we found we weren't even in the middle of the galaxy. And let's hope that man isn't at the top of the heap. The point here is this.

Copernicus took the Earth out of the center of the universe, but he left man at the top of the heap. What UFOs do is finish the job. They take man out of the center of things. And for many eminent scientists who are very impressed with what they know and not enough impressed with what they don't know, it is too difficult to adjust their thinking that we're not at the top of the heap. That's the real problem with UFOs.

It interferes with our picture of ourselves. So it's easier to laugh than it is to think about this problem. Let's look at the next slide. Now, I hope most of you picked up an opinion survey. This is a summary of an identical survey that was run in very much shortened form. What do people really think about UFOs? You see, because of the laughter curtain, people are very unwilling to express their feelings unless they think it's safe,

that they won't be quoted publicly, for example. So the survey was done by a market research class at Point Park College, not by a UFO group. Do UFOs exist? Yes. 56% of the people. No 17%. Believers over non-believers.

The more education, the higher the percentage of people who believe that UFOs exist. The older the person, the less likely to believe in UFOs. Now, a study done for Dr. Condon showed the same thing. The older an individual, the less likely he was to believe that UFOs are real, to believe that there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and to believe that the government isn't telling us all it knows. As I mentioned before, Dr. Condon was 66 when he took on this study.

Has the government been honest? Has it told us all it knows about UFOs? No. 78%. Yes, 8%. 10 to 1 credibility gap. Where are UFOs from? Now, this is asked only of the 66%.

High numbers set outer space. The high percentage, 30% undecided. Can't read the numbers from here. Have you seen a UFO? Yes. 11%. This number of people. The Gallup poll, incidentally, four years ago,

said that 5 million adult Americans claim to have seen a UFO. 5 million adult Americans. 5 million adult Americans. The official files contain only 13,000 reports. That's what I mean when I say laughter curtain, that enormous filter between the people who have seen it and those who are willing to report it. And finally, do you know anybody who's seen a UFO?

Yes, 32% of the people. You will fill out your questionnaires and leave them. Tack whatever information you want on down the bottom. Please raise the questions exactly the way they did so that we can add our data to theirs. If we'd made changes, we wouldn't be able to do that. I'd like to make some changes myself. If there's a sociologist in the audience, we've got a project.

Okay, let's go on to the next slide. Now we're going to get into some pictures of UFOs. Can we adjust the focus on that a little bit? This is one sighted from a plane flying between Barcelona and Mequitia in Venezuela. Intriguing thing here is that we have the shadow of both the airplane and the UFO. The people who have studied these pictures say that they're genuine. It doesn't really tell us much about the UFO, but it's not a fake.

Let's look at the next one. We'll go into more detail on some of these. This isn't a picture of a UFO. It's a map of one of the cases that we, the UFO Research Institute, investigated quite thoroughly. It was a chase by two deputy sheriffs from Ohio over to near Pittsburgh.

It lasted 74 miles. It speeds up to 103 miles an hour. Two guys saw this thing. It was at night. They said it was as big as a house, bright, close to them. Their sergeant told them to chase it. They did.

They were sorry later on, incidentally. They were talking about it over the radio. Other people, policemen, observed it, including one who was coming toward them and saw it between them. The chase went on, as I said, for over an hour.

The official Air Force explanation for this sighting, initially, was that it was Venus. Even though it was seen on both sides of the highway, seen by guys coming toward them as being between them, and even though the witnesses claimed that they saw Venus in the sky. We have a tape of the official Air Force investigator trying to tell these guys that it was Venus. It's a strange tape.

Also, when asked how big it was, you know, how large an angle did it subtend, what would you have to cover it with held at arm's length? Incidentally, the sun can be covered with a pencil eraser if you hold it at arm's length, the sun and the moon both. They're really very small. These guys said when it was in front of us,

we could see part of it on one side of the, rear view mirror, and part on the other side. The rear view mirror was not big enough to cover it. Now, anybody who can say that something that couldn't be covered by a rear view mirror is Venus, just isn't paying attention to the data. Now, our file on this case is about 200 pages long, incidentally.

