The 70th anniversary of “the case that started all” –the
observation of 9 strange objects flying near Mt. Rainier made by Kenneth Arnold
on June 24,1947—surely is motivating and will motivate many people to remember
the case, but also to do something special, like giving a public lecture, set
up an exhibition, writing a book or an article.
That is the case of a world recognized student of the UFO
subject as is our friend Vicente-Juan
Ballester Olmos. He together with folklorist and also UFO student Thomas E. Bullard have written each one
an article about the UFO subject.
Those articles, originally published at Academia.edu are reproduced
here submitted to the analysis and consideration of our members and eventually
anyone interested in the UFO phenomenon.
Please refer your comments to each author, and to this
blog to share your own thoughts.
-----------------------
THE NATURE
OF UFO EVIDENCE: TWO VIEWS
Part I
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos
It is exactly 70 years since the society of
the United States was thrilled and shaken by the first report of “flying
saucers”. This was the early sighting by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. It also
started a phenomenon ufologists would later call “wave”, a huge avalanche of
reports throughout all the nation’s newspapers. It was short-lived and profiled
as a sharp Gaussian curve developed over only three weeks: following the initial
sighting’s press coverage, news interest ignited, peaked, reached a saturation
point and quickly declined. This
aftermath triggered two important developments: (1) the stories were
disseminated all over the globe, taking on a life of their own in every
country, and (2) the Army Air Force (later, USAF) jumped on the matter, beginning
to investigate the visions of flying saucers (later, unidentified flying
objects or UFOs).
Seven decades of UFO history have provided
countless facts and histories, actions and reactions, military and civilian initiatives,
Congress and Parliamentary hearings, symposia, scientists and laypersons
declarations, and countless UFO-related portrayals in media, cinema,
television, publishing and advertisement, daily bombarding and influencing the
citizens. Not to mention the millions of supposed UFO reports that emerged from
the public and the feedback they yielded. Not to neglect the important effect produced
by thousands of UFO proponents all over the globe, people that James Carrion,
ex-CEO of MUFON, the top UFO organization in the world, characterized as “self-proclaimed
investigators or investigation journalists, whose modus operandi is to perpetuate the mystery, not to solve it”. Seen
from a European perspective, this diagnostics is right on target.
In the past people regarded strange phenomena
in the sky as signs, portents, and wonders, understood in religious or
folkloric terms. Only on rare occasions
were such sights reported and recorded—in the Middle Ages by a learned monk,
later by a naturalist or scientist, today by the media.
Since the XIX century, literature and press,
and more modernly, cinema and television, have helped to create fictional
expectations in the minds of people. This science-fiction scenario had a
disastrous effect on the eyewitnesses, reducing their critical judgment and
matter-of-factly obstructing a rational self-evaluation of the event observed. This
problem infects even elite observers like pilots, military personnel or
scientists, whose reports ‒as experience demonstrates‒ ultimately are explained
in mundane, conventional terms at the same rate as those by laymen.
Close review of UFO sighting reports,
especially those of higher strangeness or image recording examples, reveals
that every instance is individualistic (unique and exclusive). There are not
two occurrences equal, in the same way that there are no two UFO photographs perfectly
equal. Except for a general resemblance due to known symbols from the
collective imaginary, every craft’s shape, dimension and kinetics, or every
occupant’s biometry and behavior is dissimilar. It is like a theater of the
absurd. It rather looks like the result of everyone’s own creative imagination.
Case after case, when duly documented and analyzed,
is demolished or downgraded. Every day that goes by, we hear of another classic
UFO case long considered uncanny and insoluble, now probed and found to have an
ordinary, conventional cause. Here is one of the most recent discoveries: for
years, Western ufologists have praised the 1979 dossier by Gindilis, Men’kov & Petrovskaya (USSR Academy of Sciences)
reviewing a collection of apparently unsolvable UFO sightings in Russia, mainly
centered on a 1967 wave. UFOs were not an American construction after all! Yet
investigations by Dr. Yulii Platov first and, recently, work by Jim Oberg,
completely trashed the reliability of the Soviet research, showing that most of
1967 cases corresponded to Russian military space activities (the Fractional
Orbital Bombardment System or FOBS). Another piece of “scientific” evidence
that failed.
Advanced imaging systems aboard military
aircraft are available today in such numbers that one could expect that UFO
images would be recorded frequently, if UFOs appeared in the atmosphere with
the regularity some reports suggest. The bare truth is that the evidence of
anything exceptional or singular recorded with such powerful means is extremely
poor or non-existent: for example, the recent most important cases of airborne
infrared video technology captures (2004, Campeche in Mexico; 2013, Aguadilla
in Puerto Rico; and 2014, Navidad in Chile) were explained as something as earthly
and trivial as oil wells flames, a likely balloon, and an airplane aerodynamic
contrail, respectively.
In the 1950s charismatic UFO organizations
were established, only to close down decades later without having achieved
their main objective, to prove that flying saucers exist. Nothing extraordinary
or persuasive was transmitted, only thousands of “UFO journals” pages filled
with stories and lots of cabinets with innumerable cases files destined to
yellow with the passage of time. Nowadays, private centers devoted to the
“study” of UFOs can be counted on one hand’s fingers. The healthiest-funded
one, set up in Sweden, is mainly dedicated to preserve UFO archives, well aware
of the increasing number of retiring ufologists, abandoned files, and shut down
organizations.
