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by John Shirley
The following is excerpted (hence the disconnected, episodic quality) from a talk I just gave to MUFON in San Jose on PITFALLS OF UFOLOGY. . .I wasn’t going to talk about UFOs here anymore but since I agreed to give this talk and have this material…
I encountered no hostility there, despite having been introduced as a skeptic–everyone was very nice. I met Fred Beckman there, afterwards, who was a pioneer ufologist who worked for many years with J. Allen Hynek–he thought I was full of shit about some things (some acid comments I made–not included here–about SSE and its report on UFOs), but after we talked for awhile it turned out we had more in common (or so I think) than we’d thought. He’s a brilliant man.
Here come the fragments. I freely admit I drew heavily on two books by Kevin Randle: SCIENTIFIC UFOLOGY (his latest book) and THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA. I think these two books are the most important books to come out of Ufology in twenty years and Randle is the most important researcher. I recommend these two books highly. From Pitfalls of Ufology:
My opinion is that the first trail, the anything goes believers, will run into every possible pitfall, and will go in circles. The second, and its offshoots, will run into some pitfalls. I think the ideal trail is a third one, but one that’s closer to the second than the first–that is, the ufological path of those who neither believe nor disbelieve in advance of examining each given UFO event. I think Kevin Randle comes close to that–but doesn’t quite make it. It’s the trail I’ve chosen for myself. I think Arthur C. Clarke is on that trail. Maybe a few others. But it’s essentially quite lonely out here and one encounters few other travelers. Most people who suppose themselves to be objective… really arent. I write an online column called "The Skeptical Believer."I’m skeptical–but I also believe that there are strange and wonderful things to discover, and some of them are in the arena of what is currently called the paranormal, including ufology, and some of them are of a more spiritual nature. But I have observed that most of what we take for the paranormal or the spiritual is the product of mis-identification, poor discrimination, and fantasy. Most but not all. Let me tell you about some UFOs that I like. These are famous cases. On November 2, 1957 near Levelland. Texas two farm workers saw a glowing object sweep across the highway in front of their truck. As it landed, the truck's headlights died and the engine failed. One of the men dived out of the truck, and threw himself under cover; the other sat, terror stricken, and watched as the blue-green glow shifted into a red so bright that he could no longer look directly at it. There was a noise coming from within the craft. It sat on the ground for about three minutes, then shot suddenly into the sky. After the UFO departed, the lights and engine of the car began to work again. In Shallowater Texas, two married couples saw a flash of light in the southwestern sky. Their car radio and headlights dimmed while they watched the light. The couples reported that there were no thunderstorms around them at the time. About an hour later another man saw a red-glowing object sitting on the road. As he approached it, his car engine died. Then the egg-shaped object lifted off swiftly and silently. Several more people in other areas saw almost exactly the same thing. then the local Sheriff went out to have a look–he saw it, too, in the distance. Witnesses described it as oval or egg shaped, and glowing red. When someone approached the object, it would take off. Here we have a case where disparate witnesses, who don’t know one another, over a short period of time–and before anything about these sightings appeared on radio or television–saw the same identical object, and had the same consequences of interacting with it: their car engines and lights died when it appeared and could not be turned on while it was there. Then, when it left, they were easily able to turn the vehicles back on. The Air Force, when they got this report from the local police, had to admit that something real was happening–eventually they explained it as some unusual form of ball lightning or other atmospheric phenomenon. The electromagnetic field around ball lightning or a piezo electric display could damp a car engine. That would be my take on it, too, except–that the objects seemed to react to people–when approached they took off. They flew as if intelligently controlled. And many of these people saw the objects relatively close–they didn’t say that it looked translucent as a charged ball of plasma should. What I like about this report is the multiplicity of witnesses, the fact that the witnesses did not have a chance to influence one another, the fact that the sightings were not tainted by television or radio reports, the consistency in the descriptions, and the fact