They changed, the Air Force changed the story. At first it was Venus, and then it was the echo satellite that they saw, which is equally ridiculous. Neither one of these guys is a deputy sheriff anymore. One guy wound up being divorced, losing his job, everything went as immoral in that story. It's a well-documented case. Let's go on to the next one.

Now, this is an early type of disc-shaped UFO, and very similar to the McMinniville object it says here. Now, this was taken by a French military pilot, and has the significance of this photo is really that it's so much like the next photo. So, look at this one. This is a very big blow-up, obviously, taken by a French military pilot.

Let's look at the next one, now. This one was taken in McMinniville, Oregon. The presence of several witnesses, and actually this is a very big blow-up, because the original picture shows a house and a barn, and the ground, and just a little UFO in the distance. The County Committee investigated this picture and concluded that it was all the data were consistent with this being a round metallic object,

tens of meters in diameter, flying in the presence of witnesses and under intelligent control. That's what the guy who did the photographic investigation concluded. You'd never know that from Condon's summary, though. Now, you can say things aren't worth studying, but frankly, if you tell me that you've got a round metallic object, tens of meters in diameter, that you can fly off the ground, I would certainly be interested.

And I think everybody else would be, too. It apparently didn't intrigue Dr. Condon. Remember, this is McMinniville, Oregon. The previous photograph was in France, four years apart in time. Essentially identical objects. Let's look at the next one. This was taken near Pittsburgh,

actually near Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, this round object on the left is not a UFO at all. It's the moon. The two boys, the Lucci brothers, were out taking pictures at night. They saw this bright object on the right come into view. They had sense enough to snap two pictures, actually. This is the better of the two and actually isn't nearly as good as the original. They didn't see this bright region down here or the streak over here.

The boy across the street saw this UFO, too. It didn't take off. It did take off at a very high rate of speed after they'd taken its picture. I'm not saying because they took its picture, but it did take off. The picture was developed for a local newspaper. The conclusion was that there was no fakery involved, no hoax involved.

Densitometry readings on the negatives show that that object is a very bright object. I should say, incidentally, nothing to do with the lecture, but smoking is prohibited in the building, and I did see a cigarette just lighted, and I'll get shot if I don't tell you that it's prohibited. Okay, this picture, I like to think that the region below the UFO is a plasma,

which is a whole separate lecture on how these things might fly. But anyway, the boys didn't see it, that region down there. In the original, you can see the skyline and stars in the background. Let's look at the next one. This is a color picture taken with a Polaroid camera, incidentally, by an engineer in Australia. UFO, building.

If you want to take a picture of a UFO, please get something in it besides a hunk of sky and a UFO. There's another witness who confirmed this sighting. Well-respected individual in the community, APRO, has checked into this in sort of gory detail. Conclude there's no evidence for fakery. It's hard to fake a color Polaroid picture, incidentally. What is it?

It's a symmetric bell-shaped UFO. I don't know what else to call it. Let's look at the next one. I think we need a little focus on it. We need a little focus on that. This was taken here in California. One of a sequence of four pictures taken over at Santa Ana. Notice the disturbance on the ground here.

Taken from inside a pickup or panel truck. Man named Rex Heflin. Works for the State Highway Department. Carries a Polaroid camera on the seat of his car. Driving along, saw this object, took four fast pictures. This is one of them. Let's look at the next one. This is out the side window, obviously.

Let's look at the next one. There we go again. And finally, the last one's rather peculiar. This is a cloud that was left behind. That's a telephone wire, except it doesn't look like it from here. It looks kind of curved. The important thing about this sequence is that people have checked. He's passed muster.

He could take that many pictures in that period of time with that camera. Man has a very good reputation. When you blow up these pictures to a tremendous amount, you find that apparently it is not a small object close to the vehicle. The Common Committee checked on these. They weren't able to make a picture similar to one of these by holding a Leica lens cap up outside the car. It was the right size.