In the United States, a scientific-oriented
organization was founded in the year 2000 under the logical premise that if
UFOs intrude in the atmosphere, their activity might result in a hazard to
aviation safety. In his January 2017 resignation letter, the scientific
director stated that no such major problem had been detected. This conclusion
is to be expected if no physical UFOs share the air space with our aircraft.
No specialist in any scientific discipline
will understand why, if evidence exists on the reality of actual visits from
outer space, it has not been formally presented to the world. Neither articles
in UFO journals nor documentaries in TV channels will serve. They say that mainstream
science will never accept it. False. Science is always avid for new findings.
In this case, the argument is even more fallacious because the relevance to
society‒if UFOs were true‒is far greater than the discovery of the Higgs boson
or the latest tribe in Amazonia, for example. Objects heavier than the air will
not fly, humans wouldn’t travel to the Moon, stones cannot fall from the sky,
are some of the many widely-held beliefs proved wrong by scientific and
technological advancements or by empirical evidence. The self-correcting
mechanism is something inherent to science. If there was real evidence of UFOs
pointing to an extraterrestrial origin, it would be perfectly acceptable. Contrary
to what has been often repeated, the public is prepared for this scenario.
But UFO data is consumed only by ufologists.
Analyses that appear to confirm discoveries (anomalous images, biological
effects on the ground or on vegetal tissue, electromagnetic interferences to equipment,
you name it) are almost always performed by believers, and often irrespective of
whether they have appropriate experience or hold advanced degrees. Apparently amazing findings are not delivered
to peer-review mainstream science journals, and the rare exceptions do not
generate any positive feedback. Only a continuing research in the future will reveal
how much wrong and bad science was signed by established physicists, engineers,
and other pro-UFO scientists.
On the other hand, what it is easier to find
in academic journals are articles showing models to explain classes of extreme
UFO experiences, like the abductions, postulated as instances of psychological confusion
like sleep paralysis, fantasy proneness, or disorders. In this particular
segment of reports, clearly induced by published books and TV programs, we find
the grievous paradox that the maximum promoter of the physical reality of extraterrestrial
kidnapping was a Harvard psychiatrist! This is one of the multiple
extravagances one can meet in the study of UFOs. It is a tested fact that
deeply-rooted, extremist beliefs take root in all minds. Unfortunately, we find
it also in science, not only in politics or religion.
Ufology not only fails to advance, it is a
vicious circle. Today we see UFO news
publicized on the internet with the same old images of lens flares or aircraft
contrails that seemed strange in the 1950s.
Because there are no academic or authoritative criteria universally
accepted, and no hard evidence that exists as a certainty, past mistakes recur
over and over. Ufology is immersed in a
loop that never ends. Lately, I have
read about IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) signals picked up from unknown
traffic during the 1950s and 1960s and now offered as examples of hard
evidence. In my view, if
a “UFO” responded to IFF interrogation even in apparent encrypted mode, it is
more logical to suspect that radar triggered an aircraft’s transponder than to attribute
the response to an extraterrestrial spacecraft equipped with earthly IFF systems.
The ETT
The theory that flying saucers are space
visitors was adopted immediately, especially
by book writers looking for sensation. It was not a supposition that needed
half a century to evolve after large amounts of reliable, substantiated
evidence was collected. Not indeed. Marketed books in 1950 definitely linked
flying saucers to outer space. We should look back and consider the quality and
magnitude of the “proof” that existed between 1947 and 1949 to back up such
assertions, because it formed the foundation of the case for extraterrestrial
UFOs.
Let us take the best-authenticated, most
detailed, and strangest reports collected during the first three years of the
flying saucer phenomenon and examine them in a neutral and objective manner. The result will be no support for the claim
that UFOs come from another planet. But
by then beliefs and impressions derived from those reports had launched a vivid
and influential idea of extraterrestrial visitation. Lack of probative evidence posed no obstacle
to the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), or should I say ETT, because for
believers the idea did not serve as a working hypothesis but as an established
theory and taken for granted by all leading ufologists at that time. The theory settled in as accepted fact even prior
to the landings and creature encounters, the photographs and footage, and many
of the military and pilot incidents that have shaped the imagery of the UFO
phenomenon as we know it. The ETT
preceded most of the events now cited as proof that the ETT is true (e.g., the
landings of 1954 in France, the worldwide surge of 1965, the humanoid wave in
USA in 1973, and more). These subsequent occurrences or episodes might really sustain
an alien origin for UFO reports IF they were true. But this all happened many
years after the ETT was in force.
So we are facing here an interesting
situation: an idea based largely on poorly-investigated incidents and shaped by
the fertile imagination of writers fond of sensationalism finally created a
“real” phenomenon that both housed and draws its observational substance from
those previous, weak tales. How is that possible? This has been possible by the
conjunction of a continuing flow of new UFO stories, increasingly weird and
absurd, and the fuel contributed by magazines and books, motion pictures,
television films and documentaries. Once the belief is established, sightings
never cease to pour into the system, and a newborn mythology grows and matures.
The myth evolved differently in various countries
according to their particular cultural idiosyncrasies. One of the nations where
the impact of the UFO phenomenon has been greater and more aberrant is Brazil.
