THE UFO GAP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010006-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 12, 2001
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: January 1, 1967
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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america's leading ufologist-just back from an international
astronomers' conference behind the iron curtain-warns that a new soviet investigative
approach could cost us the race to solve the flying-saucer riddle
article By J. ALLEN HYNEK "RUSSIANS SOLVE UFO MYSTERY." For years, I have opened The
New York Times with the fear skittering around the back of my mind that I might find that
quote. In my occasional dreams, the story under the headline explains that the Russians
have found some previously unthought-of, unstartling explanation for unidentified flying ob-
jects; or, worse, that they have made first contact with an alien civilization conducting recon-
naissance missions to our planet. Either story would shake America so hard that the launching
of Sputnik in 1957 would appear in retrospect as important as a Russian announcement of a
particularly large wheat crop.
The possibility of a Russian breakthrough on the UFO problem is unlikely, if we believe
official Russian statements that the problem does not exist. At last August's XIII General
Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, one of .the Russian delegates
answered my query about Soviet UFO study with a derisive laugh and the rather absurd com-
ment, "If flying saucers really exist, why aren't they buzzing over Prague right now?" The
same man, a senior. Soviet astronomer, declined to attend a meeting I had organized to dis-
cuss the UFO problem, saying that since the UFOs did not exist, there was nothing to
discuss. One of his colleagues slipped and said that Russian scientists were not permitted to discuss
unidentified flying objects. Although we have reports of UFO sightings and phenomena from
some 70 countries, the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries have not contributed
UFO reports.
Judging by past Soviet behavior, this curious silence on a subject of increasing importance
to science and government means only one thing; and, indeed, there are some clues to actual
Soviet study of the problem. A Russian astronomer admitted in Prague to an American
scientist that he believed a problem existed. Another American scientist recently received a note
from the secretary of an official Soviet organization for the study of unidentified flying objects.
And the Russians announced at Prague that they would participate in a future international
conference on interstellar communication.
Even more significant was the recent publication of the first article in a Russian maga-
zine by a Soviet scientist discussing the strong possibility of the existence of unidentified flying
objects. That article, in the youth magazine Cmena, stated that the Soviet Union is preparing a
book-length study called Inhabited Cosmos, the chief editor of which will be the vice-president
of the U. S. S. R. Academy of Sciences, and that a chapter to be written by Felix U. Zigel (author
of the Cmena article) will consider the UFO problem. Zigel's article concludes: "There exists
almost universally a definite type of phenomenon known as the phenomenon of the UFOs. The
nature of this phenomenon is as yet not resolved and none of the existing hypotheses can claim
a final solution to the problem. In such a situation, the correct approach appears to be to
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pp submit the puzzling phenomenon of the
O UFOs to a many-sided, careful scientific
investigation."
We know enough now about the way
pa the U.S.S.R. announces its scientific ad-
a. vanes-the element of surprise the Rus-
sians have built into every step of their
03 space program is one example-to guess
u that a Soviet writer would hardly call for
"a many-sided, careful scientific investi-
gation" of a phenomenon unless such an
investigation were already going on.
Late last summer, the Chicago Sun-
Times ended its story about the discovery
-by a Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology physicist--of very puzzling narrow-
band radio signals from space with
? the sentence, "Reportedly, Soviet scientists
have also been active in such searches."
Highly directional, single-frequency radio
signals, of course, might be remarkable
evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Zigel's discussion of UFOs in Cmena
considers five theories about their na-
ture. The fifth theory-that UFOs are
"flying apparatus of other planets, investi-
gating the earth"-is the only one of the
five to which he offers no objections.
In sum, what little "hard" information
I have-and my intuition-tells me that
the U. S. S. R. may have been studying
UFOs with dispassionate thoroughness
for years. From my own official involve-
ment, I know that the United States is
only now beginning to consider treating
the problem seriously.