Didn't look like a UFO, but it was the right size. And they found that Mr. Heflin had changed his story slightly about having given up the original project in order to make more pictures. A story he had told at least 500 times by this time. His changing the story slightly doesn't bother me. I've talked to lawyers who tell me that if the story stands pat for people,

you've got to worry that it was concocted. But things don't ever 100% checked out. So I am still convinced that these pictures are genuine. Especially so, and I had hoped to have some here for you today. There are some pictures published in the latest issue of the Flying Saucer Review. Three of them. One includes Romania. The second largest city of Romania.

That look identical to this. Plenty of scenery. Plenty of investigation to check on the quality of the photographs. Fakery, etc. Hat-shaped UFOs. Taken at least 7,000 miles away. Let's look at the next one. Now this is a map of a sequence of what I consider

to be the best UFO pictures. One of the best total stories, so to speak. This ship down here was out off the island of Trinidadi, off the coast of Brazil. Trinidad with an E on the end. It was there as part of the International Geophysical Year in 1958. About 50 people on the deck of the ship, including a photographer,

and they all shouted, there goes a UFO, take a picture. In Portuguese, of course. The UFO came this way, and then took off. At a very high rate of speed that way. It went around behind one of the peaks on the island and then took off.

The pictures were actually released to the public by the President of Brazil. Not saying that this is Martian vehicle number 637. But only that official photographer taken in the presence of witnesses, etc. They have been published in the United States several years after they were originally published in Brazil. Let's look at the sequence.

Let's look at the first one. It's a Saturn-shaped object. Don't mind the red print over here. This was made from a large picture used in a book by the Lorenzans. Here's the island in the background. Here's the UFO. You'll see a blow-up of it before we get finished. Let's look at the next one.

Saturn-shaped object. Same shape as the first one. Lots of detail on the island. Let's look at the next one. This is a copy of a copy of a copy, which is probably not the best way to do this. But I don't have the originals. This is a scratch, not part of the original incidentally.

Let's look at the next one. Let's look at the next one. That's the last one. Here's part of the ship, the water. And finally, all the pictures are consistent. Un-definite-shaped object. Smooth. Apparently manufactured.

That is, it certainly doesn't look like a bird or a meteor. I have no doubt that anyone of 50 companies within 50 miles of here could very quickly build something that looks like that. People do it for television all the time. I have a great deal of doubt that anybody within 50 or 500 or 5000 miles of here can build something that looks like that and have it duplicate the maneuvers of that object.

That is, the change of speed, the sharp turn, the high rate of speed as it went out, and something round. And apparently manufactured. Well, if somebody made it, and there ain't nobody here who can do it, then somebody from somewhere else did. That doesn't tell us why, how, where.

It does tell us that we ought to be doing something more than we have done to find out about things like... Let's turn the lights on, the projector off. Thank you very much for listening. We do have time for a number of questions. I hope that you will see fit to ask them, but I have to ask you one first. Before you leave,

how many people here think that they have seen what they would consider to be a UFO? Defined as the way I described it at the beginning. Who can count? Or who can see, I guess? I can, up here. I don't think there are any members of the CIA or the FBI here, so, you know, don't worry about raising your hand.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29... How many of those people reported what they saw to the Air Force? Got one. Anybody else? Are you happy with the response of the Air Force, incidentally? The answer was no.

Okay. Now you see what I mean when I say lots of people have seen them, not much is being done. How many people here have had polio? One? Seven times as many people have seen UFOs as have had polio. And you say, why do you ask that stupid question?

Well, we have a whole month devoted to fighting polio. Every state has laws that you can't go to school unless, for your small children, unless you've been vaccinated and so forth against polio. It's a major problem. Far more people here seem to have encountered UFOs in one way or another than have encountered polio. And yet we are doing essentially nothing about UFOs.

Don't you think it's time we started? Thank you for listening. Now let me listen to you a bit. How about some questions? Yes. The question was about the Lucci Brothers photograph with what I said was probably a plasma beneath it. Do I know what the film base was?

I don't have the record with me. It was a European film. It was not an American film. Made in France, as I recall it. I can find out for you if you want to know. Yes. You mentioned something about anti-gravity studies by North American or someone.