that law enforcement professionals saw the objects, too. One of the best UFO cases ever took place in August 1956 in Bentwaters, England. Radar operators for the U.S. Air Force’s 1264th Squadron at the RAF station in Bentwaters spotted 12 to 15 blips on a radarscope. These were not correlated with any known aircraft in the area. The objects appeared to converge into one very large object, the large object remaining stationary for 10 to 15 minutes. It stayed where it was for a few minutes and then moved away out of radar range. Other radar operators spotted a single blip to the southeast that moved out of range at 5000 miles per hour. Later, another blip was seen moving 12,000 miles per hour. Another target was spotted moving about 4000 miles an hour —and it was spotted by a C47 pilot as it flashed beneath his plane. On the ground a number of people saw a bright blur flash by. Then Lakenheath Air Force Base radars, to the west northwest, began to pick up the objects. Ground personnel saw a luminous object approach from a southwesterly direction, stop, then shoot off toward the east. Not much later, two white lights appeared, joined up with one another and disappeared in formation together. This was all followed by two separate radar screens at Lakenheath. Pilots were sent to investigate in jet fighters–they saw the object in the distance and saw it on radar, very clearly. Then it vanished. Another pilot had one of the UFOs follow him–at a consistent distance. Philip Klass suggested that the radar reports were caused by spurious signals, the result of new, poorly understood radar equipment, which can make a stationary object look like a moving object and can show false signals from inversions and the like. But this doesn’t explain the visual fixes that went with the radar sightings, or the apparent intelligent behavior of the objects seen moving in tandem. Arch UFO skeptic Klass however did the right thing, in raising the very real possibility of radar mis identifications–they do happen and they can happen in clusters. I believe that every ufo researcher needs his own mental Philip Klass filter–he needs to Philip Klass every sighting in order to eliminate the noise, to make certain that this is the real thing. Because all too often it’s not the real thing–and without that "inner Phil Klass" it’s easy to be fooled. What I like about the Bentwaters report is again the multiplicity of witnesses, the reliability of witnesses–there are a record number of reliable witnesses here–and especially the excellent documentation of radar readings. Here are some UFOs that no one can say didn’t appear on radar. These UFOs left their footprints. Again, it might be possible to explain them as unknown atmospheric phenomena–but they did seem to behave intelligently. You’ve all probably heard of the notorious Condon Committee–the group of scientists who were supposed to decide whether or not UFOs were real based on objectively looking at the evidence. But it does seem, based on records of their communications with one another, as if these gentlemen set out to disprove UFOs rather than find out if they were real. However, in the Bentwaters case their review concluded, quote, "…although conventional or natural explanations certainly cannot be ruled out, the probability of such seems low in this case and the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved seems high." That’s from the Condon committee–famous for debunking UFOs. But they couldn’t quite debunk this one. Of course, when they say "genuine UFO" they mean genuine Unidentified Flying Object, something unknown–not necessarily genuine spacecraft. In the Washington Nationals case in 1952 numerous UFOs were picked up by three different radar tracking stations and were seen by dozens of witnesses, including pilots and tower operators. Various skeptics have explained it as temperature inversions creating radar artifacts–but that doesn’t explain the visual sightings. Another UFO case I like: On October 24, 1968 the Minot North Dakota Air Force Base experienced a group of sightings made by men on the ground , at the Strategic Air Command sites scattered around the base. There was a radar sighting on the ground, then a visual sighting from the crew of a B52; there were a number of sightings made by a number of men in scattered locations in the area who were not in communication with one another at the time. When the UFO approached the B52 its radio transmitters ceased to work. A missile maintenance man spotted a bright orange-red object like the one sighted in Levelland, Texas. As he started to move, the object followed the observer’s car then accelerated and appeared to stop some miles away. In response to his call a B52 came to the area to have a looksee, and confirmed having sighted a bright light of some type that appeared to be hovering just over or on the ground. Here comes a sinister moment in the story–at this time, the security alarm for one of the sites was activated. This was an alarm