COMMENTS ON UFOs

Ronald Neman, Ph.D.

(Circa 1977-1981)

The White House recently asked the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) to consider a study of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). According to one Gallup Poll, 20 million United States Citizens have seen UFOs and over half believe that UFOs are real-world phenomenon. The highly successful movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the popular television series, UFO Reports and In Search of the Unknown and the high level of sales of books about UFOs further attests to the public interest in this topic. In addition, the election of Present Carter, who admitted to having seen a UFO, added further to the contention by some that UFOs are a subject worthy of scientific inquiry. (In this paper, UFO means a structured, air-worthy craft operated by intelligent robots or beings.)

In reply to the White House Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, then NASA administrator Robert Frosch replied that there is nothing to study, because there are no captured UFOs or UFO parts. This view was shared by Dr. Edward U. Condon in his report of an Air Force-financed study of the subject released on Halloween’s Day, 1968. In addition, astronomer, writer, and television circuit rider - the late Carl Sagan has spoken quite negatively about current day interests in UFOs. Commenting upon President Carter’s request to NASA, Science noted the general lack of interest among scientists in the UFO issue. The reason for absence of curiosity seems well described by NASA’s Frosch in his reply to the White House. “…we have not been able to devise a sound scientific procedure for investigating these phenomena. To proceed on a research task without a disciplinary framework and an exploratory technique in mind would be wasteful and probably unproductive.”

The behavioral sciences offer a disciplinary framework for studying UFO phenomena, however. That framework is analysis of UFO reporting behavior. Scientists and philosophers such as Dr. B.F. Skinner and Dr. Steven Winocur have advanced the concepts that human verbal behavior is subject to scientific analysis in causal, natural science terms just as other behavior may be studied. Leo Sprinkle notes in his chapter in the fascinating popular account of UFO confrontations, Abducted, by Coral and Jim Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, “The worldwide controversy is not due to the question of whether there are UFO reports; the controversy is about the significance of the UFO experience and the appropriate hypotheses to explain each UFO report. Essentially, hypotheses are needed to explain why people make reports or claims of UFO encounters. What are the stimulus conditions that cause people to say, “I have had a UFO experience?” Some basic hypotheses are suggested below: (Note: a scientific hypothesis is, in essence an educated guess.)

Hoax/Hallucination Hypothesis: This hypothesis deals with verbal behavior of persons who say they have encountered UFOs when they did not. The cause of their behavior lies not in some perceptual event, but in other stimulation. This behavior may be subsumed under the following not necessarily mutually exclusive stimulus categories: 1. Mental illness. These are internally generated stimuli, i.e., mental verbal stimuli cause some people to say they have had UFO encounters. These people have not had physical encounters with UFOs however, but believe in their minds that they have. That which causes such internally generated stimulation is reading or hearing about UFO’s and consequent confusion, delusions, or hallucinations related to that stimulation. These persons have come to believe that what they read or heard about can be interpreted as a personal experience. A member of the Air Force-financed team studying UFOs, the group’s leader Edward Condon, had what may be described as a peculiar fascination with UFO reports accountable by the hoax/hallucination hypothesis. Saunders suggests that this “obsession” may in part account for the negative character of the Condon Report. 2. Liars. These people say they have had UFO encounters, but have not and do not believe that they have. They differ from those with emotional disturbance in that they liars know they have not seen any UFOs whereas the mentally ill may believe they have. Liars may go to great trouble to fake their experiences. They may even have what they believe are noble motivations, e.g., they believe that by their false testimony, they may give substance and report to those making true reports. Liars may be attention seekers or people who hope to profit from their false tales. Anti-UFO advocate Phil Klaas gives emotional credence to the liar hypothesis in his book, which attempts to debunk UFO accounts.