A lot of people talk about gravity. Some few even talk about anti-gravity. I can't really say anything very useful except I've been intrigued by, especially by work at use, by a man who has some notions about collecting a lot of cold neutrons together. And a neutron has a heck of a lot of mass

and a bucket full of just neutrons. And a bucket full of just neutrons would change the gravitational field in the vicinity substantially. It's kind of a neat trick to get a bucket full of cold neutrons. But gravity in general we don't know nearly enough about. Hopefully the recent studies by Dr. Weber have stimulated a lot of interest

in trying to find out some more about gravity. But I know of nobody who's built yet a gravity-propelled device except a rock that falls down. We've got lots of those. But I don't know of anybody who's left the Earth under gravitational power as opposed to anything else.

You mean why bother? What do you mean by negligible? We don't have any good hard data. Okay, why haven't they contacted us? You're saying that their behavior doesn't seem to be very meaningful. Why haven't they contacted us? Well, there are a lot of ways to answer that question.

I could be frivolous and say, you know, how many scuba divers talk to the fish? Not very many. Are we worth talking to? How do we know we haven't been contacted? How many people who claim to have been contacted? Our government certainly hasn't given us any indication that they have been contacted.

But, you know, first of all, I don't claim to be an expert on extraterrestrial motivation. A Time Magazine article I mentioned before, incidentally, the other argument made by the astronomers, they don't act the way we think they would act. As if astronomers know anything about how to expect people to act.

We don't understand each other on this planet. We don't understand the motivation of the guy across the street or the guy across the ocean. Who in the world can claim that he knows something about how extraterrestrials will act? I think the thing we get back to, though, to be a little bit more serious, is why in the world should they contact us?

What would anybody on this planet do if they had the secret of the saucers? We try to rule the planet. I don't give my five-year-old daughter guns to play with. She's not responsible. Not for guns, anyway. Why in the world would an advanced civilization

studying us for any period of time at all give us anything in the way of technology? I'm serious. If you were circling around, you know, if you were a Martian, and I'm not, incidentally, my finger works properly enough. If you were a Martian looking down at this planet

from some height and had computers and spies and what have you and knew a lot about us, how would you evaluate this planet? You'd say it was an awfully primitive place. They obviously haven't learned how to use their technology. They spend $80 billion on arms and $20 million on disarmament.

They pay people to not raise food while other people are starving. This is a sick planet. We certainly, if I were up there, don't want to give them any more technological power than they already have. Because how would they use it?

What have we got to teach anybody? How to make a mess out of the place? Maybe that they don't need to know. So what I'm suggesting is that probably throughout the galaxy there are certain rules about getting involved in primitive societies. It's about not interfering, maybe.

Why would they come here? That's a different question, you see. Why would they come here, the man asks. Well, let's hypothesize a few things. Maybe they planted a colony here. 10,000 years ago. They want to know how it's making out. Maybe they planted a crop here.

They want to know how it's making out. Maybe they're looking for the coaling station equivalent for the future. We happen to be in a good spot to provide fusion propulsion system material. We've got lots of deuterium around, incidentally. Maybe they're graduate students doing their thesis work.

Maybe it's punishment. If you don't do the right things, you spend two weeks near Earth. I would punish anybody. Maybe they know something that we don't know about what's going to happen in the future. You know, they could be time travelers, after all, who are coming back here to find out,

you know, how come what happened in 1980 happened? Lord knows. Certainly you raise a question that by itself justifies further study of UFOs. Why would anybody come here? I don't know. But let's find out. The only way to find out is to ask them.

You can find out something about their propulsion characteristics without talking to them. Maybe by making measurements with instruments, which is what I think we ought to be doing. Why is it relevant to me? I think it would be better to jump on one is the question. I think we ought to report sightings so we can find out more about them.

I think we ought to report sightings so the other people who see them will have somebody to share their experience with. I think we ought to report sightings so that maybe in the long run, the people on this planet will learn how to behave differently. And that in itself makes it relevant for anybody. Yes.