In 1948, I was asked by the U. S. Air
Force to serve as a scientific consultant
on the increasing number of reports of
strange lights in the sky. I was then di-
rector of the astronomical observatory of
Ohio State University and am now the
chairman of the astronomy department
at Northwestern. I had scarcely heard of
UFOs in 1948 and, like every other
scientist I knew, assumed that they were
nonsense. For the first few months of my
association with what is now Project Blue
Book-the name of the very small office at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Day-
ton, Ohio, concerned with UFOs-I had
no reason to change this opinion. The re-
ports of sightings that came to our atten-
tion then were either identifiable flying
objects (IFOs), such as weather balloons,
meteors or planes, or they came to us from
patently unreliable witnesses. A few
others were hoaxes.
But over the years, cases began to ac-
cumulate for which I could find no satis-
factory physical explanation. In fairness
to Project Blue Book, I can say that
nearly all of the cases that I consider
unsolved have remained so labeled in
Air Force files, despite charges by critics
that the Project always found an explana-
tion for a report. On the other hand, the
Project did acquire the habit of subtly
modifying its disposition of particular
cases over a period of time. A sighting
that the evaluator had said was "possibly"
traceable to conventional aircraft at the
time it occurred would appear in the
Project's annual report as "probably"
traceable to conventional aircraft. More
important than such small distortions,
however, is the fact that the Wright-
Patterson group usually consisted only of
a captain, who headed the team, one
other officer, a sergeant and myself, as
occasional consultant. The fact that the
commanding officer was a captain indi-
cates the extent of the Air Force's concern
for this investigation.
My complaint here is not primarily
against the Air Force-which, after all,
is not a scientific investigative agency.
But, under the aegis of the Air Force or
not, there should have been a large,
well-staffed UFO research group in this
country since the first waves of reports.
In the past 20 years, I have analyzed
more than 15,000 reports of UFO sight-
ings. About 90 percent of these turned
out, on quick inspection, not to have been
UFOs at all, but readily identifiable ob-
jects. Of the remaining 10 percent, I made
a further division in my mind between
those that came to me from reasonably re-
liable observers-about 70 percent-and
those that came from oddballs of one
stripe or another. What this means is that
there are at least 1000 UFO reports that
remain completely unresolved in my own
mind. As a scientist, 1000 perplexing
cases strike me as significant enough to
warrant professional and thorough inves-
tigation. I frankly do not know why the
Government has been so slow in coming
to the same conclusion.
The popular attitude among scientists
in the late Forties was that UFOs were a
product of what some called "post-War
nerves." Of course, when reports of the
sightings continued well into the Fifties
-and began to arrive from many re-
gions of the globe-this theory was out.
Unfortunately, the attitude that accom-
panied the theory was retained. How
many UFO reports there might have
been if the popular and academic atti-
tude toward UFOs were one of neutral
inquiry instead of derision will never be
known. Even an Air Force major general
does not want to be laughed at by an
Ivy League professor.
One reason the professors were so
contemptuous of the reports was that
UFOs, obviously, cannot be studied in the
laboratory. Results that can be verified
through repeatable, quantitative labora-
tory experiments are still considered the
essence of science. What must be re-
membered is that much of our accurate,
scientific knowledge about the universe
was not gathered or verified in laborato-
ries-and cannot be. We know much
less about tornadoes than we would if we
could whip one up whenever we wanted
it; but we certainly accept the fact that
they exist and, in fact, have some univer-
sally accepted theories about their for-
mation, composition and behavior..That
information is the result of unscheduled
observation. Similarly, many accepted
findings in zoology-our ideas about so-
cial structure among wild lions, for c x-
ample-could come only from patient
observation in the field. With UFOs-as
with tornadoes, sunspots, animals in
their wild state and a host of other as-
pects of the world-the scientist must
mount an attack to suit the phenomena.
To select phenomena that meet the de-
mands of laboratory research leads to
error in many fields and is impossible
with UFOs.
The existing evidence may indicate a
possible connection with extraterrestrial
life, the probable existence of which is
generally accepted. If such life does exist
and if there is any possibility of estab-
lishing communication with it, our scien-
tific knowledge of that life might even
be critical to our survival. Now let us be
clear: The existence of extraterrestrial
intelligence and the UFO phenomenon
may be two entirely different things. But
the latter, in itself, poses an interest-
ing scientific problem. How can it be
studied? Do we ignore it simply because
the evidence we have does not follow
the strict rules of scientific evidence?
