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James McDonald's Fight for UFO Science
By Ann Druffel
FATE :: November 2005
Dr. James E. McDonald was a bold and articulate scientist who publicly entered the UFO research field in the spring of 1966. He had studied UFO reports privately in his home town of Tucson, Arizona, from 1958 to early 1966, and had come to the conclusion that UFOs were “a serious question that was being neglected by science.”
In April 1966, McDonald put his career, scientific reputation, and personal life on the line for the cause of UFO research. He pursued the subject for the next five years, tapping his numerous high-level contacts in science, government, and the military. He made great strides among the scientific community, persuading many highly-placed authorities that UFOs must be treated as a serious problem.
In 1966 McDonald was at the peak of his scientific career. He was only 45, yet he was respected internationally as an eminent atmospheric physicist with impeccable credentials. He was chief physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) on the campus of the University of Arizona at Tucson, as well as a brilliant professor of meteorology. He was also a valued member of the U.S. Navy’s Stormfury Project, and served on the National Academy of Sciences Panel for Weather and Climate Modification. His distinguished list of publications in top-rated, refereed scientific journals was second to none. Yet he still found time for his wife Betsy and their six children.
McDonald had a sense of responsibility to the public that few scientists shared. He believed that science existed to serve the people, not to live in ivory towers, and he often spoke out boldly on scientific problems that impacted the public. He was an ecological pioneer, one of the first scientists to sound the alarm regarding damage to Earth’s fragile ozone layer.
McDonald was a cordial man who made friends easily among the scientifically-oriented lay researchers in UFO community. In turn, he was admired for his carefully-crafted hypothesis regarding UFOs: that some UFOs were physical, unidentified aeroforms from unknown sources.
McDonald was interested in “occupant sightings” also, which involved unknown creatures viewed by reliable witnesses near landed UFOs, but realized that such sightings involved psychological aspects that he did not feel qualified to research. He reasoned that the scientific community must first be convinced of the existence of those unidentified aeroforms that resembled physical craft. Afterwards, well-funded interdisciplinary study could address what he called “these peripheral aspects.”
His prominence as an atmospheric physicist made him a logical source to receive UFO reports from a curious public. Puzzled witnesses found him to be a gracious, interested professional who did not disregard or laugh at their reports. Like all conscientious researchers, he found conventional explanations for most, but a certain residue of unexplained sightings puzzled and intrigued him. It was the unsolved one-half of one percent—the true “unknowns”—that he came to regard as the greatest scientific problem of his time.
McDonald explored all possible hypotheses to explain the most puzzling sightings, and he came to the very tentative conclusion that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the “least unsatisfactory hypothesis.” Early in 1966, he presented eight possible hypotheses, including the suggestion that UFOs might be some type of unknown parapsychological phenomenon. This was an era when the very words “parapsychology” and “psychic phenomena” were anathema in the halls of science. McDonald’s impeccable reputation protected him, but he took the advice of trusted colleagues and dropped the tentative parapsychological hypothesis. Later on, however, he stated in his public talks that, if UFOs were not extraterrestrial, they could be something “even more bizarre.” ....
Read the rest of this article in the November 2005 issue of FATE
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