Feb 17 1959

From The Space Library

VANGUARD II (SLV-4), the fifth U.S.-IGY satellite, successfully launched payload containing photocells designed to produce cloud cover images for 2 weeks ; precessing or wobbling prevented significant interpretation of data.

USAF Committee presided over by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Associate Director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, Mass., recommended that the USAF continue to take a positive approach to UFO's, investigate reported sightings by all scientific means, and keep the public fully informed of existing policy. Of the unknown objects sighted, it reported, no scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the objects were spacecraft.

Roy W. Johnson, Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), testified before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics that DOD and ARPA had no lunar landing program. Herbert F. York, DOD Director of Defense Research and Engineering, testified that exploration of the moon was a NASA responsibility.

U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Science and Astronautics, Missile Development and Space Sciences, Hearings, 86th Congress, 1st Session (1959), pp. 346, 359.