for both the outer and inner perimeters. When guards arrived at the scene they found the outer door was open–and the combination lock on the inner door had been tampered with. Project Bluebook attributed these events to charged plasma in the atmosphere–though that isn’t known to glow or appear to be solid. Still, it’s a possible answer, though not the only possible one. A similar pattern, with differently shaped objects, had appeared over Portland, Oregon in 1947–numerous untainted sightings including those of police officers. However, I dismiss the Portland sightings. Why? Because some other witnesses saw an airplane ejecting silver objects from it, which suggests a hoax of some kind. Does it prove it’s a hoax–no. But I dismiss the Portland sighting because of that blot on the report’s escutcheon–the witnesses who saw similar shapes dropped from a plane. That casts enough doubt on the event that I cannot take it seriously. And that is part of a pattern, a style of approach I’m trying to suggest here: zero tolerance rigor in the scientific study of UFOs. We have lots and lots of UFO reports–we can afford to study only the ones we can be sure of, because there are so very many we cannot trust. Most UFO reports just do not come as well corroborated as the cases I’ve just read you that took place in Bentwaters or Levelland or Minot. Photographs of UFOs are usually even more problematic. I’ve never seen a UFO photo or film that couldn’t have been either faked–or which couldn’t be of an object so distantly, distortedly seen it could be many other things. One of the most famous series of photos was taken off the coast of Brazil–it shows an object like a flattened planet Saturn, a very definite saucerlike anomaly. It sounded good at first and looks good too–there were supposedly dozens of other witnesses besides the photographer, according to the Brazilian papers. Many years later a researcher did travel to the area and found some people who claimed to be among those witnesses–but by then the case was tainted by having become famous. Brazil is permeated with UFO mythology and alien invasion folklore. People there adore it. But the main reason to doubt this famous photo is simply that the photographer turned out to be someone who was well known for trick photography, including double exposures; and he was someone who’d been involved in faking UFO photos before. According to my approach–that eliminates these photos for good. They are blighted by the photographer’s lack of credibility. And besides, they simply look like double exposures of a model to me. Kevin Randle, in his excellent new book SCIENTIFIC UFOLOGY, seems to lean toward the photo series’ reality–but I discard them completely and utterly because the photographer had been known to fake these sorts of things. I also discard repeaters–people who’ve seen a UFO more than once are, in my opinion, less credible than a first timer. The odds against seeing one more than once–except perhaps if you’re an astronaut, say–are extremely high. Most people, if not all people, who claim to have repeated experiences with UFOs turn out to be hoaxers or self deluding. That’s just the way it has shaped up in the field over the years. For this reason I discard the famous McMinville, Oregon photo by Paul Trent that appears to show some spacecraft details: Trent had had other UFO experiences. And it would be easy to fake the photo with a model. Kevin Randle however believes the photo is real. UFO enthusiasts often claim that there isn’t enough representation for their viewpoint, that UFOs are real–somehow they manage to give the impression that skeptics have the upper hand. But with respect to the media: go to any bookstore and look for the books on UFOs. You’ll find many, many books by people who assert they’ve been abducted, that flying saucers are practically outnumbering the new VW bugs and Volvos too, books by believers–how many books do you see in Barnes and Noble by skeptics? When you see specials on TV–how often are they skeptical in tone? Skeptical UFO specials aren’t sensationalistic–they don’t draw as many viewers as the believer kind. They aren’t exotic. Skeptics are quoted for thirty seconds and believers for the rest of the hour. The skeptical viewpoint is mostly not represented on network television.
But I believe this approach is all backwards–what ufo believers don’t understand is that the skeptic is their best friend. Because the ratio of noise-to-signal in the data transmission, so to speak, in the UFO phenomenon is very high. There is so much sheer silliness in the field, so much sloppy investigation, the field desperately needs the skeptical viewpoint so that it can prove that UFOs are real–and yes, if it has any hope of proving that aliens are among us, it will need skeptics to make that proof acceptable to the scientific community and to the thinking members of the public. Unless, of course, someone comes up with a real live alien or a spacecraft in hand. No one has so far.