The question, is it tachyon or tachyon? Well, anyway, of the, let's call it tachyon for a minute, concept in physics which gets back to relativity. This is the notion that there are particles that slow down to the speed of light. Crazy as that might sound. But it is respectable to think and talk

and publish about them. There are experimental physicists looking for tachyons, these peculiar particles. Interesting thought, incidentally. The guys who are looking for them have to reprogram all the computer programs that were used to check pictures in big spark chambers and bubble chambers.

Because the way the programs were set up, we don't use graduate students so much anymore. The way the programs were set up, they would automatically reject any particle that had the characteristics of tachyons. You don't look, in other words, for things that you know don't exist. So now that we think maybe they exist,

we've got to go back and look at them. There are a lot of oddball notions in physics today, oddball only in the sense that they're new and different, which is the history of physics. New discoveries, different discoveries. Other questions? Yes, it's the new one that belongs to me.

Okay, you're right. This is a different book on UFOs. And it's not on the list, incidentally, because I just got it. Passport to Magonia. From Folklore to Flying Saucers by Jacques Vallée again. A valuable discussion of man's past history

and the recurrence of reports of things that we would call humanoids and saucers, including something like a 969 sighting appendix. UFO reports from 1868 to 1968. A very valuable reference work. There are going to be a lot of people who don't like Vallée for writing this book,

I think, because he brings in folklore and myths and what have you. I think it's time we faced up to the fact when we dig under a myth, we usually find a fact. So I do recommend the book, and I'm sorry I should have gone on to mention it before.

Yes. Passport to Magonia. M-A-G-O-N-I-A. The author is Jacques Vallée. The publisher is Regnery. That's Chicago. 695. Not out in paperback yet.

Maybe, I don't know. I mean, it may be coming out, but it isn't yet. In the back there. I hear three people at once. I got troubles enough with one. The girl in the gray. Who's to say that there's so far?

Far ahead of us. You see, it depends upon what you mean by so far ahead of us. We don't know how far ahead of us they are. And maybe they are just hot shot inventors, but it is perfectly clear that they can do things that we can't. There wouldn't be a problem

in the aerospace industry in Southern California if we could produce hundreds or thousands of round craft that take up not much more space than their payload, that can take off vertically, land vertically, make no noise and no pollution,

and can hover and can move at, you know, 10 or 15,000 miles an hour. That's far enough ahead of us to be interesting. Believe me. So I'm not saying they're a million years ahead of us.

I'm saying there's no reason to say that they couldn't be a million years ahead of us. And the farther they're ahead of us, the less likely we would understand why they do what they do or how they do what they do. So even give them only 50 years,

50 years. Think back 50 years. And those of you who are in science and engineering

[01:44:07] Questions and closing discussion

know that 50 years has meant one heck of a difference in what goes on in the world. Computers to nuclear reactors to micro circuits to lasers to superconductors to lots of other things. Yes.

Yeah. Frank Edwards said don't touch one if you see one. Brad Steiger wrote a book on flying saucers are hostile. The question was, you know, is it dangerous to go flying? Is it dangerous to go near them

or isn't it dangerous to go near them? You have to. Some people say flying saucers are hostile. Other people say they're very friendly from Japan and on the outside. It said flying saucers are friendly. I guess they're optimistic. Well, we have the same problem

I was just talking about. If we don't know their motivation, it's very hard to judge what happens. There are a number of reports of people who apparently were injured in connection with a UFO site. We cannot say that the pilots are hostile. If you stood behind a jet-engined aircraft

when it took off, you'd be injured. But I don't know that you'd be correct in saying that the pilot wanted to hurt you. If you stuck your hand in the wrong place in a lot of other pieces of equipment, you'd be injured. So discretion is the better part of valor. If you see a strange manufactured object,

you don't play games with it. But I don't think we have enough evidence or enough data to say that they're hostile or not hostile. And the fact that they haven't apparently tried to obliterate us in the last 20 years certainly doesn't tell us anything about the future. Dr. Hynek used to tell the story of the turkeys,

who in the middle of November were talking to each other, telling each other how nice, how beneficent their masters were. Plenty of food, water, and warmth. That's the middle of November. I think they changed their tune at the end of November.

So before we evaluate hostility or not, we need to know more. Yes? Good question. What's the nearest point these guys could be coming from? A planet or a star?

