The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Times, of San Mateo, California, USA, page 11, on December 27, 1969.
BOSTON (AP) - After 22 years, the U.S. Air Force has given up its investigation of UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects - but a scientific debate continues.
UFOs were the topic of a symposium today at the annual meeting of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"Scientists of the 21st century will look back on UFOs as the greatest nonsense of the 20th century," declared Dr. Donald H. Menzel, Harvard University astronomer.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Northwestern University astronomer, countered: "We in the 20th century may be as far away from a solution of the UFO problem as 19th century physicists were from an interpretation of the Aurora Borealis [northern lights]."
Both men have served as consultants during Air Force investigations of UFO reports. Dr. Hynek served almost from the inception of the project.
The Air Force, saying it found UFOs no threat to national security, closed its study just last week.
Dr. Menzel, who believes that most if not all UFO reports have a natural explanation, said: "I can't walk around the block without seeing at least one and sometimes several of the basic stimuli that people have reported from time to time as a bona fide UFO."
He said amateur groups who believe UFOs represent spacecraft from other planets "can do considerable harm to science," and will "deluge Congress with demands for further costly studies."
"The government should withdraw all support for UFO studies as such, though I could certainly advocate the support of research in certain atmospheric phenomena associated with UFO reports," he said.
Dr. Hynek said some photographs of UFOs or flying saucers are obviously hoaxes, but that, in cases he looked into, "the probability of a hoax in all cases is vanishingly small."
Even so, this would not prove the existence of strange flying objects, but it should provide sufficient justification for the proper attention to the phenomenon by the scientific world, he said.
A small residue of UFO reports are not easily identifiable as coming from crackpots or from misperceptions of known objects and events, Dr. Hynek said.