The question now is not whether but
how to design a truly scientific approach
to the UFO problem. When the Air
Force last year appointed a special com-
mission to study the UFO problem-the
so-called Condon committee, meeting at
the University of Colorado and named
for its chairman, Dr. Edward Condon-
it tacitly recognized the seriousness of the
problem. I trust I will not seem to be
trespassing on the committee's territory
if I outline here a scheme that I think
would be a thorough and efficient way
to obtain scientific knowledge of UFOs.
Let us suppose we have before us
5000 UFO reports. We appoint two
scientific panels, one composed of physi-
cal scientists, the other of social scien-
tists. We ask the first panel to examine
the reports and assign to each a
"strangeness index," Y, on a scale of I
to 5. By "strangeness" we shall mean the
difficulty in ascribing a simple scientific
explanation for the report, taken at face
value. An attempt shall be made by the
scientific panel to evaluate the strange-
ness of the report. Given the report as
is, how difficult is it to find a natural,
normal explanation for it?
Thus; Yl and 12 would refer to UFO
reports that, even though taken at face
value, nonetheless find a ready explana-
tion. They can then be excluded from
-further consideration. They are IFOs
rather than UFOs. Here are a few exam-
ples of IFOs: In May 1953, in a small
town in Wisconsin, a group of solid citi-
zens excitedly reported that for several
nights running, just before sunrise, a
bright object, "much too bright to be a
star," appeared in the East and "remained
there, getting slowly higher and higher
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THE UFO GAP
(continued from page 146)
in the sky, even after all the stars had
disappeared." The witnesses were so in-
sistent and vocal that this couldn't be
anything ordinary that I made a quick
trip to the town. I set up a small tele-
scope, followed the object into full day-
light and, with the aid of the Nautical
Almanac, proved even to their satisfac-
tion that the mysterious object was none
other than the planet Venus shortly after
inferior conjunction with the sun and
so at its greatest brilliancy. (The Air
Force can always be assured of several
Y,1 reports, either before sunrise or after
sunset, whenever Venus is at greatest
brilliancy.)
In New Hampshire, four lights in a
diamond-shaped formation and later in a
T formation were observed to hover and
then to travel first in one direction and
then in another. The sighting lasted for
some minutes. Identification was positive
that the object sighted was a KC-97
performing a refueling operation. A Lab-
rador radar station picked up an object
traveling at 72 knots at an altitude
of 50,000 feet. Two F-102 aircraft were
scrambled and picked up the object on
their radar. The object was fully ob-
served by several military personnel on
their separate radars. Identification was
positive that the object tracked was a
balloon released from an Air Force base
in Maine.
In New Jersey, a flat-shaped object
was reported. It had a dome in the mid-
dle and was somewhat bigger than a
commercial aircraft, with bright yellow
lights coming from square windows
around the bottom and with green lights
on the front. This turned out to be, quite
positively, a commercial aircraft with a
39-foot advertising sign containing 245
flashing electric lights. Apparently, the
advertiser was not getting his message
across. And, for good measure, in 1962,
one of our Navy's ships reported an ob-
ject traveling southeast that remained
visible for 15 minutes but which "air and
surface radar could not pick up." It was
observed by navigators taking a celestial
fix, by the commanding officer and by
about 1000 enlisted personnel. This was
the satellite Echo I, which calculations
showed had traced that identical path at
that precise time.
But this is only one part of the story.
There are high Y. reports, too. If there
weren't, there would be no UFO prob-
lem. High ratings, of Y,4 and Y.5, are
reserved for reports that, at face value,
do not find an explanation in conven-
tional scientific terms. Let us look at
some examples from my files.
IMPORTED RAKE SCO2CH
It was 5:30 P.m. I remember the
exact time because our car radio
was on. A program change was
made and the time was given. I was
now driving with my headlights on,
the electric windshield wipers were
going, as we were in a heavy mist.