The number of UFO touch down reports is incredibly high, the accounts of
humanoid beings associated to those landings (with the richest possible variety
of morphologies, from dwarfs to giants, including one-eyed monsters) are innumerable.
In 2009, the Brazilian historian Rodolpho Gauthier published his bachelor
thesis which credited “a combination of sensationalist journalism, fear of an
atomic conflict and fascination with space exploration” for the emergence of
the idea that extraterrestrial were visiting the Earth aboard flying saucers.
I am convinced that similar work in other
countries will expose the trends, influences and motivating factors that
solidified the belief in flying saucers as vehicles from other worlds. We will
realize that, in many countries, this media-triggered belief predated the local
UFO waves to come, ones that afterwards were exhibited as examples of UFO
displays.
Similarly, US historians must deeply delve
into the influence and weight that personages like Ray Palmer or Kenneth Arnold
himself, the science fiction tabloids of the epoch and magazines like FATE, had
on the invention and the willingness to accept the close association of flying
saucers and UFOs to the ETT.
The bottom line here is that the idea of
interplanetary UFOs precedes the myth. Though debatable whether Kenneth Arnold’s
foundational sighting remains an authentic mystery or just a formation of
pelicans, as proposed, it is certain that the publicity associated with the
observation sparked the craze. And people started reporting “disks” by the
hundreds, as soon as the popular name “flying saucer” was coined in this
context, though it is not sure that this shape accurately reflects what Arnold
saw.
The
popular, widely acclaimed extraterrestrial theory is opposed by the realistic
“all can be explained in conventional terms” position of the skeptics. Yet
other odd theories have been proposed such as time travelers, evil forces, or
UFOs operating as a control system. These are purely undemonstrated and
indemonstrable speculations that range from the lunatic to the very well rhetorically-crafted
and breathtakingly imaginative. But in my humble opinion, they are no more than
literature after all.
There is also a flagrant contradiction
between the alleged non-contact-policy of aliens, postulated by some UFO theorists,
with their marked exhibitionist character when they flaunt their presence at
night with all their lights turned on! Unless what is seen is simply
astronomical bodies, fireballs, aircraft, high-altitude balloons, reentries,
missile launches, and the like, objects better observable during evening and
night, as statistics show.
Attitudes
Between skeptical researchers and radical
believers there is an ample gradation of investigators who hold positions
ranging from mild skepticism to a firm nuts and bolts conviction. The first
usually endure derogatory names like pelikanists, debunkers, deceivers, and
worse; the last have an educated tendency to gullibility and credulity. But all
of them agree in public that most sighting reports are misperceptions and phenomenological
garbage. Typically, however, the latter strive to maintain that the cases they
have investigated or cataloged qualify as UFOs: if over 90% of events are IFOs,
this percent drastically drops when it comes to their own favorite cases. Somehow
a Mark Twain’s phrase is applicable here: “You can’t depend on your eyes when
your imagination is out of focus.”
You can wrap yourself in ufological
academicism and state that you do not look for extraterrestrials in your
research but a new atmospheric phenomenon, an optical anomaly, etc., but in
reality what you are supporting are those traditional photographs showing
flying discs, the old-fashioned landing reports or the lunacy of abductions. To
some audiences you hide your true beliefs to appear scientific (even you may be
a scientist yourself!) and abhor the term UFO and use UAP (or any variants),
but underlying these dodges is a conviction that UFOs are nothing less than visitors
from outer space. It explains the harsh attacks you receive after solving a prominent
UFO case. Your standing within ufology collapses. And it hurts. There is nothing more frustrating than
realizing that you have wasted your life in the pursuit of a mirage or a
delusion.
Time and again a seemingly water-tight UFO
incident springs a leak and skinks. Even case histories that acquired fame and
that required books to be told meet inglorious finales. It is realized how even
the most impressive accounts end up beyond belief, simply implausible. But the
believer soon exchanges the previous disappointment for a shiny-new, surely
insoluble “unknown”. And so the merry-go-round continues. The believer never
quits.
The Government
In the USA, the USAF has declassified some
15,000 UFO cases, amounting to some 150,000 pages and the US Government through
the departments of Defense, State and Army, plus CIA, DIA, NSA, and FBI
agencies has disclosed circa 12,000 additional pages of documents related to
UFOs. Nevertheless, neither the Air Force, the Government, the intelligences
services, nor the University have been able to sort out, learn or draw lessons
from thousands of UFO reports. Nothing close to “reverse engineering” to help
improving space research or the weapon industry. Incompetence? No-one guessed
that they were handling a gold mine with remarkable potential to advance
science and technology? They all knowingly dismissed this opportunity?
In view of such huge release, the speculative
proposition that there is hidden information in secret vaults of the US
Administration seems quite questionable. After all “evidential resources”
proved nothing but unimpressive stuff, some resort to believe that the Holy
Grail of UFO evidence is treasured in the still unreleased reports, when such
documents ‒if in existence‒ are probably on hold due to issues affecting
national security, not to withheld alien secrets.