Well, let's first look at our own solar system. A lot of people think we've ruled out life in the solar system. And every astronomy book just about that goes into this question says, quote, life as we know it could not exist on the Moon,

Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, et cetera. The astronomers, no evidence for life in the solar system.

Life as we know it cannot exist here. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Life as we know it was walking around the Moon not very long ago, and will walk on the Moon next month. Life as we know it, I think those guys are anyway.

What we should recognize, of course, is that an advanced civilization is perfectly capable of creating conditions suitable for life pretty much anywhere. The surface of the Moon, no air, no moisture, no protection against ultraviolet

and meteorites and all the other things. We had guys walking around up there, behaving pretty foolishly, incidentally, if you were a Moon man and looked at how they behave. That's a separate question. How about Mars? And some people will say,

look, we proved with Mariner 6 and 7 no life on Mars. Nonsense again. We don't know. Similar resolution photographs of the Earth also show no sign of life on this planet. Now there are those who would dispute anyway whether there's intelligent life on this planet,

but that's a separate question. So they could be coming from a base on Mars, they could be coming from one of Jupiter's moons, they could be coming from our own solar system. Eliminating that for a moment, these studies on, on interstellar travel, certainly show that even with our limited,

meager knowledge of advanced technology, that they could be coming from, say, 5 to 10 light years away. There are at least a dozen stars within 20 light years that are potential homes or stars for solar systems more or less like ours. The scientist at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, where they've been making photographs of the skies

for 60, no, 70 years now, who's been checking the paths of the stars across the sky. And from this data you can determine whether or not there is a small body along with the planet. Small meaning, say, smaller than Jupiter. The paths wiggle because the center of mass of a solar system is not in the center of the star, but is a little outside the star as it is in our solar system.

And when he's checked a whole bunch of stars, within, say, 20, 25 light years, and he restricts his attention to stars that have other characteristics which I won't go into, he finds that just about every star he's checked apparently has at least one small companion. And you can tell from the wiggles how many, and there are some which have four or five.

What I'm suggesting is that the great majority of stars probably have planets. And there's certainly no reason to rule out places a mere 5 to 10 light years away. I say mere. If you go at relativistic velocities, the whole galaxy is within reach within a man's lifetime. That is, within the pilot's lifetime.

He'd come back to a different world, but that's a separate question, too. So where do they come from? Could be anywhere. I don't believe they come from the center of the Earth. There's a popular notion about the hollow Earth. I think we have too much data to have an advantage to have an advanced civilization hidden here someplace.

Another question. Yes. In Puget Sound. I've read about it in several books. I don't know whether it's legitimate or not. This is where a craft supposedly exploded and sprayed metal parts all over a couple of people. When some of these parts were being carried by airplane

to another site for testing, the airplane crashed and the people got killed. It's one of those many mysterious incidents that seem to have happened for which there really isn't a good story, one way or another, I don't think. No. As far as I know, no.

They did not discover what the metal was. Incidentally, there's a new book that isn't, well, the publisher hasn't accepted it yet, but put together by the scientific consultants to APRO, including a new chapter on the metal specimens from the UFO that apparently blew up over Brazil, the magnesium, and giving new analyses

that seem to confirm the earliest analyses done several years ago in Brazil that this was higher purity magnesium than could be made on the surface of the Earth at the time that that thing was found. So I hope that'll come out for metallurgical confirmation. The group in Pittsburgh, the UFO Research Institute, has incidentally run analyses

on several specimens of material purported to be extraterrestrial. In no instance have we been able to confirm that this was indeed extraterrestrial, but we weren't able to say that it was. Yeah. One second. Not that I know of.

That's one where the information is filtered into places that you can't get it out of. There's a lot like that. Yeah. Why did the UFO Research Institute stop being a subcommittee of NICAP? We wanted to expand our efforts. Major Kehoe didn't want us to charge dues.

It takes money to investigate sightings. Let's face it. They wanted to set up a 24-hour answering service, which we did. They wanted to have a clipping service to find out sightings in small towns that never made it into the big city papers. We wanted to buy some good instrumentation.

