Editing MUFOB ARCHIVE/04 1966 MUFORG Bulletin 02 (section)

== SCIENTIFIC UFO INVESTIGATION ==
ANTHONY DURHAM, Hon. Secretary of the Cambridge University Group for the Investigation of UFOs, offers some interesting comments on the article by R.D. Hughes, which was published in our last issue.

– What I really write this letter for is to comment on Mr Hughes’s article on the possibilities for scientific UFO research. The Group here is thinking about the possibilities and in fact I hope personally to go into print for the BUFORA Journal with some ideas. The point about using a spectrograph is a good one. Have you done any serious thinking about how and where to place one’s instruments like this, in order to try and catch a saucer? Short of a real flap like Warminster, just sitting waiting is useless. The obvious answer, of course, is to make them all automatic, such as a cine-camera to pick up anything moving in the sky. This is, of course, what meteor astronomers already do, and it might be worth while finding out where such observatories function, with a view to checking a known sighting against photographic records. We are thinking along the same lines with regard to magnetic and pseudo-seismic effects here in Cambridge. It strikes me that Manchester University has a strong tradition in astronomical research, and with a little perseverance it should be possible to find out if the idea has any hope of success at all.

We havew been asked, on our Technical Information Service, to take a look at Kraspedon’s book and that was something that I did personally. Frankly, I find it very surprising you should regard Kraspedon as any use at all. He gives no real details at all about his supposed meetings with the saucer, and even if he did meet one there is no guarantee that the “Saucer Captain” told him anything but a load of platitudes to keep him in blissful ignorance. My real quibble with the book is that it falls into the all too common trap of trying to take some parts of our currently accepted physical theories and show that they are inconsistent with other parts. Much better brains than K’s have tried and failed. If he is to make an original contribution he needs to show much more originality. Most of the book that I read is just snippets of half-understood information crudely stuck together. As an example, I would take the places where he harps away at the old bogey of the wave/particle dualism of matter and says that it is unexplained. The simple answer is that it is well understood, but that popular exposition of the often difficult concepts involved, lags badly behind. The Bismuth Cycle is not all mysterious. It is the name given sometimes to the bismuth phosphate process used for the extraction of plutonium from spent uranium fuel rods during the war, and now long since obsolete. The mere fact that it happens to be performed on a radioactive element adds an air of glamour to a rather hack piece of chemical cookery. I rather gather that the details of the process were declassified and presumably available in garbled form in the newspapers about the time he claimed to meet the Saucerer.

All that was very destructive, chiefly because I found the book a most irritating one. When I read it, I naturally tended to assume that where he used the concepts of conventional science, he was talking about the science that I know, with the unstated assumptions, that underlie all scientific thought, used in the normal way. On this basis, it is a load of tripe! However, if someone else would like to digest the book in detail, without preconceived ideas, he might be able to extract any valid points. We have a fairly large range of scientific know-how available here (our strength seems to be theoretical physics this year) and would be glad to hear of any conclusions and offer comments.