Power Outages (Blackouts) and UFOs

UFO Symposium, House Committee on Science & Astronautics, July 29, 1968

Summary: Below is the part of the testimony by Dr. James E. McDonald before the House Committee on Science & Astronautics, July 29, 1968, on the subject of power outages and UFOs.

Below is the part of the testimony by Dr. James E. McDonald before the House Committee on Science & Astronautics, July 29, 1968:

Mr. Ryan:
Let me ask a further question: In the course of your investigation and your study of UFO sightings, have you found any cases where contemporaneously with the sighting of UFO’s allegedly, there were any other events which took place, which might or might not be related to the UFO’s?

Dr. McDonald.
Yes. Certainly there are many physical effects. For instance, in Mr. Pettis’ district, several people found the fillings in their mouth hurting while this object was nearby, but there are many cases probably on record of car ignition failure. One famous case was at Levelland, Tex., in 1957. Ten vehicles were stopped within a short area, all independently in a 2-hour period, near Levelland, Tex. There was no lightning or thunder storm, and only a trace of rain. There is another which I don’t know whether to bring to the committee’s attention or not. The evidence is not as conclusive as the car stopping phenomenon, hut there are too many instances for me to ignore. UFO’s have often been seen hovering near power facilities. There are a small number but still a little too many to seem pure fortuitous chance, of system outages, coincident with the UFO sighting. One of the cases was Tamaroa, Ill. Another was a case in Shelbyville, Ky., early last year.

Even the famous one, the New York blackout (Nov 9 1965), involved UFO sightings. Dr. Hynek probably would be the most appropriate man to describe the Manhattan sighting, since he interviewed several witnesses involved. I interviewed a woman in Seacliff, N.Y. She saw a disk hovering and going up and down. And then shooting away from New York just after the power failure. I went to the FPC for data, they didn’t take them seriously although they had many dozens of sighting reports for that famous evening. There were reports all over New England in the midst of that blackout, and five witnesses near Syracuse, N.Y., saw a glowing object ascending within about a minute of the blackout. First they thought it was a dump burning right at the moment the lights went out. It is rather puzzling that the pulse of current that tripped the relay at the Ontario Hydro Commission plant has never been identified, but initially the tentative suspicion was centered on the Clay Substation of the Niagara Mohawk network right there in the Syracuse area, where unidentified aerial phenomenon has been seen by some of the witnesses.

This extends down to the limit of single houses losing their power when a UFO is near. The hypothesis in the case of car stopping is that there might be high magnetic fields, d.c. fields, which saturate the core and thus prevent the pulses going through the system to the other side. Just how a UFO could trigger an outage on a large power network is however not yet clear. But this is a disturbing series of coincidences that I think warrant much more attention than they have so far received.

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