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Professor MacDonald recorded his 12th in Sydney on a recent visit to Australia, New Zealand

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and Tasmania to investigate UFO sightings in this part of the world.

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Professor James E. MacDonald.

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I suppose one good place to begin with my remarks on the UFO problem is to tell you briefly

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why I happen to be down in Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania, why I've been studying this problem

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of the Australian UFO sightings.

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It comes to this, I've spent about 12-13 months in the States interviewing witnesses in key cases

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attempting to unravel this very puzzling and very intriguing mystery.

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One of the questions that keeps coming up is the question of are there sightings of essentially the same type

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in other parts of the world?

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Well, it turns out that there are large numbers of reports in the publications of various private

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UFO investigating groups in England, America, Australia, France and so on that quite clearly indicate that

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but certainly as a scientist I am not entirely happy with taking hearsay evidence

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and I've been down here in Australia interviewing witnesses to find out for myself in direct face-to-face

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or in some cases phone interviewing exactly what happened in individual cases

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and what the credibility of the witnesses is, how witnesses may be and thoroughly the cases have been checked

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and so on down the line.

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And just to very briefly indicate what I've found in that investigation, it's this,

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the picture in Australia with respect to UFO sightings, observations of unconventional objects,

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maneuvering sometimes quite close to ground, sometimes within tens to hundreds of feet of very credible,

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reliable observers is just not appreciably different in Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania

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from what it is in the States, very strong similarity.

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There's just a little bit of evidence that indicates to me there may even be a few more sightings

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per square mile or per capita here than in the States, but I wouldn't stand firmly on that feeling that I've gotten.

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One thing I have noticed is that lots of witnesses after 15 or 20 or 30 minutes of interviewing them

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bring up the point that several other friends of theirs have also seen objects at close range.

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Sometimes I've been able to check these, sometimes I just put it aside as evidence that there are other reports.

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The thing I've been doing is taping. I have about 10,000 feet of tape I noticed while I'm listing up

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and I've interviewed about 70 Australians or New Zealanders.

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I've been down to Hobart, Tasmania, some extremely interesting cases in Tasmania.

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The problem is to try to find out what has happened in these cases.

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There's a great deal of reluctance to report them. That's exactly the same in the States as it seems to be down here.

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People have been ridiculed, made fun of by official groups, by press and radio and television.

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Scientists too have been a great deal of completely unbased, I emphasize that, scorn and scoffing about this problem.

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That's driven the problem underground, just the same kind of a comment.

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You ask people, did you ever report it to the United States Air Force or down here, did you report it to the RAF?

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The answer is typically no. Did you report it to the press?

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Well, sometimes they did. One woman that I interviewed not so long ago pointed out that she described her case in some detail

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and reported her after she didn't use more water in what she's been drinking.

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She was quite incensed and I would agree with that.

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This whole attitude of ridicule has been engendered and I'm afraid greatly encouraged by the American Air Force investigation,

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Project Blue Book, which has been in operation for about 14 years and which is presented certainly within the States

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and I've learned down here, regarded quite highly in other parts of the world and that's completely unjustified.

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I've taken an extremely good look at the official Project Blue Book investigation and briefly it's been done superficially

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and by persons of extremely low scientific competence. It has to be regarded as essentially zero.

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It is not a scientific investigation. For instance, when I got started looking at this problem intensively about a year ago

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and got in there, it became a great surprise to me to find out that Project Blue Book, the American UFO investigation

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headquarters project consists of a major, a sergeant and a secretary. Imagine that.

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When you contrast that with the kind of pressure releases that were put out about the great expertise that's used in the federal investigations

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and the indication that they're only 2% or 3% of unknowns and probably those would be explained, the Air Force insists,

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if you add a little more data. When you contrast the pronouncements, the assurances, there's nothing to it,

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with the very low level of which it's actually been investigated. When you compare the official explanations with the details of the reports

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and then go back and check them yourself as I've done, you end up, as I have ended up, with a conclusion that this problem has been completely lost sight of

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in America and perhaps it's not justified to suggest that in other parts of the world, the large amounts of money that seem to be at the disposal of

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our Air Force are misconstrued as indicating we've probably done a very large, very extensive, very thorough study of problem.

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That is absolutely incorrect. The type of sightings that are on record, thousands of cases in the U.S.

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involves cigar-shaped objects, discs, hovering, sometimes with very low altitude. There's a wide range of other phenomena.

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It won't take time to give you all the details. Many inexplicable, scientifically inexplicable, baffling phenomena, very high accelerations,

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sometimes high-speed objects moving without any obvious sonic booms, though I hasten to interject it.

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Sometimes there are unexplained sonic booms that could be UFOs. Many peculiar luminous phenomena and some of them down in Australia will really baffle every scientist

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who ever takes a look at these. Same thing in the United States, but mainly cigar-shaped objects and disc-shaped objects,

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maneuvering in our airspace and written off by official groups as non-existent, just as if it was a lot of nuts seeing things,

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a lot of people who can't be trusted. When you go out and talk to the people, you find that yes, there are some, yes, some

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incompetent people who have seen something and haven't quite identified it. There are certainly nuts. There's certainly in the United States,

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there's a very annoyingly visible cultist crackpot frames that scroll up around the problem and that discolors it and puts a lot of scientists off.