The highway in this area [of Okla-
homa] has many rolling hills and is
heavily wooded with native post-oak
trees. The visibility is limited to the
highway by looking ahead or behind
or up overhead. We were driving
along, everything in normal condi-
tion and operation, when suddenly
from above and ahead of us over the
top of the hill and trees, at a fantastic
speed, came a tremendous bright
light. The color or glow was similar
to that of a mercury light. I thought
for a moment we were going to have
a head-on crash with something.
I was looking for an escape route
to avoid a collision. We were ex-
tremely frightened. My wife had
dropped down in the seat and our
son had jumped from the back seat
and had positioned himself between
me and my wife. At the speed of
approach, I had little time for a
reaction. The light around us was
almost blinding as the object ap-
proached our car. As it came to-
ward us, the car began to slow
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"Evidently you're not the little boy who wrote that
he wasn't getting anything...."
268
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down (Note: I was not using the
brakes) and the whole car came un-
der control of the UFO. The car
came to a complete stop. Lights,
radio, heater, wipers, all electrically
operated, instantly stopped.
Other than being frightened, we
had no other sensation than that we
were being observed. I rolled down
my window and, putting my head
out of the window, I looked up and
approximately 200 feet directly
overhead was a saucer-shaped space
vehicle. By this time, my eyes
had become adjusted to the light
that was emitted from the space ve-
hicle. I could observe the size and
shape as well as see the observation
windows around the upper deck.
The UFO was at least 50 feet in
diameter. At the same time, a high-
pitched whine could be heard and a
very light warm wind was being
emitted from the bottom of the
vehicle.
The vehicle had in the center a
large extended dome. The time fac-
tor was not of long duration, no
more than two or three minutes.
There was no other visible traffic on
the highway at this time. After this
short period of time, the vehicle,
with an increase in intensity of the
whine, lifted straight up from its
hovering position and, as this oc-
curred, the car began to function
and make normal movement on the
highway. The lights, radio, wipers,
heater and motor functioned as if
they had never stopped.
I wish to state that this was not
a type of any known earthcraft. I
have worked in and around aircraft
since 1940, when I graduated from
the Spartan School of Aeronautics,
and I am also a discharged veteran
from the U. S. Air Force.
Here is one from an air base in
Alaska:
At the time of the sighting I
was at work (in the base control
tower) and I had an air carrier short-
ly beginning an approach. As is my
custom, I had the lights in the cab
turned down low. I got up from the
console and looked out the window
to make a visual check of the run-
way. As I looked to the north end of
the runway, I saw a light coming
down center of the runway. My first
thought was, I had an aircraft on
approach that I didn't know any-
tl.ing about. The light was moving
at about the speed of a large air-
craft making a low pass. The light
continued down the center line of
the runway at about a height of 50
feet. The airport is equipped with
high-intensity runway lighting. The
lights were on step 3; the lighting
control panel is located to the right
and just behind me. As the light
reached a spot just a little north of
my position, I reached around and
flicked the light to step 4, hoping to
cause a reflection off the body of
the object, as I was still unable to
see anything other than a light,
even though visibility was excellent.
When the lights went brighter, the
object made a right turn and started
to climb, increasing speed ex-
tremely fast, clearing the nearby
mountain in a second or two. At
this time, I lost sight of the object
as it seemed to level off and became
lost behind the mountains. One other
thing that I forgot to point out
above. When the light turned and
started to climb, it did so sharply,
whereas when an airplane turns or
climbs, it makes an arc.
And let's take just a short excerpt
from another.
As I approached a bedroom win-
dow ... the whole yard was bathed
in a brilliant orange. Everything
looked as something does when it
is reflecting fire. I looked up at the
sky and there was a big orange light.
I woke my husband and told him
to come look at the thing in the
sky. He got up, came to the win-
dow, and as I kept saying, "What
can it be?" he just kept repeating,
"Oh, my God." It seems like we
watched it for about a minute. It
was stationary in the sky all that
time and seemed to be quite near.
The light was more powerful than
anything we had ever seen, but
still we could look right at it. As
we watched, the light finally went
out, not slowly, but still not as fast
as you would turn off an electric
bulb. All that was left was what
looked exactly like a star and it be-
gan to move. We watched as it
moved toward the lights of Los
Angeles in the distance.