Misperception/Victim Hypothesis. These hypotheses deal with verbal behavior of persons who have reported some perceptual event that they interpreted as a UFO, but which were misperceptions. They saw something, but what they saw was not a UFO. They saw something which could be explained in terms other than UFO phenomena. A note of caution is needed here, because to say a report can be explained in non-UFO terms depends upon who is doing the explaining and the extent to which the explanation takes into account all the details of the percipient’s account. Here are some stimulus classes: 1. Astronomical stimuli. On very clear nights, certain planets and stars appear unusually bright. These include the planets Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn and particularly the start Sirius, the brightest and one of the nearest to earth. So vividly can these celestial bodies appear under conditions of varying frequency that people often mistake them for unnatural phenomena. The perception of these bodies under conditions of unusual brilliance has been one cause for people to make reports or claims of seeing UFOs. In addition, there are other phenomena, such as meteors and comets that may give rise to misperception that become reported as UFOs. 2. Atmospheric stimuli. These stimuli range from the simple to the abstruse. On the simple end of the continuum is the reflected light of the setting sun from a small, odd, or smoothly circular-shaped cloud fragment. The major cloud body may already be too near the horizon to reflect sunlight. Such a phenomenon could readily appear to be a UFO. Near the recondite end of this stimulus dimension are the phenomena of swamp or marsh gas, Saint Elmo’s fire, and ball lightening. Many UFO reports have been interpreted as misperceptions of theses kind of stimulus conditions. 3. Aeronautical stimuli. These stimuli can be broken down in the three classes: a) airplanes and helicopters; weather and research balloons; and c) artificial satellites. In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kinds, a group of people gathered in a field where UFOs had been previously witnessed. Suddenly, brilliant, blinding lights in the sky approach menacingly close, terrifying the observers. The UFOs turn out to be lights on low-flying helicopters. This scene illustrates several points, one of which is the misperception of explainable events as UFOs. Unfamiliar aircraft, aircraft in new, unusual, or irregular flight paths, peculiar reflections of sunlight by airplanes or helicopters, contortions of high atmosphere weather balloons, bright aircraft lights, satellites in orbit and satellites re-entering the atmosphere upon orbital decay have all been evocative of UFO reports. 4. Victims of hoax stimuli. Occasionally, people will report seeing something, which appears to be a UFO, and which someone else has deliberately concocted to look like a UFO. The victims are neither mentally ill or hoaxers, nor do they observe something that can readily be accounted for as atmospheric, astronomical, or aeronautical stimuli. The reports of sightings of what in truth are hoax stimuli can be construed as misperceptions, because if the viewer could see the hoax UFO up close, they would quickly understand what the stimulus was and realize that they had been the victim of someone else’s mischief. In addition, more than once have authorities treated hoax victims as if they were the hoaxers instead of the victims. True Perception Hypothesis: This hypothesis is the UFO report corresponds accurately to the stimulus conditions; the report is a true account of things seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched or otherwise directly experienced. The true Perception or True Encounter Hypothesis states that the stimulus class involved in a UFO report are UFOs and that there is veridicality between the description of the UFO and UFO-related events and the events that actually transpired.

Summary of Hypotheses: The three preceding groups of hypotheses describe some stimulus classes that may evoke UFO reporting behavior. The hypotheses deal with non-perceptions, misperceptions, and true perceptions. The polling data that say the public believes in UFOs suggest popular support for the Third, or True Perception Hypothesis. Scientific and military groups have tended to invoke Hypotheses 1 and 2 type of accounts to explain reporting behavior. These hypotheses are rather general and simplistic, and it should be noted that UFO reporting behavior, like most other behaviors, might have multiple determinants. These will briefly be looked at next.

Social and Organismic Variables. In one classic experiment, it was shown that verbal labels tended to dramatically influence perception and recall of ambiguous line drawings. This was a specific illustration of a general principle that people interpret things in the context of familiar, often culturally determined concepts. Thus several centuries ago, when the ghost concept was accepted as a general reality, people reported seeing ghost more often than they have (perhaps up until quite recently!) In Catholic religion dominated countries, visions of the Virgin Mother Mary are more frequently reported that in non-Catholic cultures. In addition, the evolution of the UFO concept in our culture similarly provides a framework for reporting and interpreting some unusual, ambiguous, and infrequent stimuli.

There is a story of a purported UFO sighting in which the percipients were asked how they knew that what they saw was an UFO, to which they answered “It had UFO written on the side of it.” Whether an urban legend or not, this story illustrated in the extreme the effects and need to have labels by which experiences may be sorted. It is of course logically absurd for an unidentified object to affix a label to itself proclaiming its status of not being identified. The point here is that given the concept of the existence of UFOs, whether or not we believe in that concept, it becomes possible thence to interpret ambiguous or unrecognized stimuli as being examples of that concept.

Another facet of UFO reporting behavior is reporting by others or other’s verbal behaviors about UFOs. We have all had the opportunity to observe that people talk about weather conditions. When it snows, the word “snow” is spoken more frequently than otherwise. And when one person talks about snow, listeners tend to respond to words about snow. If the weatherman says at 6:00 A.M. “Possible snow today,” then the frequency of the word "snow” being spoken will increase, even in the absence of a single flake. UFO reports in the media increase the frequency of talking about UFOs as well. Thus, if a number of UFO reports have recently occurred, and you observe some bright light in the sky, you may say ”UFO” and even report it to the authorities, believing as it were, to be part of a wave of sightings.