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That's true. And there are completely sincere misidentifications of planets and balls,

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lightening fireballs, luminous phenomena one type or another, even aircraft and so on. But experienced investigators such as those that have been working

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in Sydney and Melbourne and Tasmania and other parts of the world, these are private investigating groups, not the official groups.

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The official groups, it's very hard to know what to say about them. They come out and say, it's outrageous. They have absurd explanations that one is really hard

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to know how to sort that out. But these are sightings that are being investigated include a lot of quite unconventional phenomena that are not any product of our technology

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or Australia or Russian or English technology. They are not plasma phenomena. They are not sun dogs and pelicans and all the rest of the things that one hears about.

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They are beyond the present pale of science and they're being ignored by science, being ignored by official groups. And that has got to change very, very rapidly.

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The question arises, what are these UFOs, the ones that passed the test of not being put aside as fireballs and planets? So what are they be? And that, of course, is the ultimately important question.

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It's not easy to offer an answer. One can only consider hypotheses, guesses, big gifts in front of all of them. But when you look at these various hypotheses, psychological, advanced technology,

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pokes, fabrication, fraud, poorly understood geophysical phenomena, you run through all of those. This is certainly what I've done in the past year of checking. You find yourself ending up with the seemingly observed, seemingly improbable hypothesis.

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These things may be coming from somewhere else. And just where that is is a great, big question mark. All that we know about the astronomy and planetary meteorology of the solar system seems to argue against a planetary, as an intra-solar system, origin of the objects.

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All that we know about the structure of a galaxy makes quite clear that the next nearest source of origin is quite an embarrassing number of light years away. And when you confront that distance and look at it in terms of present day terrestrial technology of propulsion,

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we're just beginning, of course, so to speak, we're just beginning in that business on Earth. And that has to be kept in mind. But when you look at it in terms of present day or foreseeable propulsion techniques, it's very, very baffling, essentially not possible to explain how any kind of objects, surveillance probes or what have you could be got into the Earth's environment from

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an extra solar, that is, across interstellar distances. But the rub there, the thing to keep your eye on seems to me, is the proviso in terms of our present knowledge or foreseeable technology. You've got to realize, and actually I find many laymen, I really find laymen more aware of this than some fellow scientists, more sensitive to it.

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You have to realize that given another 100 years or 1000 years, terrestrial technology will be an entirely different thing from what it is now. It's a safe extrapolation because you have only to look back 100 years and things like radio, television, lasers, nuclear fusion, fission,

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countless other technological devices and systems that we take for granted now are, of course, incredible. 100 years ago, 100 years ago, there's just nothing, just a twinkling of an eye in galactic, even geologic, time standards. So it is entirely conceivable that it's almost probable that elsewhere in the galaxy are advanced civilizations.

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In fact, this is very, it becomes very respectable to say this nowadays. It's generally granted by astronomers that far from here in the reaches of the galaxy, there must be other societies that are essentially sentient beings whose technologies have swept far beyond ours.

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But what nobody grants and what everybody stalls on and blocks their further thoughts on with respect to UFOs is nobody thinks they can get here. Well, I don't have any answers to that. I certainly want to emphasize that.

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I'm the slightest idea how anything would get here from, say, Talsy to I or Epsilon or Ribbon I or anything 10 or 15 light years away. But I'm afraid in looking at the situation, looking at Australian, American and other sightings, examining the credibility of the observers, looking at the content of these observations, I'm afraid that it boils down to craft of some kind, machine-like objects that are not, you know,

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to the ground for 20 years, ignored by all of us scientists, swept aside and ridiculed, and nobody has any good knowledge of this problem. All these years have been wasted scientifically. We've got to get at this right away, got to get on a global scale.

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And with the best scientific talent, not just in the United States or not just in Australia, but the world's best scientific talent has to get on that.

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I spoke along these lines only a short time ago this summer in the United Nations at the Outer Space Affairs Group, presented a statement to the Outer Space Affairs Group urging immediate UN action on the problem.

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I was very pleased to see that it had some effect. By the way, I also sent copies of that statement to about 60 embassies in Washington, 64, and embassies care of their scientific attachés, hoping to stimulate more interest in any and all parts of the world.

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I didn't get a chance to talk to Todd. I had a date to see him, but it was right in the middle of the U.S. and the security thoughts of crisis, and he couldn't see me. I'm going to try again to see him.

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But only a very short time ago, a very interesting statement was made by Todd to Drew Pearson that the problem of the UFOs, now this is the Secretary General of the United Nations speaking, saying that the problem of the UFOs is the greatest international problem, second only to the present one of the Vietnam War.

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I think that's very interesting. I cabled him from Australia when I heard that by long distance phone call from San Francisco. I cabled Secretary General Houttant and strongly endorsed his statement, except I expressed disagreement.

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In my opinion, the UFO problem is the greatest scientific problem, the greatest international problem that stands before us, and I am hoping to see it elevated to that status in a very great hurry.