None of these three sightings (which
are merely random samples from my
considerable collection of sightings of
high strangeness index) lends itself to
simple explanation. Nor, by definition,
do any of the high reports. It will be
noted that nothing has yet been said
about believing these reports.
As the next step in our proposed pro-
gram, let us ask a panel of social scien-
tists-psychologists and sociologists-to
rate the credibility of the witnesses in-
volved in the high 5 cases, singly and
collectively, for any given sighting, with-
out any reference whatever to the report
itself. The panel is given dossiers on each
of the witnesses. (But it would be best not
to let this panel read the UFO reports-
it might prejudice them!) The dossiers in-
clude medical history, length of time and
general standing in the community, psy-
chological and personality traits, a note
on the willingness of the witnesses to take
lie-detector tests (and the results of
these, if administered), the technical
backgrounds of the individual witnesses,
the independence of the witnesses (were
they strangers, blood relatives, friends?)
and what has been garnered as to the
motivation of making the report in the
first place. Was there any overt attempt
at publicity, or was the report made
guardedly and out of a sense of duty?
Was there any possibility of financial gain
by having made the report? We shall
call this rating the C, or credibility,
rating.
The "credibility panel" must also be
given a full account of the reaction of
the witness under interrogation. A
skilled investigator soon learns to watch
for many clues as to the credibility of the
witness. Psychotic or paranoid signals
are many. The tendency to repeat cer-
tain phrases, the singsong retelling of an
experience in a set, stereotyped manner,
as though one is hearing a playback of a
tape-all these are danger signals. And,
of course, at the slightest hint from the
UFO reporter of imaginary persecution,
one may just as well drop the investiga-
tion. I have on occasion been told what
seemed to be a straightforward story,
when suddenly the witness lapsed into a
highly confidential mood and told me
that he was sure that his phone was
being tapped or that he was being
watched, sometimes on a regular schedule,
either by "the Government" or by
"occupants of the craft."
In my long experience with the UFO
phenomenon, I have developed certain
practices that quickly bring out these
"credibility flaws." For instance, I will
patiently listen to the account and then,
as if to see that I have things straight,
will repeat the highlights of the story, but
making sure that in two or three spots I
deliberately misstate some of the witness'
descriptions (for example, directions,
time estimates, etc.), to see whether
the witness will quickly catch me up
on the misstatement or let it pass. One
quickly learns also to gauge the objec-
tivity of the reporter. The most glaring
fault on the part of the witness is to sub-
stitute interpretation of a fact for a fact.
Thus, he may tell me, "The spaceship
was patrolling the neighborhood and ob-
serving us," when the actual fact is that
the witness observed a light meandering
in the sky and read into that simple ob-
servation his interpretation that intelli-
gent surveillance was being carried on.
One of the most frustrating experi-
ences a UFO investigator can have is to
be told, at the end of what seems to be a
fairly straightforward story, that the wit-
ness has had similar experiences on
many occasions in the past. We call
these "repeaters." A person with so little
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understanding of statistics and probabili-
ty as to think that one person can have
dozens of UFO sightings while a great
many other people (indeed, the majority)
have never in their lives seen anything
resembling a UFO, can be identified at
once as utterly unreliable. When we get
the combination of the repeater with
a persecution complex, we really have
something. For many months at Project
Blue Book, we received frequent letters
from an inmate of a mental institution,
who exhorted us to do something about
the UFOs that visited him regularly and
interfered with his sexual functions.
The work of the credibility panel
would really be much more difficult than
that of the scientific panel. The latter has
only to determine whether the contents
of the report, as given, are easy or hard
to explain in the context of present-day
science. The credibility panel, however,
has to decide not only whether the wit-
nesses, taken together, are trustworthy,
honorable and responsible people who
in everyday matters, but
also whether they could' have been capa-
ble of gross errors and misinterpretations
in the particular instance of their UFO
sighting. Is it possible, for instance, for
several people in concert to see a bright
star and have it trigger in the brain the
impression that what was really seen was
a moving spaceship with portholes?