Many other countries had their own shares of
UFO reports and their Air Forces were involved in the evaluation of cases reported
to the military. Most of Governments have declassified or released their UFO
archives: England, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, Italy, New Zealand, Spain,
Norway, Denmark, Finland (and the list does not end here) have placed in the
public domain circa 100,000 pages of UFO documents, concerning over 25,000 UFO
reports. Governments with an in-house, official unit to study this problem,
like UK, closed down the shop in recent years. All coincided to make public
their archives, asserting at the time that the reports did not represent a risk
to homeland safety or air security and that no scientific information was
gained in their scrutiny.
The situation in the old USSR and present
Russia and Ukraine is less official but it is equally important: in the last
years, a team of researchers formed chiefly by M. Gershtein, I. Kalytyuk, S.
Petrov and A. Bilyk has had access to 3,000+ UFO reports from the Academy of
Sciences and other Government institutions. Another 2,500 cases are scheduled
to be released in the coming two years.
In Europe, only France maintains a UFO
program started in 1977 and conducted under the French space agency CNES. Since
2007, GEIPAN has disclosed online over 2,500 sighting reports (~50,000 pages).
The reason why France remains in the UFO business (sorry, unidentified
aerospace phenomena, PAN in the French acronym) has much to do with the
traditional interest in the matter by high-rank officials and established scientists,
probably influenced by thinkers of the stature of Aimé Michel. However, GEIPAN
affirms that only 2% of the collected cases in the last 10 years is
unidentified, but there are no signs of any current or foreseeable theoretical
or technological exploitation of UFO reports data.
A few Latin-American countries (Argentina,
Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Uruguay) maintain low-budget, modest UFO studies, basically
to monitor observations reported by official channels. In most cases this is a
political response to people’s demand for higher transparency, and I have
plainly noted that in some instances the will-to-believe or a too credulous
approach is evident within the military environment, when the UFO question is
tackled.
The
notion held by some ufologists and writers that the US Government conceals
revolutionary secrets (either information or hardware) on the origin of UFOs is
practically contemporary to the commencement of Project Blue Book or its predecessors.
However, decades and various political administrations have passed, each with distinctive
agendas, yet none have admitted or even hinted at holding such secrets. On the
reverse, repeated official declarations have stated (for example, The White
House, November 6, 2011) that “the US Government
has no evidence that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted any member of
the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any
evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye”. No
doubt the United States is a big power in the concert of nations, but thinking
that it is the only repository of the knowledge of a technology arriving on our
planet is nationalistic delusion.
Epistemological issues
From the viewpoint of philosophy of science,
ufology is a freak subject, beginning with the object of study which is a
negative, i.e. it gathers what we cannot identify. It means that there are
infinite objects of study. For the lack of a positive definition and other
reasons there is no possibility of replicating experiments. Statistics, which
is a key medium to replicate experiments is useless here as the content of the
samples is different according to the collectors. Anomalies in science are
important, for example the anomalous precession of Mercury’s perihelion, which
helped to establish the theory of relativity. But this requires finding
constants in the data and UFO phenomena are devoid of constants. Scientific
theories are predictive, but what does the UFO theory predict? What experiments
can we do to refute or validate the theory? A hypothesis must be falsifiable.
The ETT cannot be falsifiable…unless a flying saucer lands in the White House
lawn.
We all know “experiences” not satisfactorily
explained. Like the extremes of a Normal curve, there will always be a residue
of seeming anomalies: they show the limits of visual perception, the ceiling of
our skills, some room for evaluation errors, the shortcoming of data, even our
own biases. But in no way these tailing events give shape to a congruent
phenomenon that constitutes a new class of physical entities in defiance of
present-day science. Much less do they suggest a manifestation of an
intelligence aboard machines that have crossed the universe.
My best guess for the small remnant of bona
fide unsolvable cases is that their solution lies with disciplines like eyewitness
psychology or atmospherics physics. And I feel that when the solutions come
these will not produce even a tremor in the international scientific
world.
Without accurate data no real assessment can
be done. It is essential that visual input has not been corrupted, but this is often
difficult to achieve. I am convinced that many unknowns result from this sort
of corruption. It probably produces most of the residuum typically invoked as
the unexplainable core of the “authentic” UFO phenomenon. But verily the
statistical “properties” of supposedly genuine UFOs are inseparable from the
properties described in IFO reports, and this same dilemma haunts supposed
similarities in the narrative structure of close encounters, landings and
humanoid tales. Even alleged psychological or physiological effects, and
mechanical or electrical effects are similar when we compare “true” UFOs and
solved IFOs. This indistinguishability between anomalous and conventional
events (the indiscernibility concept) suggests that both have the same origin:
UFOs come from inner space.
Over decades of inquiring into UFO
testimonies and solving them, I came to the realization that even the best,
apparently irreducible cases, on which the ETT for the UFO enigma is founded,
are like mirages lending appearance but no substance to sustain this claim. Yes, there are apparent idiopathic reports
but they are not unassailable ones. Practically every major UFO case defended
as unaccountable by believers has a plausible counter-explanation among skeptics.
It is an unattainable goal to solve 100% of
all circulating reports. There will always be unexplained events but it does
not mean they are unexplainable. We will always have bad input data. There will
always exist people willing to deceive us. There will always be wrong analysis
or biased interpretation on such observations. What do unexplained cases
account for? You cannot erect a hypothesis proposing a defined nature of
something on the basis of unknowns and events you cannot explain (i.e., which have
an undefined nature). Only the detection of a coherent, well-assessed, multi-witnessed
set of physical observations can be the foundation of a hypothesis. A signal,
even weak, within the random noise. Never a myriad of ephemeral, heterogeneous,
visual or instrumental observations, which is all the residual true UFO reports
in hand amount to. And even less than nothing if you wish to uphold the ETT,
which is the bottom line for UFO promoters since the phenomenon was born.