And after Kehoe said we couldn't do that, not that he didn't trust us, but he didn't trust scientists in general and almost all of our people were scientists, and some of the other subcommittees might want to do that too, so he said no, so we set up and incorporated in Pennsylvania

as a nonprofit organization, to give us more freedom of motion, so to speak, and so that we wouldn't restrict our activities to strictly NICAP sightings. We'll play with anybody if they've got information for us. And also because we want to do

some of our own public relations. NICAP has pretty much a rule that they announce anything, their conclusions. The information tends to be sort of one way. And so we wanted to change that. I am still a member of NICAP. Almost all our members are members of NICAP.

But we felt that the way to do the UFO investigative business is to set up a local organization where you publicize a 24-hour answering service where you have competent people ready to go out to the scene of a sighting with instruments, ready to get hard data during a sighting.

And that in any large city in the country you could set up such an organization, the chances are fairly decent if you publicize your existence and if you act in a responsible way. But you might catch a sighting live, so to speak. We've come within five minutes. Radio, some representative of APRO

saying there was a trip scheduled to Brazil to check on a factory manufacturing spaceships. Well, I've spent some time with Coral and Jim Lorenzen who were the founders of APRO and the general director and the secretary. And they did take a trip to South America back a couple of years ago, which they reported in the APRO bulletin.

I would find it very difficult to believe that they or anybody very close to them said that they were going down there to check on a factory. It is certainly true that there had been many sightings in South America. They had good representatives in South America. And that there's some indication

that maybe there's a base down there. But I wouldn't at all believe that either one of them or the people close to them would have said they were going down there to check on a factory as if they were sure one existed. A UFO factory?

I don't know who it was. Recent work suggesting that maybe they have planets around them and that what we're seeing is the planet going by. This sudden speed up or slow down. Pulsars are an enigma in a lot of ways because they put out far more energy

than they ought to. They've got magnetic fields that are supposedly magnetic fields like 10 to the 12th gauss. The surface of the Earth's magnetic field is about half a gauss. A very healthy magnet is 150,000 gauss. And here we're talking about

a million million gauss. And we don't know anything about what happens under those conditions if they exist at all. So we've got a real oddball phenomena. And there are a lot of theories that can be confessed, but people have suggested

that pulsars might be beacons put together by advanced civilizations. And that thought is still in the background of a lot of people, mainly, incidentally, because the frequency is so regular. The signal that they put out is the kind of signal you'd expect

to be manufactured rather than natural. They can be used as secondary clocks. They're so accurate. But now they've found some of these sudden changes. So we don't know what pulsars are. We won't for a long time. Maybe we ought to ask our guys

who are coming here for a better answer than we presently have. The kind of astronomy that's involved is fairly new. And they keep discovering new pulsars and new peculiar things about them. But we don't know what they are.

What sort of instrumentation do we currently have ready to fly to an area where a lot of sightings are taking place? Well, the Institute in general isn't ready to fly much of anywhere. In Pittsburgh, it's restricted

to, say, 100 miles around. We've got some instrumentation of our own, and we depend more than anything else on access to instrumentation that belongs to companies for which the people work, which companies shall be nameless at this point in time.

You do need instruments for measuring magnetic fields. You need specimen bottles. You need cameras. You need telephoto lens. You need movie cameras. You need information. You need infrared devices.

You need a grating to put in front of a camera to get a spectra. You need a Geiger counter. You need other means for checking on radioactivity. You need the whole spectrum of devices for measuring electromagnetic

and other phenomena. A lot of this you can get surplus. A couple more questions, and then we'll have to call it quits because we've got to get out of here. Yes. I just want to bet, I was asked the question,

have you personally seen a UFO? I have a little bet with myself that I'll always get asked that question. Have I seen a UFO? No. I have never seen anything that I would call a UFO. But I have to add,

I've been working with neutrons for 13 years. Never seen one of them either, and I still think they're real too. Yeah. Measured, or looked for the absence of radioactivity as opposed to the presence of radioactivity in connection with the landing.