The idea that reports made by police-
men and Air Force pilots must be correct
is entirely unjustified. A highly technical,
trained observer skilled in one area of
operation or observation does not neces-
sarily transfer his critical skills to a situa-
tion in which he is observing something
that is surprising to him. Pilots have
been known to swerve their planes vio-
lently when they suddenly encounter a
veto bright meteor they think is on a col-
lision course. but which later proves to
have been 50 to 100 miles away. And
policemen can grossly misinterpret some-
thing with which they have no. familiari-
ty. Still, on the average, if several pilots
and/or policemen concur on the main
points of the story, particularly if the du-
ration of their experience was long enough
(a matter of minutes rather than seconds)
to have brought their judgment into
play, it is difficult to brush aside their
seemingly hardheaded testimony. And
when one gets high N reports from scien-
tists, engineers and technicians whose
credibility by all common standards is
high and whose moral caliber seems to
preclude a hoax, one can do no less than
hear them out, in all seriousness.
Hoaxes are not as common as depicted
in the newspapers. Pranks by college
students and everyday practical jokers
make good copy and are always good for
a laugh, especially if the hoax has suc-
ceeded in at least temporarily fooling
some respected citizenry. Hoaxes are fre-
quently accompanied by photographs, on
the mistaken idea that a photograph is
worth ten thousand words. Actually, a
photograph is worth nothing unless we
know the full circumstances of how it
was taken. I simply will not take a pho-
tograph seriously unless I can interrogate
witnesses who saw the object in question
being photographed and unless I can
have access to the original negative and
the technical data on the camera. So far,
I have not been able myself to accept any
photographs as representing incontro-
vertible scientific proof of the existence
of truly strange objects.
Any sensible investigation of UFO re-
ports will limit itself to reports that ex-
hibit both a high ~ level and a high C
level. It will ask whether there are any
apparently meaningful patterns among
such reports: patterns of kinematic be-
havior, of luminescence, of geometry, of
geographical distribution or of seasonal
distribution. With the aid of the elec-
tronic computer, cross-correlations will be
sought between these and other factors.
It may come as a surprise that this sort
of search for patterns has not been con-
ducted by the Air Force all along. The
closest the Government came to such an
investigation was in 1953. A distinguished
panel of scientists, under Caltech physi-
cist Howard P. Robertson, was appointed
to review the matter, but the panel
was given only a limited number of cases
to examine and was able to allot only four
days to its study. Our Government's ap-
proach in all other instances has been to
treat each reported sighting as though it
were the only one in existence. The Air
Force has tried to knock down each report
as it showed its head, like a duck in a shoot-
ing gallery. This "divide and conquer"
technique is powerless to detect signifi-
cant patterns, the very mainstay of the
scientific method.
The approach to the study of UFO
reports proposed here is designed specift-
to your corrupt mismanagement, cally to reveal patterns if they exist-to
the people of your country are starving and rebellious, extract the scientific gold from the only
ore we have (UFO reports), if such gold
and you urgently require American aid. Right. exists.
How many machine uns?" There is a more direct a roach to the
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problem: an active rather than a passive
attack. The scholarly study of UFO re-
ports is capable of establishing the like-
lihood that the UFO phenomenon
represents something heretofore not
recognized in the present-day scientific
framework. But no passive methods can
prove this to be the case. They can pro-
vide only a measure of probability of its
being so.
The passive method-painstakingly
examining reports and then building a
logical set of hypotheses-puts me in
mind of the story told about the explorer
who had come back from a dinosaur-
egg-hunting expedition in the Gobi
desert. In his lecture, the explorer pre-
sented many cogent reasons why the eggs
they discovered were dinosaur eggs. He
pointed out that they were about the size
and weight to be expected of dinosaur
eggs, allowing for desiccation and the
ravages of time, and that they had about
the right color, given the effects of
weathering-all of this leading to the
strong likelihood that the eggs were, in-
deed, dinosaur eggs. "And furthermore,"
the lecturer stated at the conclusion of
his talk, "when we opened one of the
eggs, it had a baby dinosaur in it." What
is needed in the UFO problem is for us
to find a baby UFO somewhere in the
crates of UFO reports.