Can you
calculate the millions of work hours devoted to UFO research in the world in
the last seven decades? Never has so much work accomplished so little in any
field of investigation (parapsychology and ghost-hunting apart). The corollary
is: what if there is not a real UFO phenomenon? At last, not as a unique,
common phenomenon but a host of different phenomena that have been mistakenly
tied up together. The irony is that this is precisely what the critics have
argued ever since the early days of the UFO mystery.
So where
is the substantial evidence? Does it look homogenous? There circulate various
lists of the 10 best, irresolvable-looking cases. Well-documented incidents
witnessed by several observers, displaying features far from current knowledge
on science and technology? Scientists will be eager to analyze them. The
scientific journals in atmosphere physics, aeronautics or space research are
certainly willing to publish revolutionary discoveries.
However, the remaining set of queer-looking
unknowns are old and no matter how much you sort those out you cannot build a credible
breakthrough. Many tried to find Scientia
in the UFO phenomenon only to come upon unmanageable gobbledygook, much to our
regret. I more than anyone wishes to be
proved wrong, but all indications are that in the future flying saucers and
unidentified flying objects will be categorized as a mass sociological
phenomenon. Today ufologists still have the opportunity to do science, but only
by studying UFO raw data and demonstrating how a vision that puzzled the
observer has a rational explanation. We have the chance to be didactic in the
process by teaching others how to use the scientific method on claims that
appear weird at first glance and even after a certain inquiry.
For long time we have been searching for
constants, patterns, invariants or clusters in the body of UFO data that would
suggest intelligence or any recurrent law that would prove consistency. No
model has been formulated from this data pool. Nothing. In place of salient
features we find only gibberish. On the other
hand, sociological mechanisms have been found in the topography and timing of
sightings. These facts pose more than just a minor inconvenience to any theory
that postulates significant metadata within the mass of reports. What these facts point to is a chaotic
collection of oddities having as many origins and natures as the people who
report them; a jumble of individualistic observations sharing little in common
and calling for separate explanations on a case-by-case basis.
In order to recognize the existence of a new
phenomenon, you would require events totally original, unambiguous, highly-strange,
necessitating a novel physical framework to be understood, objective in
recording, observed by scientists, and reported in mainstream scientific
journals. UFO phenomena do not adhere to these standards.
Every researcher whose position has evolved
from proponent to agnostic, acquires spontaneously a sort of “cross-border
perspective”. This viewpoint liberates the mind from narrow habits of belief
that turn every puzzling aerial object into a UFO unknown. Once free to think
outside of the UFO “box,” you investigate natural and man-made sources for
alternative solutions in a more efficient manner. For example, if a reliable source reports seeing an oval object flying
slower than a plane or helicopter but faster than a weather balloon through the
afternoon sky, you can trust that an object of that description really flew in
the area at that time. And you look for
it and you research any mundane possibilities, to finally find out that a blimp
fits the reported characteristics. If
one was in the area, schedules and flight paths will confirm or refute your
hypothesis, but if you cling to the position of the UFO proponent, your
assumptions fence you in. Your desire to
confirm that the object was a UFO closes your eyes to other and likelier
possibilities.
Epilogue
Let me be perfectly clear: the UFO phenomenon
holds transcendent significance only insofar as it results from extraterrestrial
life visiting the Earth. It is this possibility that made the ETT popular and
compelling from the start. But I fear that 70 years of air incidents, close
encounters, radar returns, photos and videos and other seemingly astonishing
experiences do not sum up to proof that such visits have taken place. This
evidence is inadequate as proof. To be realistic, however, people will not give
up the flying saucer myth. Its impact on popular belief and society at large
has been profound and universal, having permeated all levels of education and social
class. In some form this mythology will last forever. After all, the down-to-earth
solutions are dull by comparison and interest no one aside from a handful of
academics.
In a reasonable prognosis for the future, the
present social situation around UFO phenomena is not expected to change at the
popular level. Active UFO propagandists will continue defending the ETT hell or
high water through books, radio, TV and websites because this business has a
market. They are discouragement-proof and turn a deaf ear to information from
all quarters about the increasing number of reports written off after analysis
exposes their conventional nature. They will respond to skeptical challenges
with name-calling, recycling old stories, and adulterating the scene with
unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the ranks of serious
and objective researchers still supporting the reality of a distinct UFO
phenomenon will decline, as time and lack of proof play against keeping the mere
faith, the hope of a contact, or the regularly-predicted (and miserably failed)
expectation of recognition by the powers that be. On the other hand, it is not
difficult to foretell that UFO phenomena’s cultural outlook will be increasingly
treated by university scholars as a topic worthy of study, but for reasons
other than those proposed by believers.
Not the last word has been uttered on this
subject. There is pending research on a number of puzzling UFO observations,
where the application of physical sciences is of paramount importance.
