For most of the modern era, the majority of UFO investigators believed that the main objective in interviewing a witness was to shore up the idea of aliens visiting us from other planets. The easy tunnel vision we have built up for ourselves over the decades seemingly ignores the witness in the equation. Many other issues may be very important: What was the UFO percipient doing in the months, days, or hours leading up to the encounter? What happened afterwards? Did the percipient’s life change in any way? Did their beliefs and outlook change as a result? These issues and others are only sporadically recorded in the literature, but may actually be far more important than what is supposedly an effort at a statistical or “scientific” documentation and any answers that may be derived.
The terms of the search may need to be changed. If we are looking for an “answer” to the enigma, this assumes that there is an easy or understandable one waiting in the wings for just the right researcher who gets lucky or is amazingly smart. Perhaps the process should be referred to as a quest for understanding rather than any search for a specific truth. This may serve to keep the question open, and direct thought processes and models. The search may be aided by mimicking the obliqueness of its subject.
To this end, perhaps large UFO groups should be disbanded in favor of smaller, autonomous groups with a narrow research focus. Or, the big organizations should concentrate on collecting and cataloguing data rather than pushing a specific theory or becoming the subjects of breathless reality shows. “Mainstream” abduction study may also benefit from a hiatus of 5 to 10 years in favor of small support groups, and then resumed with no assumptions and no use of hypnosis and see what transpires. The suggestion here is that since we haven’t really gotten anywhere with anything that can be proven to the greater public and, more importantly, the arbiters of popular reality, such as the media and academia, then, perhaps, different methods and ideas could be more fruitful. No one should fear what could be learned. A serious shift in focus and methodology could change many ideas completely, and that would be a good thing. The answer is encoded in the question.
The phenomenon has not proven to be anything that can be reconciled by our current standards of proof. Therefore, UFO researchers and enthusiasts would best be served by making no firm judgments on any of the data—at least on its existential origins. The Greek philosophy of Pyrrhonism is a good model of inquiry in this regard:
“Nothing can be known, not even this.” Pyrrhonian skeptics withhold assent with regard to non-evident propositions and remain in a state of perpetual inquiry. For example, Pyrrhonians might assert that a lack of proof cannot constitute disproof, and that a lack of belief is vastly different from a state of active disbelief… Pyrrhonians recognize that we cannot be certain that new evidence won’t turn up in the future, and so they intentionally remain tentative and continue their inquiry. Pyrrhonians also question accepted knowledge, and view dogmatism as a disease of the mind.3
This method prevents the investigator and researcher from falling into the trap of a belief system from which there is a need to entrench and defend opinions since, seemingly, any viewpoint on this weird subject does not cover all the bases.
An example of a sane attitude towards UFO study can probably be summed up as something like “total interest combined with complete agnosticism.” Investigators should listen and log everything that that seems interesting and relevant, but try to make no value judgments on them. Keep notes and store the information away for later when it may make more sense or significant connections can be made. The first step is to formulate new questions, rather than to work backwards from an answer. In this regard, the most information-rich reports seem to occur when the phenomenon is closer to the percipient.
The close encounter witness is at first blindsided by something for which he or she has no previous framework, and which the mind tries furiously to stuff into a mental “filing box” during and soon after the event. Later, the aftermath of trying to find some sort of context and meaning is readily available in literature, popular culture, the internet, and from UFO researchers, who are, for the most part, notoriously wedded to an extraterrestrial explanation.
What many fail to realize is that most UFO witnesses have had an experience for which they have no benchmark. They are thrown into an alternative reality where something that they ignored, or perhaps even derided, has been forcefully presented to them. Descriptions of colors, speeds, distances, time frames, “what the aliens looked like” and similar concerns are no longer important, or may even become meaningless from their point of view.
In his 1991 book, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination, Keith Thompson described a dilemma of which few took heed at the time:
Many UFO witnesses emerge from their sighting experience or close encounter with a surrealistic appreciation that the world is filled with enormous vistas and abysses. It is as if they have glimpsed the edge of reality so precisely defined by the surrealists, and now can never go back to the mechanistic Newtonian world absent of depth, beauty, significance, and soul. In contrast, both extremes of the UFO debate—proponents and debunkers—seem committed to forcing witness interpretations into narrow boxes that witnesses themselves tend to see as inadequate. This is surely one of the richer ironies of the UFO epic.4
Witnesses may not be prepared to give the investigator what they are looking for, and, in fact, the two parties may often be talking about very different things. The witness’ desire to make sense of their experience moves him or her inexorably closer to any seemingly rational explanation.
