Post by Steve on Jan 25, 2012 5:49:04 GMT -6
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._McDonald
James Edward McDonald (May 7, 1920 – June 13, 1971) was an American physicist. He is best known for his research regarding UFOs. McDonald was senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics and professor in the Department of Meteorology, University of Arizona, Tucson.
McDonald was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota. He served as a cryptographer in the United States Navy during World War II, and afterwards, married Betsy Hunt; they would have six children.
McDonald studied at the University of Omaha, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned his Ph.D. at Iowa State University. He taught at the University of Chicago for a year, then in 1953, he was invited to help establish a meteorology and atmospherics program at the University of Arizona as a professor of meteorology.
McDonald eventually became the head of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, but resigned as its administrator after about a year because he preferred to teach and research rather than oversee the department. He taught courses from introductory to graduate levels, received good evaluations, and was fondly regarded by his students.
His specialty was cloud formation and physics, but his natural curiosity led him to read widely in many other scientific fields. McDonald was a widely recognized authority of atmospheric phenomena: he published many articles in peer reviewed journals, and contributed to several standard meteorology textbooks. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Meteorological Society.
As a leading atmospheric physicist, McDonald was one of many experts who testified before congress in the 1960s against the development of supersonic transport airplanes, for fear that they would damage the ozone layer.
Most of McDonald's life is known through the authorized biography Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald's Fight For UFO Science (2003) by Ann Druffel.
McDonald campaigned vigorously in support of expanding UFO studies during the mid and late 1960s, arguing that UFOs represented an intriguing, pressing and unsolved mystery which had not been adequately studied by science. He was one of the more prominent figures of his time who argued in favor of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a plausible, but not completely proved, model of UFO phenomena.
A dedicated and tireless UFO researcher and scholar, McDonald interviewed over 500 UFO witnesses, uncovered many important government UFO documents, and gave important presentations of UFO evidence. He testified before Congress during the UFO hearings of 1968.
In 1969, McDonald was a speaker at an American Association for the Advancement of Science UFO symposium. There he delivered a lecture, "Science in Default", which Jerome Clark calls "one of the most powerful scientific defenses of UFO reality ever mounted". McDonald discussed in detail a handful of well documented UFO cases which seemed, he thought, to defy interpretation by conventional science.
His best known speech was a summary of the current UFO evidence and a critique of the 1969 Condon Report UFO study.
Steve
SCIENCE IN DEFAULT:
22 YEARS OF INADEQUATE UFO INVESTIGATIONS
James E. McDonald, Institute of Atmospheric Physics
University of Arizona, Tucson
(Material presented at the Symposium on UFOs,
134th Meeting, AAAS, Boston, Dec, 27, 1969)
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE,
134th MEETING
Subject:
Science in Default: 22 Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations
Author:
James E. McDonald, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences
Address:
The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 85721
Time:
9:00 a.m., December 27, 1969
Place:
Sheraton Plaza Ballroom
Program:
General Symposium, Unidentified Flying Objects Convention
Address:
Sheraton Plaza Hotel
RELEASE TIME
A.M. December 28, 1969
No scientifically adequate investigation of the UFO problem has been carried out during the entire 22 years that have now passed since the first extensive wave of sightings of unidentified aerial objects in the summer of 1947. Despite continued public interest, and despite frequent expressions of public concern, only quite superficial examinations of the steadily growing body of unexplained UFO reports from credible witnesses have been conducted in this country or abroad. The latter point is highly relevant, since all evidence now points to the fact that UFO sightings exhibit similar characteristics throughout the world.
Charging inadequacy of all past UFO investigations, I speak not only from a background of close study of the past investigations, but also from a background of three years of rather detailed personal research, involving interviews with over five hundred witnesses in selected UFO cases, chiefly in the U. S. In my opinion, the UFO problem, far from being the nonsense problem that it has often been labeled by many scientists, constitutes a problem of extraordinary scientific interest.