I guess I'd have to say, no. As a matter of fact, I'm not at all happy with many of the reports of radioactivity because people get excited by the dial moving, the needle moving across the dial, and usually without giving any kind of data

which would allow any competent nuclear physicist to evaluate what they're doing. So I don't know of any really good data on either end of the spectrum, either that the background went down to ridiculously low values or that the radioactivity was sufficiently high to become excited about.

We have a couple of specimens that we checked on that were slightly radioactive, but not enough to be interesting. So no, the answer is no, and it might be an interesting thing to do. If they know how to get rid of radioactivity, we need them. Yes.

If a saucer landed and I was limited to one question, what would I ask? I guess I'd ask, what do you want? I'm not sure. I hope I'd ask, what do you want?

Instead of, what the hell are you doing here? The book, The Interrupted Journey. That's by John Fuller, the story of Betty and Barney Hill. A very long story, short. I spent three hours with Betty and Barney.

Barney is dead, incidentally. Barney Hill. I personally accept that story. This is a story that was written up in Look Magazine. They'd taken on board a saucer. Physically examined. Put back down. No trip.

Told they wouldn't remember what happened. Didn't remember what happened until they were each independently hypnotized, regressed in time by a competent psychiatrist who's been using regressive hypnosis for 20-some years, and each tell the same story, three years later this is, of what happened,

in a night in which it was clear that they were missing two hours somehow. Well, the book is very carefully done. Fuller is a quite competent writer. Also makes documentary movies for the United Nations, among other things. He used the tapes that the psychiatrist made of his sessions with these two people.

I was very impressed by the people. I was impressed with Fuller. I've done some studying of hypnosis, and it rings true with that. And besides, they describe things, creatures, if you will, in the vehicle in the same terms in which other people independently had also described them.

So, I accept that story. Now, a lot of people's viewpoint has been colored by the fact that Barney was a negro and Betty was white, so obviously these people are out of their minds and you can't believe anything they say and other nonsense like this. I spent over three hours with them.

I was very impressed. So, I recommend that book, The Interrupted Journey. It is on the list. I strongly recommend it. If somebody wants an intriguing story that raises a lot of questions, they ought to look at that book.

One more. Has anyone ever seen any of the pilots? Yeah, there are reports from all over the world of creatures associated with UFOs. What do they look like? About four kinds. The little guys, they're all humanoid, incidentally.

For practical purposes, they're all humanoid. That is, more or less like us. A head, two arms, two legs, a body, you know. Okay. Little guys, three feet or so tall, four and a half feet tall, facial features a little different than us. Some people who look like us,

they're the ones to worry about. And the real big guys, who seem to be robot-like, big pumpkin heads and move in a sort of strange way. Look at the humanoids and you'll get a description of them. A motley crew, really,

if you were to throw them all together. But we here on this planet could put together a motley crew, too. You know, take a pygmy and a tall Watusi and a short fat Chinaman and a tall blonde Norwegian and you got a motley crew, alright.

So no bug-eyed monsters, that's a key point. No bug-eyed monsters. You know, in the science fiction writers' cross between a giraffe and a tiger. None of that. One more and that's it, yes. How much controversy do I run into

with religious groups? I'm not really representative of NICAP. But frankly, I've, frankly, run into no controversy with religious groups. I've spoken in synagogues, I've spoken in churches.

I have not had a problem with religious groups. Now, I don't know whether this is, they don't want to bother with saying anything to me. I don't know what it is. But I don't see that I raise any religious problems

in the small sense. In the larger sense, the question of who are we and where do we fit in the universe is certainly a religious problem. I don't have any, I haven't run into any religious problems. If you want to raise some,

I guess I'd be happy. I'm curious why you asked the question. Would you expect that I would have religious problems? I should point out that ever since Sputnik went up, almost all religions have come out with some kind of notion

that says, in effect, that our word is the word out there, too. I'm serious. Admittedly, it's a new notion. But all the religions have said, you know, the word extends out there. We'll be happy to consider them.

It does raise some obvious religious questions. But everybody has suddenly expanded his region of operation. You know, from Madeline Murray on to the other extreme. Thank you very much for coming. Please leave your surveys out front.