Documentalist work is required in the area of bibliographies and resource
indices. History, Folklore, Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Epistemology,
Biography are amongst the many academic outlets that can provide valuable
insight into the characteristics of this phenomenon. And we encourage present
and future investigators to deal with it. As an example of what has already
being accomplished, early this year, the Italian specialist Paolo Toselli
released a database with 283 university theses and dissertations dealing with
UFOs worldwide.
After
70 years of recurrent reporting, the evidence at hand should be sufficient to demonstrate
the material existence of extraordinary machines that cruise our skies,
interact with our environment and communicate with our fellow earthlings. Not at
all. Lo and behold what was baptized by imaginative writers as visits from space
has not been substantiated by cogent, palpable proof. We have collected records
of ambiguous phenomena, diverse in appearance and behavior. Most cases that
seem intriguing happened years ago,
while none of the thousands of so-called landing events have yielded any
remarkable evidence. As they recede further into the past, the cases that once
seemed convincing will look more and more like anecdotes and tales, less and
less like credible evidence that we have been visited by aliens.
Let me
finish this synthesis of thoughts that condense five decades of a personal,
investigative journey over the UFO subject, with a 1988 quote by a
distinguished British writer and acknowledged UFO researcher, Hilary Evans:
If we are to benefit
from this splendid myth we have created, we must never lose sight of the fact
that it is – only a myth.
Acknowledgements
The author
wishes to thank Dr. Felix Ares de Blas, Manuel Borraz Aymerich, and Dr. Thomas
E. Bullard for valuable comments.
Not the last word has been uttered on this
subject. There is pending research on a number of puzzling UFO observations,
where the application of physical sciences is of paramount importance.
Documentalist work is required in the area of bibliographies and resource
indices. History, Folklore, Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Epistemology,
Biography are amongst the many academic outlets that can provide valuable
insight into the characteristics of this phenomenon. And we encourage present
and future investigators to deal with it. As an example of what has already
being accomplished, early this year, the Italian specialist Paolo Toselli
released a database with 283 university theses and dissertations dealing with
UFOs worldwide.
After
70 years of recurrent reporting, the evidence at hand should be sufficient to demonstrate
the material existence of extraordinary machines that cruise our skies,
interact with our environment and communicate with our fellow earthlings. Not at
all. Lo and behold what was baptized by imaginative writers as visits from space
has not been substantiated by cogent, palpable proof. We have collected records
of ambiguous phenomena, diverse in appearance and behavior. Most cases that
seem intriguing happened years ago,
while none of the thousands of so-called landing events have yielded any
remarkable evidence. As they recede further into the past, the cases that once
seemed convincing will look more and more like anecdotes and tales, less and
less like credible evidence that we have been visited by aliens.
Part II
Thomas E. Bullard
Seventy
years have passed since Kenneth Arnold reported the first “flying saucer,” the
biblical threescore-and-ten that comprises the years of a natural
lifespan. Perhaps this anniversary more
than any other marks a symbolic moment in the history of the subject, a time to
evaluate what we have learned, to look ahead, and to ask hard questions.
Vicente-Juan
Ballester Olmos is a legendary name in ufology.
He has a sterling reputation for research and thought, a long and deep
familiarity with the field in all its aspects.
When he speaks, the wise pause to listen, and his reflections in “The
Nature of UFO Evidence” carry a special weight.
His
thoughts in this article express not the usual pep talk to the faithful, or a
statement of progress made, or of plans for future research. His topic is heavier, his tone somber and
mournful. He wonders, has the subject of
UFOs run its course? Has the time come
to admit that its life has reached an end?
He
recalls that he took up UFO study with the same youthful enthusiasm that so
many of us remember, drawn by the hope that beings from other planets were
visiting the earth and a desire to be on the cutting edge in solving the
greatest mystery of all time. He has
shared the disappointment that many of us have felt when the years passed and
the desired solution continued to elude us.
Unlike
some proponents, Ballester Olmos has not closed his eyes
to the shortcomings of ufology, or committed himself to defend the phenomenon
in spite of all reason. On the contrary,
he has confronted the evidence with clear-eyed scientific judgment, and
concludes that despite enormous time and effort invested in UFO research, no
convincing evidence has resulted to indicate that extraterrestrial spacecraft
have visited the earth.
The
thoughts our colleague has written for this occasion do not call us to redouble
our efforts and soldier onward; rather they serve as an obituary for a failed
quest. I do not want to hear that we
have tilted at windmills for decades, but sadly, I have to agree with most of
what he says.
Ballester
Olmos argues that UFOs constitute a mythic belief rather than a phenomenon
accessible to science. The basis of the
belief rests on genuine sightings but the sightings themselves reduce to
conventional phenomena, reshaped into something strange by ideas of what UFOs
are, how they should look, and what they do.
The operational term here is ideas rather than an objective truth that
corresponds to them. The
extraterrestrial theory quickly took control of the popular understanding of
UFOs. Ufologists accepted this
proposition, the news and entertainment media promoted it, and witnesses
conformed their reports to the expectations it sowed. Reports multiplied and grew stranger as both
witnesses and ufologists made emotional commitments to their beliefs. The story expanded, its supporters
rationalized and defended it, and in the end they enclosed themselves in their
bubble of belief, a mythic narrative self-confirming and impervious to
challenge that had taken on the semblance of truth.