The grave difficulty with essentially all past UFO studies has been that they were either devoid of any substantial scientific content, or else have lost their way amidst the relatively large noise-content that tends to obscure the real signal in the UFO reports. The presence of a percentually large number of reports of misidentified natural or technological phenomena (planets, meteors, and aircraft, above all) is not surprising, given all the circumstances surrounding the UFO problem. Yet such understandable and usually easily recognized instances of misidentification have all too often been seized upon as a sufficient explanation for all UFO reports, while the residue of far more significant reports (numbering now of order one thousand) are ignored. I believe science is in default for having failed to mount any truly adequate studies of this problem, a problem that has aroused such strong and widespread public concern during the past two decades. Unfortunately, the present climate of thinking, above all since release of the latest of a long series of inadequate studies, namely, that conducted under the direction of Dr. E. U. Condon at the University of Colorado, will make it very difficult to secure any new and more thorough investigations, yet my own examination of the problem forces me to call for just such new studies. I am enough of a realist to sense that, unless the present AAAS UFO Symposium succeeds in making the scientific community aware of the seriousness of the UFO problem, little immediate response to any call for new investigation is likely to appear.
In fact, the over-all public and scientific response to the UFO phenomena is itself a matter of substantial scientific interest, above all in its social-psychological aspects. Prior to my own investigations, I would never have imagined the wide spread reluctance to report an unusual and seemingly inexplicable event, yet that reluctance, and the attendant reluctance of scientists to exhibit serious interest in the phenomena in question, are quite general. One regrettable result is the fact that the most credible of UFO witnesses are often those most reluctant to come forward with a report of the event they have witnessed. A second regrettable result is that only a very small number of scientists have taken the time and trouble to search out the nearly puzzling reports that tend to be diluted out by the much larger number of trivial and non-significant UFO reports. The net result is that there still exists no general scientific recognition of the scope and nature of the UFO problem.
* * *
Within the federal government official responsibility for UFO investigations has rested with the Air Force since early 1948. Unidentified aerial objects quite naturally fall within the area of Air Force concern, so this assignment of responsibility was basically reasonable, However, once it became clear (early 1949) that UFO reports did not seem to involve advanced aircraft of some hostile foreign power, Air Force interest subsided to relatively low levels, marked, however, by occasional temporary resurgence of interest following large waves of UFO reports, such as that of 1952, or 1957, or 1965.
A most unfortunate pattern of press reporting developed by about 1953, in which the Air Force would assert that they had found no evidence of anything "defying explanation in terms of present-day science and technology" in their growing files of UFO reports. These statements to the public would have done little harm had they not been coupled systematically to press statements asserting that "the best scientific facilities available to the U. S. Air Force" had been and were being brought to bear on the UFO question. The assurances that substantial scientific competence was involved in Air Force UFO investigations have, I submit, had seriously deleterious scientific effects. Scientists who might otherwise have done enough checking to see that a substantial scientific puzzle lay in the UFO area were misled by these assurances into thinking that capable scientists had already done adequate study and found nothing. My own extensive checks have revealed so slight a total amount of scientific competence in two decades of Air Force-supported investigations that I can only regard the repeated asseverations of solid scientific study of the UFO . problem as the single most serious obstacle that the Air Force has put in the way of progress towards elucidation of the matter
I do not believe, let me stress, that this has been part of some top-secret coverup of extensive investigations by Air Force or security agencies; I have found no substantial basis for accepting that theory of why the Air Force has so long failed to respond appropriately to the many significant and scientifically intriguing UFO reports coming from within its own ranks. Briefly, I see grand foulup but not grand coverup. Although numerous instances could be cited wherein Air Force spokesmen failed to release anything like complete details of UFO reports, and although this has had the regrettable consequence of denying scientists at large even a dim notion of the almost incredible nature of some of the more impressive Air Force-related UFO reports, I still feel that the most grievous fault of 22 years of Air Force handling of the UFO problem has consisted of their repeated public assertions that they had substantial scientific competence on the job.
Close examination of the level of investigation and the level of scientific analysis involved in Project Sign (1948-9), Project Grudge (1949-52), and Project Bluebook (1953 to date), reveals that these were, viewed scientifically, almost meaning less investigations. Even during occasional periods (e.g., 1952) characterized by fairly active investigation of UFO cases, there was still such slight scientific expertise involved that there was never any real chance that the puzzling phenomena encountered in the most significant UFO cases would be elucidated. Furthermore, the panels, consultants, contractual studies, etc., that the Air Force has had working on the UFO problem over the past 22 years have, with essentially no exception, brought almost negligible scientific scrutiny into the picture. Illustrative examples will be given.