The next stage in the scientific ap-
proach to the UFO problem must clearly
be an active one. Once the scientific fra-
ternity is convinced that the UFO prob-
lem is worthy of serious attack (and this
degree of conviction can come only after
it is amply demonstrated that reports
really do exist that find no conventional
explanation, even after study by compe-
tent persons), we arrive at the interesting
and challenging stage of the problem.
It is necessary to find out whether,
when persons of high repute report a
strange apparition, something of a physi-
cal nature. does, in fact, exist. In short,
an all-out effort must be made to obtain
photographs. If unimpeachable photo-
graphs can be obtained, it follows that
the stimulus that gave rise to the report
was accompanied by an actual image on
the retinas of the witnesses. This may
seem a trivial or obvious point; yet
should this not be the case, it would
throw the problem into a totally different
dimension. In any event, the existence of
unimpeachable photographs would rep-
resent incontrovertible scientific evidence
that UFOs, as we have defined them,
exist.
Of course, the whole problem could be
solved, or at least put on an extremely
firm foundation, if tangible physical evi-
dence, "hardware," of unimpeachable
character were available. Meteorites were
finally admitted to scientific respecta-
bility only after there had been a spec-
tacular fall in France in 1803, a fall that
not even the most skeptical of scien-
tists could doubt. That was certainly
"I read your book, Miss Crane, and found
it delightfully uninhibited."
much easier than attacking the problem
through a corresponding >,C diagram
for reports of meteorite falls. Similarly,
the problem here could be solved should
a fleet of UFOs land in the Rose Bowl
during half time.
But how can we hunt the wily UFO
without gun but with camera? Must we
place automatic cameras along every
roadside in the country? Well, hardly. A
study of geographical distribution of the
high C cases, however, reveals (as a
cursory inspection already shows) that
certain areas of the country seem to re-
main "UFO hot" often for as long as
days or even weeks. When the electronic
computer indicates such a "hot" area, let
a technical team be dispatched by jet
helicopter (several of which we would
keep in readiness in various parts of the
country), and within hours of the receipt
of the original report, cameras, tape re-
corders, movie cameras, spectrographs
and Geiger counters would be there. The
expense is trivial if study of the best re-
ports indicates that there is, indeed, valu-
able scientific pay dirt hidden in the UFO
phenomenon.
As a backup to the investigative readi-
ness teams, and as an over-all means of
garnering improved original data, a cen-
tral UFO center in the United States
should be established. A central tele-
phone exchange (UFO-1000) could be
manned 24 hours a day by competent
interrogators capable of recognizing a
true UFO report from a prankster's re-
port, a simple misidentification by the
untutored or the meanderings of an un-
steady mind. Calls would be made col-
lect to UFO-1000. Should the nuisance
calls become a problem, these could
be declared a misdemeanor or even a
criminal offense, comparable with tamper-
ing with the mailbox or the fire alarm
on the corner.
Let us suppose lonely travelers, as in
our first UFO case cited, encounter a
UFO. As soon as they can get to a road-
side telephone, they call UFO-1000. If
the report passes preliminary and imme-
diate screening, headquarters notifies the
local police and they rush to the scene,
already properly equipped with suitable
cameras. If the case appears to warrant
dispatching the UFO plane, this can be
clone very shortly thereafter.
Such a concerted effort would accom-
plish far. far more than the passive receipt
and evaluation of reports possibly could.
If UFOs as previously defined actually
exist, we would have photographs, movies,
spectrograms, plaster casts of indentations
(if a landing occurs) and detailed measure-
ments and quantitative estimates of
brightnesses, speeds, and so on, within a
year of the initiation of such a no-
nonsense program. But if the UFO-1000
program is sincerely and intensively car-
ried out for a full year and yields nothing,
this, in itself, would be of great negative
significance. Then we could go back to
the "real, common-sense world" of pre-
UFO days-shrugging it all off with,
"There must have been a virus going
around," an outlet successfully used in
other fields of human inquiry.
Admittedly, I will be surprised if all
intensive, yearlong study yields nothing.
To the contrary, I think that mankind
may be in for the greatest adventure
since dawning human intelligence turned
outward to contemplate the universe.
U
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