Although
ufologists seek to portray their efforts as science, the evidence they gather
does not meet scientific standards. It
is voluminous but largely anecdotal and subject to the shortcomings of human
observation, the illusions, misperceptions, and preconceptions that can turn
Venus into a shining spaceship about to land.
With UFO evidence no replication is possible, no controlled experiments,
no predictions, no falsification.
Photographs are abundant but almost invariably questionable either as
conventional phenomena or as hoaxes. No
convincing physical trace, no alien technology, has ever fallen into human
hands except as rumors. Consistencies in
UFO data are few and mostly of the broad stereotypical type that could be
borrowed from popular expectations, and the properties reported for UFOs are
indistinguishable from properties reported for IFOs. The subject has undergone scientific
investigation and been debated in more than one official forum but no reason to
credit a genuine unknown phenomenon has emerged. A complaint that science ignores the UFO
evidence is really a complaint that UFOs have not produced any evidence worthy
to attract scientific attention.
There
are certainly anomalous UFO cases. They
lend a sense of mystery, but any great mass of evidence based on human observation
will have a residue of unexplained cases.
Their unknown status is more likely due to human factors, like a
tendency to combine unrelated observations and ascribe a desired meaning to
them, than to a distinctive unknown phenomenon.
No standout recurrences distinguish the body of unknowns as coherent and
unique. Even the best cases diminish in
number under close skeptical investigation, suggesting with ever-growing
likelihood that UFOs are not objective phenomena but products of human
imagination, error, expectation, and desire.
UFOs come from inner space, from the human imagination and myth-making
capability. They provide subject matter
for sociologists, psychologists, folklorists, and the like, but in the end
Condon was right: The study of UFOs contributes nothing to physical scientific
knowledge, much less proof of alien visitation.
This
reckoning is hard but fair. It exposes
ufology as so barren in its results that anyone who doubts that this is the
last word pretty much convicts him- or herself as a committed true
believer. For my part I agree with the
reasoning of the argument, yet I still cannot accept the absoluteness of the
conclusion. I still find some substance
among UFO reports and see a path, albeit narrow, that may lead to a true
anomalous phenomenon, and without detours into the “alternative facts” of UFO
mythology.
Both
Ballester Olmos and I agree that UFOs are mythic in character. I think we also agree that the appropriate
sense of “myth” here is not the mere false belief of popular usage, or the
slightly more sophisticated sense of a way of understanding experiences that is
not acknowledged by authoritative consensus.
UFOs are mythic because a complex system of facts, alleged facts,
understandings, arguments, and speculations have grown up around them. Many people accept all or part of this system
and view some aspects of the world as if UFOs were factual truths, even though
both the evidence and the interpretations attributed to UFOs remain in
question. UFO ideas shape entertainment
and imagination. They become part of
informal education and inform expectations of things to see in the sky. The myth influences—or
contaminates—perception, conception, memory, verbal formulation, communication,
argumentation, in other words every aspect of the UFO narrative and discussions
about it. We do not hear of, speak of,
or even observe a pure phenomenon. Our
relationships with UFOs are always mediated by the myth.
UFOs as
we know them are indisputably human products serving human purposes, but the
myth is not necessarily everything.
People still see something. Often
the object of observation is conventional but rendered strange by the
distorting influences of the myth.
Sometimes, perhaps, the object observed is strange in itself and
rendered into suitable “UFO” form by the force of expectation and the need to
assign an unknown to an understandable category. The myth distorts both ways.
A toxic
entanglement between observation and comprehension is the common lot of
humankind. The situation grows worse in
the case of UFOs since official understandings seem inadequate or unsatisfying
and unofficial versions take over.
Ufology presents vivid examples of extreme distortion, like the case of
a satellite reentry in 1968 where several people reported windows and hull
plating on an object at treetop level, when the actual stimulus was half a
dozen flaming fragments a hundred miles overhead in the upper atmosphere. Yet the appearance of anomalous sights does
not automatically spell the end of objectivity.
Many more observers of this reentry described it accurately whether or
not they identified it for what it was.
Considerable evidence confirms that people deserve more credit than they
receive as observers of strange sights in the sky. For example a 12th-century monk,
John of Worcester, entered a detailed account in his chronicle that we now
recognize as a fine example of a large and brilliant meteor. He limited himself to a clear description of
a phenomenon unknown to him without any effort to force the sighting into a
medieval interpretive scheme.
Are
UFOs mythic? Of course they are, and our
human bias will always threaten to muddle observations, our human efforts to
give meaning to experiences will intrude on the facticity of the objects we
wish to understand. These complications
are inescapable but not necessarily fatal.
A disease can be explained as the result of germs, humors, or
witchcraft, but while the interpretations differ, the disease remains the same
and all too real. UFOs can be both
mythic and phenomenal at the same time.
This duality complicates the job of understanding, but we can live with
it and work around it by learning to separate the human contributions from the
objective basis.
The
fundamental unit in any argument for UFOs is the individual sighting. At least one UFO report must describe a genuine
unknown phenomenon or the case in favor of UFOs collapses as empty. We know what we want—a landing on the White
House lawn, a piece of unmistakably unearthly technology, indisputable
instrumental records. We do not have
these Holy Grails. What we have are vast
numbers of witness reports describing lights in the night or fleeting objects
in the distance, claims of close encounters and occupants without firm evidence
to back them up, indefinite landing traces and ambiguous radar contacts and
photos that may be fakes. The great
majority of these reports have conventional answers or lie in a broad “gray
area” where nothing can be proved either way.
