The UFO experience

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How does a person come to decide that he is having a UFO experience? Clearly this is a critical question, both in terms of the person communicating his experience to others and in terms of the experience being compared to other, 'similar' experiences. In the first place, it is possible that the individual may not define the experience as 'UFO' during the experience at all, in the sense that the object experienced is recognized as being one of a class of 'UFO objects'. He may feel that he is having an experience with an anomalous object, and his experience may be reported for this reason, even though it is not clear to what class of objects the experience belongs. Previous to 1947, for instance, when the phrase 'flying saucers' was first used, those who had what would now be classified as UFO experiences could only describe them in very specific terms, as they were unaware that others were having similar experiences s1 T. Bloecher, Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 (published by the author, 1967).. The event may thus be labelled a 'UFO experience' only a considerable time after the event itself. This can happen when the person discusses his experience with others or even after the report has been made and is being compared to other reports. At the time, the person may simply feel that the experience is anomalous because it does not fit into any conventional cultural categories.

On the other hand, once the social category 'UFO' exists, it is possible to imagine the event in advance of the actual experience. There would thus exist a number of perceptual cues which would be seen as indicative of a UFO experience n1For some suggestive comparisons in the perception of monsters, see A.I. Hallowell, 'Cultural Factors in the Structuralization of Perception', in J.H. Rohrer and M. Sherif (eds), Social Psychology at the Cross-Roads (New York: Harper, 1951), 178-90.. There may even be a strong psychological set on the part of some individuals toward perceiving ambiguous stimuli as UFOs. Consider the following account:

I really wanted to see a UFO. I remember saying aloud.... 'This is no natural phenomenon. It's really UFOs', I ... made an attempt to communicate with them. I had a flashlight ... and signaled ... in Morse code.... No visible response elicited.... After I came into the house I had an overpowering drive to sleep.... My dog ... went over between the two trash cans like she was frightened to death.... High frequency sound inaudible to us? s2University of Colorado, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam, 1968), 577.

It is ironic that the stimulus for this experience may have been the debris of the Russian satellite Zond IV re-entering the atmosphere s3Ibid., 571..

Not all those who have UFO experiences achieve the perception so easily. In many cases the perception of a UFO comes only after several other perceptual 'hypotheses' have been tried out and found wanting. Only the failure to make any of the non-anomalous hypotheses 'fit' the stimulus leads to a perception of an anomaly:

The object looked like the top of a parachute canopy, he told me; it was white and he thought he could see the wedges of panels. He said that he thought it was moving across the ground a little bit too fast to be drifting in the wind, but he was sure that somebody had bailed out and that he was looking at the top of his parachute. He was just ready to call the tower when he suddenly realized that this 'parachute' was drifting across the wind s4 E. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Ace Books, 1956), 161-62..

In another case which the author investigated, a merchant and his daughter saw what he thought at first were the windows of an airliner in the sky above his father's home. But he rejected this idea when he realized that the 'airliner' was not moving. Was it a helicopter then? This idea also had to be rejected, as the witness reported hearing no sound. Finally the object appeared to be a 150-foot wide disc perhaps some 800 feet off the ground, with portholes 'like the windows on an airliner'. After eight or ten minutes, the object departed slowly to the northwest.

This 'escalation of hypotheses', as Hynek has called it s5J. A. Hynek, The UFO Experience (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), 13; see also M. Carrouges, Les Apparitions des Martiens (Paris: Arteme Fayard, 1963), 188-95., is a typical feature of many anomaly sightings. It is, according to one theory of perceptual recognition s6J. Bruner, 'On Perceptual Readiness', Psychological Review, Vol. 64 (1957), 123-52., the way one would expect the human perceptual apparatus to operate if indeed it were to encounter an object which it had great difficulty recognizing. The relative slowness in perceiving an anomalous object would be the result of attempting to match the stimulus with more common perceptual ideas first. If an object is rare or 'impossible' (such as a red ace of spades), it will be perceived for what it is only with great difficulty.

Another possible indication that the subject of an anomaly experience is indeed perceiving an anomalous object correctly is the existence of critical reactions to the perception. In his study of public reactions to the Welles' 'Invasion from Mars' broadcast of 1937, Cantril found that belief in the 'invasion' was caused by lack of what he called 'critical ability' s7H. Cantril, Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 112.. Briefly, critical ability was shown by those who made effective checks about the authenticity of the described events either through the internal evidence of the broadcast itself or by checking the social context for counter-indications, such as routine programmes on other radio channels. Those without this critical ability, even when they were of a relatively high educational level, believed that the play was indeed a news broadcast, that the Martians were actually landing, and so on - except in the case of those who were lucky enough to find out by accident that the broadcast was a play.

In UFO experiences, one also finds some witnesses who feel that critical checks on their own perceptions are necessary to validate them. For instance, a group of scientists who thought they might be mistaking airplanes near their installation for UFOs had planes fly over to see if they produced the same effect s8 Ruppelt, op.cit. note 22, 266.. Still other ways to make sure that one is seeing something correctly are to ask someone else if they can see it as well s9Ibid., 47. ; or once one has left the locale of the sighting, to return to it to see if the object is still there:

I wanted to make sure it was there. To take another look to make sure I wasn't seeing things. We did go back s10J. Fuller, Incident at Exeter (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966), 64..

If the person who has an anomaly experience is to make public witness of his experience, he must be sure that he has indeed seen something anomalous. Having made critical checks is likely to enhance this certainty, but he must also be confident that he can discriminate an anomalous stimulus from a non-anomalous one. In one survey, for instance, persons who had not reported their UFO experiences most frequently (forty percent) claimed as the major reason for their non-reporting that 'it was probably something normal that just looked funny for one reason or another' s11University of Colorado, op.cit. note 20, 228..

One could say a great deal more about the internal constitution of anomaly experiences in general and UFO experiences in particular, but hopefully this brief summary will give the reader some feeling for the nature of UFO experiences s12For a fuller treatment, see Hynek, op.cit. note 23..

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