Then there’s the new MJ-12 papers. The papers reiterate claims that have coincidentally been trendy just lately, that certain human technology such as fiberoptics came from a crashed saucer. These papers were coincidentally discovered just after that claim was popularized by Corso and others. They also contain trendy references to HIV-like viruses found on alien bodies. A UFO researcher in England who had received letters from the man who claimed these new papers were anonymously mailed to him, said that those letters had the same typing characteristics as the new set of MJ-12 papers–the letters were typed on the same typewriter as the MJ-12 papers. And they refer to the UFO crash at Roswell, which I have concluded never took place anyway. The references in the new papers to fiberoptics and the like drive the nail into the coffin for me–claims that human technology derive from crashed saucers is ludicrous — we know who designed fiberoptics, for example, and why, and how, and the whole process is historically laid out with hundreds of witnesses. It is slander to say they didn’t do it–it’s the same as accusing the designers of fraud. Corso claimed that transistors came from UFOs. Spacecraft that came from another star system used something as crude as transistors? Do they also have freon air conditioning? But I don’t need doubts raised that way to dismiss the MJ-12 papers–I dismissed them out of hand because they could always have been forged, they could always have been just cutting and pasting. What is more likely–that these are some mysterious government papers relating to a UFO crash and alien bodies, or that they are fabricated? The fabrication will always be more likely. They are just papers. But what happened at Bentwaters and the Washington Nationals is a well documented series of actual events–those are evidence I CANNOT dismiss. The MJ-12 Papers anyone could have forged–scientifically they must be shrugged off. But at Bentwaters there were more than a dozen highly trained witnesses with corroborating stories and documentation–now THAT is evidence. People go into the minutia of the Travis Walton case–how his uric acid level in the urine tests showed that he had, in fact, eaten in the days he was missing and that contradicts his story; how he failed the first lie detector test and passed one many years later only because he’d told his story over and over for years and was comfortable with it–something that will make a polygraph test meaningless; how he might’ve worked up his story with his confederates and why. But I don’t need any of that– a number of researchers were told by both friends and family of Walton that he planned the ‘abduction’ from the beginning. Travis had boasted that he would win the $5000 offered by the National Enquirer for the best UFO case of the year. Walton planned to win the money, designed a case to win it, and, indeed, was awarded the money in 1976. Then there is the amazing coincidence between the Walton case and the abduction of Barney and Betty Hill–a movie about the Hill case, THE UFO INCIDENT, was broadcast by NBC in late October 1975–two weeks after the movie aired on TV, Walton disappeared in his own faked abduction. To me those two facts, especially the boasting, is enough. It cannot be accepted rigorously because of those things.The Walton case must be disregarded. I find all abduction cases, so far, equally suspect. The whole issue of abductions is so vast–there is so much apparent testimony, there are so many people making the claim, there are so many hypnotists and pseudo-scientists profiting from it, so many books and interviews–to even approach fairness to the issue would require a whole talk in itself. Maybe several. But I’ll raise a few issues just to underline my point of view.
On February 22, 1964 Barney Hill first described in a hypno-regression the aliens that he encountered. Twelve days before that date an episode of THE OUTER LIMITS called "the Bellero Shield" featured the exact same aliens, the same facial features, features with wrap around eyes, which other "contactees" had not seen until then. The grey aliens described by Betty Hill years after her expereince bear a striking resemblance to the aliens seen in an episode of TWILIGHT ZONE called "Hocus Pocus and Frisby" that aired in 1962. The Hill abduction, as Kevin Randle points out, did not spring into existence in a cultural vacuum–that is one great point about all alien abduction cases. This is a society where information, real and fantasized, is shared nationally on television and through the movies, not to mention magazines and books. Betty’s interest in UFOs predated her experience–because her sister had seen and discussed a UFO long before. People also forget that the Hills’ own psychiatrist never believed the story told under hypnosis. He believed it to be a confabulation. Another abductee speaking in Ft. Smith, Arkansas described having been abducted while waiting in his car at a railroad crossing. Under hypnosis he told a story of being examined on a table by aliens with a screen nearby showing his internal organs including his beating heart–and that is a scene straight out of a movie called KILLERS FROM SPACE. Small aliens with large heads and pointy chins and huge eyes were featured in many 1950s science fiction films, before they were reported in abductions–INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN, for example. Implants and tiny probes pushed into the back of the neck appeared in 1953's INVADERS FROM MARS–here are several scenes in the movie that mirror exactly stories told by modern abductees. Implants are featured in IT CONQUERED THE WORLD. Other abduction scenarios that turned up in abduction stories were seen in THIS ISLAND EARTH, THE NIGHT CALLER, NOT OF THIS EARTH and many other films. There was an explosion of reports