Throughout the history of the subject, UFO enthusiasts and researchers have been concentrating on gathering information from witnesses based on presumably unbiased observations of their encounters. It is an established fact that recall of even mundane experiences and witnessed events can vary widely. Over time, memory becomes hazier and the mind tends to fill in details that are either incomplete or that flatter our prejudices or those of the listener or audience. The instrument for recording these encounters is not radar or a video camera: it is the human brain and nervous system, which are notoriously imprecise things.
People who study UFOs are, for the most part, not interested in the murky and complicated issues of human perception and memory. Perhaps what should be called into question is not just the origin of sightings and abductions (which may or may not be connected) but the very way we look at things; how our brains and nervous systems process input and remember events, and how traumatic events and memory affect what was seen and how we recall events after the fact. If we can pick apart these issues as they relate to UFO sightings and close encounters, we may not only gain some level of interest from intelligent people from outside the field, we might also make a breakthrough in understanding, which is far more important.
The idea of an extra-human consciousness is such an enigma that perhaps the key (or one of them) starts with us, sort of like the dog who looks at your finger rather than what you are pointing at. We may be looking at the effect rather than the cause, and the cause may be wrapped up in our visual and nervous systems. A thorough and up-to-date understanding of these issues might give the researcher a way to get at the cause of sightings and encounters rather than the perceptual packaging that surrounds them. In this regard, close encounters (in J. Allen Hynek’s definition of a sighting within 500 feet or less) have the potential to be much more profound than sightings of distant objects, and where far more things seem to be happening between the witness and the witnessed. In fact, the outlier cases may be more accurate precisely because they do not fit a pattern that we expect.
Basic questions like “What causes UFO sightings?” and perhaps on an even deeper level, “What do the weirder cases tell us about the phenomenon?” should take center stage. The late abduction researcher Karla Turner said that, “the truth to me more likely is going to lie in the anomalous details.”5 The stranger cases may contain clues about the nature of the phenomenon and how we perceive it. This probably appea
rs counterintuitive, since most researchers tend to throw out or ignore these reports, but the whole phenomenon can be looked at as counterintuitive, and, when things don’t fit a pattern, it should serve as a beacon for attention.
Some very strange and generally little known cases illustrate the variety of human experience with UFOs, and blur the line between the internalized experience and the external world. They suggest that the mind is far more creative than we expect when confronted by cognitively dissonant input. Here are just four among many similar examples that could be presented:
Driving to his job as a radio DJ in Long Prairie Minnesota on the night of October 23, 1965, Jerry Townsend rounded a curve in the road and was startled to come upon what looked like a 40-foot tall rocket in the middle of the road, standing on three fins. Three small figures approximately the size and shape of beer cans on two legs waddled towards him, stopped, and put out a third “leg” which they balanced on while apparently “looking” at him. They soon made their way back to the craft and disappeared inside the “rocket.” With a humming sound, it took off into the sky and disappeared.6
In January of 1978, a boy named Cristovao disappeared from an apartment building in Curitiba, Brazil, where he lived with his mother. She searched in vain for him all night while a strange beeping sound and other paraphysical disturbances occurred in the apartment. In the morning, an employee of a local power plant found the boy sleeping on the grounds. Cristovao told his mother that he had been taken away in a “rocket” and encountered a man and woman with no mouths. His mother said that he was emitting a strong odor and had marks on his skin that were not there previously. He said he had gone to a “yellow moon” and that the beings said that they would return for him. Strange paranormal events continued to plague them for a period after the incident.7
The rural witness in an incident from Emilcin, Poland in 1978 had no exposure to any media or cultural antecedents for his experience which featured an apparent rectangular or boxlike craft with corkscrewing spirals on it, diminutive humanoids with flippers for feet, a platform with a pulley system to raise him and his visitors into the craft, and a door on the object that looked like a rolled-up carpet.8
In 1974, a few days after a fiery “meteorite” was seen plummeting to earth a few miles from Bald Mountain, Washington, a hunter, used his binoculars to look at something in the distance that caught his eye. He observed “an incredible glowing creature… It was vaguely horse-like, he said, with four ‘legs’ that looked like the tentacles of an octopus and a football-shaped head with an antenna-like prong sticking up. The body was covered with scales.9
These cases evince almost none of the normal elements of a supposed abduction or what we have become used to as the standard “alien,” but they are only very rarely mentioned in surveys and research, mainly because they both don’t make any sense and because they don’t fit comfortably into a standard narrative.