Similarly, you may have witnessed what you thought was a UFO in the past, but at the time did not speak about it. You read later a UFO report that parallels your own experiences, geographical location, weather conditions, etc. Alternatively, you read about another witness’s account of the very same thing that you saw. Both may be sufficiently provoking stimuli to cause you to speak. Going back to Freud, and accepted by Skinner and psychoanalytic dogma alike, is the concept that behavior is multiply determined. This concluding paragraph has touched on some of the additional stimulus conditions that may bear upon an individual's making a report of seeing, experiencing, or encountering a UFO. Now, we will turn to some of the basic dynamics of reporting behavior.

Reporting behavior can be studied systematically from a scientific point of view. The focus would be to give a plausible, naturalistic account of what causes people to make reporting and contact. Verbal behavior can be described in terms of what is called the general operant behavior paradigm or model.

General Operant Behavior Paradigm: Most of us have heard of classical condition where Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell. Operant behavior is different and far more typical of behavior we are familiar with. The operant model (or paradigm) consists of two elements. Element 1 has two parts, a discriminative stimulus and a response. Element 2 has one part, a reinforcing stimulus. These are shown in symbolic form below:

Stimulus(Discriminative)   Response   S (REINFORCEMENT)

or

SD R SR

The symbols stand for the following terms:

SD = a discriminative stimulus (a green traffic light)

R = a response given in the presence of the discriminative stimulus (stepping on the accelerator of the car)

SR = reinforcement (the car moves forward when you accelerate at a green light))

A response which occurs in the presence of a discriminative stimulus and which is followed by reinforcement tends to increase in frequency and strength. What increases is the power of the discriminative stimulus to evoke a given response. For example, if a child, upon being presented a ball, says the word ball and receives praises immediately afterwards, the likelihood that he or she will say ball in a similar situation in the future increases. Generally, verbal behavior, as is all behavior, is shaped by the contingencies in which it occurs.

This model, proposed by Skinner, rests of the idea that a naturalistic account of behavior, including human verbal behavior, can be made in terms of a) the genetic predisposition of organisms, the individual history of reinforcement and c) prevailing stimulus conditions. While many students of language violently oppose the theoretical formulations of Skinner, e.g., Chomsky, Skinner’s approach provides an objective basis for examining some of the verbal behaviors included in sighting and contact reports.

The “Tact.” One type of verbal response class is called a “tact,” (e.g., facts, acts, etc.) This is a spoken or written verbal response which attempts to describe some discriminative stimulus and in adults is shaped by a highly diverse mixture of rewards, no one of which is particularly associated with the discriminative stimulus/descriptive response tendency. People become trained, in other words, to describe their environments and to do so in the absence of any specific or prevailing promise of direct reinforcement. The credibility of UFO reports then rests upon the extent to which sightings and contact reports fit a tact model or paradigm.

Many of us, however, have ourselves or have known others who have been reluctant to speak directly about their sighting experiences for fear that the reinforcement following such verbal behavior would have a negative characteristic. Verbal accounts can, however, be “elicited” by the introduction of a mand.

The “Mand.” Another type of verbal operant or response class is called a mand, (e.g., command, demand, mandate). The mand occurs in the presence of some specific discriminative stimulus and reinforcement contingency tied to the occasion under which the mand occurs. An example using the fear of UFO reporting might be, “Please tell me what saw…I won’t laugh or tell anyone that you told me about seeing a UFO.” That verbal discriminative stimulus is directly tied to the respondent answering with their information. Another example might be describing a true UFO encounter with the hope of making money off the tale. Pure cases of mands and tacts are hard to isolate and tend to be intermixed with one another.

It should be noted above that in one case the discriminative stimulus was another verbal response, whereas in another example of a tact, the environmental even was the discriminative stimulus. It appears that a desirable approach in analyzing verbal reports of UFOs would involved a description of possible SDs, Rs, and SRs .

Two likely candidates that cue the reporting of UFOs are a) UFOs and/or UFO-like entities and written or spoken verbal behavior or others. In the first instance, the speaker (who makes a report of a sighting) is attempting to give a description of something he or she observed or experienced, e.g., a bright red light, a shiny metallic object, little gray men,” etc. In the second case, the speaker is tacting the words of others and presenting them as his own. These two classes may be combined to form a compound stimulus, e.g., following reading about a UFO sighting in the vicinity, the reader may look up at the sky more. This response enables him or her to have a greater likelihood of observing something. Combined with a report someone read about, the passing of a meteor burning up may be transformed into a second sighting. The UFO controversy rests with the specification of the discriminative stimulus.