of grey aliens after the film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Coincidence? You decide. And now movies like COMMUNION and FIRE IN THE SKY and Fox TV specials generate more and more imitators. More than once in my life I have had the expereince of waking in the night to find I was paralyzed. I had a sense that there were unseen hands on me, pulling me, a presence preventing me from moving. Then it would pass and I’d be all right again. This is something called isolated idiopathic sleep paralysis and it happens, now and then, to millions of people. Suppose that you experience such a momentary fit–and you’ve recently seen a movie with abduction imagery in it. Suppose you’re a person with a certain psychological profile, a little hysteric, a person whose needs are not being met and you’re looking for an explanation. If I’d been that type of person in that situation my episodes of sleep paralysis might’ve led me to confabulate an abduction experience around the core of that very frightening nocturnal fit. The psychology of alien abduction is a study that could consume volumes. One thing that’s quite obvious, though rarely talked about in meetings like this, is the sexual component of many modern abductions. The abductees are constrained and probed–things are pushed into their anuses or vaginas. Genetic material is taken from their wombs. Sometimes they’re raped; they’re forced to have sex with human alien hybrids. There’s a support group in Colorado of people who’ve been, they saiy, abducted by reptilian aliens that forced them into sex–and these people are deeply ashamed because they enjoy the sex. I'm quoting here from THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA: Research by several different investigators has suggested that as many as half of abductees are homosexual. Homosexuality is, of course, not a psychological problem in itself, but society’s tendency to reject homosexuality–that is, homophobia–can create enormous psychological tensions. As many as 90 percent of abductees studied have had some kind of sexual dysfunction. Look at what happens in abduction fantasies–the abductees are violated, are made to feel shame. It has been suggested that at least some abduction scenarios are the result of distorted childhood memories of sexual molestation by parents or doctors. Suppose that society has made you neurotic about homosexual yearnings, or other kinds of sexual exotica–how do you express that in a way that’s acceptable to society. When abductions have become mainstream–that could be one way. In earlier times the same need was answered by folkloric tales of abduction by fairy creatures, warlocks and demons–who always sexually abused the medieval abductees. So, one of the pitfalls of ufology is the tendency to use faulty informational gathering tools. Among the most faulty is the so called reverse-speech methodology, and channeling. Channeling offers us no real reason to take it seriously as an information source. Hypnotic regression isn’t much better. It is not allowed as a method of obtaining information for court testimony in most states including California. Why, if it’s a reliable method of getting information? Because it is not reliable. Hypnotists consciously or unconsciously contaminate witnesses in their drive to validate their own belief structures about the reality of alien abduction. For the documentation on that I refer you to THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA. People forget that another term for hypnosis is auto-suggestion. The whole idea is implanting suggestion; it is a state in which contamination by suggestion is even more likely than in a normal state. The idea that information given during a trance is "more reliable" for some reason is a complete myth. Why should it be considered more reliable? It comes from the same fallible, suggestive, confused human being–that is, all human beings are fallible, suggestive and to some extent confused. It is also relatively easy to fake being in a trance. There is a way to determine if a state of real hypnosis exists–THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA tells the story of a woman who, under repeated hypnotic regression, told long, involved and detailed stories of her continuing abductions that matched those told by others under the influence of hypno-regression. She felt that there was more to the events than hypnosis revealed, so she agreed to be subjected to sodium amytal, a drug that can put one in a truly altered, truth-accessing state. With a certified medical doctor present the woman was given the chemical–under its influence there was suddenly no testimony of alien abduction anymore. She remembered nothing of the sort under the influence of the "truth drug." UFOs should be studied. There is something there–I’m not sure what yet, but something. But they should not be studied through the rose colored glasses of our need to believe. Because–make no mistake–I want to believe in flying saucers. I struggle against it… I always have. I try to get into a middle state, that special path of enquiry that is not biased toward belief or disbelief. I have to work at it. I have always wanted to believe that aliens are among us–the alternative is a kind of cosmic loneliness, and maybe a sense that the human race, the terribly fallible human race, is all there is; and that this world is all there is. I theorize that one of the psychological motivations that makes people want to believe in flying saucers is the fear of death. UFOs imply transcendance; they imply a way out, they suggest that our limitations, our rules, the laws of biology and mortality are only local, only temporary until the space brothers show us a way out. They seem to imply a bridge to a higher reality–and that implies escape from those things we fear in this reality… |