Many UFO researchers would be tempted to say that these accounts are either faulty recollections (that would fit a humanoid narrative if given enough questioning) or screen memories imposed by aliens, but perhaps extra-human consciousness has no need or method to impose any mind control on us. We have our own built-in screen memories that function quite well in earthly situations such as childhood trauma. How much do we bring to the dance during a paranormal encounter? In other words, how much of the UFO experience is the result of our subconscious minds trying to make sense of unexpected, startling, and/or frightening input, and leaving us with an insane placeholder when it can’t decide on anything else?
A legitimate question arises about photos and films or videos of UFOs. These seem to depict, for the most part, what was seen by witnesses. This may be true, but there seem to be very few if any close-up photos of UFOs or their occupants. The close encounter appears to be a very different animal from sightings of distant objects. Besides, images of supposed unidentifieds have not convinced skeptics and others who determine what the greater public believes, and they can be faked very convincingly now. If we can make some sort of headway in understanding how humans encode visual stimuli and remember it, we may begin to crack the mystery, and attitudes and outlooks may change or evolve. There is also the seemingly well-supported idea that the closer a witness is to the phenomenon, the more variety seems to emerge. Perhaps our creativity could even change what a camera sees.
Electronic engineer John Fenderson was a guest on the Radio Misterioso podcast in 2015. He described an “experiment,” which he conducted sometime in the 1970s, where he and a few friends released hot air balloons made with laundry bags over their hometown after dark. He said that accounts later varied from those who saw exactly what was there to others who thought that there was some sort of alien invasion underway. There are many studies that indicate that the human visual system changes what is seen before we are consciously aware of it. Fenderson said “Most of what you’re seeing, you are actually imagining, and consists of what you are filling in based on patterns you expect. When something happens that you don’t expect, very often you won’t see it at all.”10
The human mind is well known for editing out what is too painful or useless to us. What is not as well-known is how it does this. In his 1997 book, Mind Trek, Remote viewer Joe McMoneagle discussed a model of perception based on his understanding of the human visual system and how our brains process input from our senses:
We reside and operate in a constantly fluctuating past of our own creation … By the time our processing is of any use to us, we are already dealing with past events. Our reality is one we in fact invent or make up as we go.
Processing sequence as a Function of Time:
TIME 0: We recognize incoming information about our current reality.
PLUS .00000: We begin to make sense of the input from our five senses.
PLUS .00001: We fish out additional information from our hard-wired brain memory modules.
PLUS .0001: We reason a little about the information and decide we lack certain essentials to make any decisions.
PLUS .001: We insert additional overlay, inaccurate assumptions a prejudice in order to make it more palatable.
PLUS .01: We reach a conclusion regarding our surrounding physical reality.
PLUS .1: Assured of the accuracy of our reality understanding, we make corrections to our hard-wired memory, file the conclusions for quick reference in the next check to make sure nothing changes too drastically, and begin the process all over again.
Overlap these processing sequences and perform them at fifty times per second and you can see that not only is the accuracy somewhat questionable, but no matter how fast it operates, it will always be just a tad behind reality as it can be observed. We will always be subject to our own observations as well as our own belief concepts.11
Think of what is happening to a UFO witness. These complicated, subconscious processes are going on while the mind is furiously trying to stuff everything into the proper mental filing boxes for cognition and recall later. It is a wonder that we get any memories of extraordinary experiences. Referring to this conundrum, parapsychologist Dean Radin said, “We’re not equipped very well for accommodating and absorbing things which are too different… If you don’t have a place to stick a memory, it just doesn’t stick at all.”12
When a witness sees something startling and unexpected they may block it out or transpose or conflate the experience with something else in the same way as a trauma or abuse victim often does. Perhaps there are far more UFOs seen than are ever reported for just this reason. It is so jarring to a sense of everyday reality that the victim creates a story for themselves and others that the he or she can handle without too many problems, and without having to live with the disturbing memory as it happened. Researchers counter that abduction victims often have terrifying memories of ostensibly real experiences, but perhaps the actual reality is either so incomprehensible or so terrifying simply because there is nothing to compare it to, and the victim latches on to wh
atever makes sense, even if it seems outlandish by most people’s standards.
UFOs and anything walking out of them are never expected and always strange. In the act of first experiencing the event, and then, more importantly, in remembering it and telling the story about it to ourselves and others, we are adding many layers of cultural baggage and other input that help us to make sense of the experience. In so doing, we are taking ourselves step-by-step away from our original impressions.
The phenomenon of faulty memory and perception is so common that lawyers and judges are starting to place less emphasis on witness testimony, and this is for events that we all agree happen every day—like assaults and murders.
In a January 2010 article in Scientific American on witness reliability, authors Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld wrote:
The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of UC, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.” Even questioning by a lawyer can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall.13
UFOs- Reframing the Debate Page 26