The Condon Report, released in January, 1968, after about two years of Air Force-supported study is, in my opinion, quite inadequate. The sheer bulk of the Report, and the inclusion of much that can only be viewed as "scientific padding", cannot conceal from anyone who studies it closely the salient point that it represents an examination of only a tiny fraction of the most puzzling UFO reports of the past two decades, and that its level of scientific argumentation is wholly unsatisfactory. Furthermore, of the roughly 90 cases that it specifically confronts, over 30 are conceded to be unexplained. With so large a fraction of unexplained cases (out of a sample that is by no means limited only to the truly puzzling cases, but includes an objectionably large number of obviously trivial cases), it is far from clear how Dr. Condon felt justified in concluding that the study indicated "that
further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. "
I shall cite a number of specific examples of cases from the Condon Report which I regard as entirely inadequately investigated and reported. One at Kirtland AFB, November 4, 1957, involved observations of a wingless egg-shaped object that was observed hovering about a minute over the field prior to departure at a climb rate which was described to me as faster than that of any known jets, then or now. The principal witnesses in this case were precisely the type of witnesses whose accounts warrant closest attention, since they were CAA tower observers who watched the UFO from the CAA tower with binoculars. Yet, when I located these two men in the course of my own check of cases from the Condon Report, I found that neither of them had even been contacted by members of the University of Colorado project! Both men were fully satisfied that they had been viewing a device with performance characteristics well beyond any thing in present or foreseeable aeronautical technology. The two men gave me descriptions that were mutually consistent and that fit closely the testimony given on Nov. 6, 1957, when they were interrogated by an Air Force investigator. The Condon Report attempts to explain this case as a light-aircraft that lost its way, came into the field area, and then left. This kind of explanation runs through the whole Condon Report, yet is wholly incapable of explaining the details of sightings such as that of the Kirtland AFB incident. Other illustrative instances in which the investigations summarized in the Condon Report exhibit glaring deficiencies will be cited. I suggest that there are enough significant unexplainable UFO reports just within the Condon Report itself to document the need for a greatly increased level of scientific study of UFOs.
That a panel of the National Academy of Sciences could endorse this study is to me disturbing. I find no evidence that the Academy panel did any independent checking of its own; and none of that 11-man panel had any significant prior investigative experience in this area, to my knowledge. I believe that this sort of Academy endorsement must be criticized; it hurts science in the long run, and I fear that this particular instance will ultimately prove an embarrassment to the National Academy of Sciences. The Condon Report and its Academy endorsement have exerted a highly negative influence on clarification of the long-standing UFO problem; so much, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to now call for new and more extensive UFO investigations. Yet the latter are precisely what are needed to bring out into full light of scientific inquiry a phenomenon that could well constitute one of the greatest scientific problems of our times.
* * *
ILLUSTRATIVE CASES
The following treats in detail the four principal UFO cases referred to in my Symposium talk. They are presented as specific illustrations of what I regard as serious shortcomings of case-investigations in the Condon Report and in the 1947-69 Air Force UFO program. The four cases used as illustrations are the following :
1. RB-47 case, Gulf Coast area, Sept. 19, 1957
2. Lakenheath RAF Station, England, August 13-14, 1956
3. Haneda AFB, Japan, August 5-6, 1952
4. Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, Nov. 4, 1957
My principal conclusions are that scientific inadequacies in past years of UFO investigations by Air Force Project Bluebook have not been remedied through publication of the Condon Report, and that there remain scientifically very important unsolved problems with respect to UFOs. The investigative and evaluative deficiencies illustrated in the four cases examined in detail are paralleled by equally serious shortcomings in many other cases in the sample of about 90 UFO cases treated in the Condon Report. Endorsement of the conclusions of the Condon Report by the National Academy of Sciences appears to have been based on entirely superficial examination of the Report and the cases treated therein. Further study, conducted on a much more sound scientific level are needed. ....
Continues ......
www.cufon.org/cufon/mcdon2.htm#top
www.cufon.org/cufon/mcdon2_2.htm#top