No wonder Ballester Olmos has grown cynical. Anyone who has confronted these mountains of
disappointment feels the pangs of despair
At the
same time, ufology does have a collection of unsolved cases that is significant
in size and meaningful in evidential value.
These cases describe unknowns not just in the trivial sense of
insufficient information or nobody has really tried to solve them, but in a
robust sense of cases rich in description, provocative in strangeness, and
impervious to conventional solution even though skeptics have attempted time
and again to explain them. Astronomer
Lincoln La Paz and others saw a white rounded object maneuver during daylight
in 1947. He was able to triangulate it
and calculate its speed. Its actions
distinguished it from either a balloon or an aircraft. In 1968 the crew of a B-52 approached Minot
AFB when a very large object appeared on radar, heading toward the plane and
turning away just before a collision. At
the behest of ground control the plane circled the area and observed a large
glowing object on the earth below. These
highly trained personnel confirmed the presence of an unknown object also
detected from the ground by radar and visual witnesses. Multiple persons at O’Hare Airport in 2006
saw a disk-shaped object just below the cloud deck. The object rose and punched a “cookie-cutter”
hole in the clouds, a process that would require a great deal of heat
energy. Cases such as these offer
multiple quality witnesses and instrumental support or the chance to “do some
science” with results that suggest an unusual phenomenon. Here is the foundation for a genuine and
puzzling UFO phenomenon.
Ballester
Olmos readily admits that ufology has its unknowns. His concern is that they do not remain
unknowns forever and yield sooner or later to conventional solution. This course has certainly become
familiar. The Yukon “giant mother ship”
UFO of 1996 and the Phoenix Lights of 1997 attracted a great deal of attention
among ufologists. These cases seemed
strong until skeptics provided convincing explanations of a satellite reentry
for one and a flight of military aircraft for the other. Yet the skeptics are not always the safe
bet. The Exeter case of 1965 has had
numerous solutions, some that actually addressed the sighting and some that
were laughable, but the skeptics took their best shot when they attributed the
UFO to a refueling aircraft. This was an
intelligent proposal but it fell apart under close analysis; so have all the
others. About one-fourth of the cases
investigated by the Condon Committee emerged as unknowns. Some cases, among them the best in the files,
do seem to be “ironclads” defensible against conventional solutions. Conversely, some explanations such as Blue
Book personnel used to clear their docket of difficult reports, amount to no
more than slipshod excuses that explain nothing. A number of explanations succeed only as
reminders that the rationalizing of skeptics can distort the truth as
grievously as the credulousness of UFO enthusiasts.
In this
light a readiness to give up on UFOs seems premature. New cases continue to enter the “unknowns”
pool—for recent examples consider the Southern Illinois police chase case of
2000, the O’Hare sighting, and MUFON’s “phone receiver” object of 2013. Since a high standard ought to apply to
explanations as well as to unknowns, older cases explained in dubious terms
deserve to be thrown back into the pool.
We may not have the full story from the Government files, either. I have never favored conspiracy theories, but
I have noticed the abundance of quality unknowns from military and civilian
pilots in 1947. After 1952 military
reports became scarce in Blue Book files and unknowns of any sort diminished to
a trickle. This change follows JANAP 146
and AFR 200-2, regulations that barred both military and civilian pilots from
revealing UFO sightings to the press, and the Robertson Panel, which created a
policy of defusing public interest in UFOs.
A sudden end to pilots seeing UFOs seems unlikely. Perhaps rumors of a dual system—Blue Book
that was a public relations front, and a hidden system that secluded reports of
the highest quality—have substance after all.
And if so, significant files comprising a “ufologica irredenta” may yet
await the light of day deep in the bowels of Government secrecy.
A
healthy body of unknowns even now underlies the UFO mystery. These cases hint that the apparent downward
spiral of unknowns toward zero, or to a minimal residue of intractable rather
than truly anomalous events, may be an historical illusion rather than an
inevitability after all. Perhaps some
consistent level of unknowns persists throughout UFO history. The level of occurrence may be a low one, but
a stream of “ironclads” duly recognized might emerge as a clear signal in the
noise. Shouldn’t we at least consider
this hypothesis before we surrender the phenomenon altogether?
Nothing
stings ufologists so painfully as the rejection of their subject by official
science. They regard their enterprise as
scientific and crave approval, only to find themselves like small children
closed out of the game by the big kids at the gate. Complaints that scientists do not listen or
ignore the facts overlook the nature of UFO evidence. It is sloppy in the extreme, overwhelmingly
anecdotal and intangible. UFOs offer
little or nothing to carry into the laboratory for analysis or experiment. The rare exceptions have proved inconclusive
or at least not compelling. This
empty-handedness along with a reputation as pseudoscience assure that ufology
will continue to get the brush-off from laboratory scientists.
Field
science offers an alternative approach that is more congenial to the nature of
UFO events. When scientists cannot
control their object of study, they must approach it on its own terms, in its
native environment, and gather observational data for indirect analysis. This model sounds like a good match for UFO
reports, though with the added complications that the observers are numerous
and widely-scattered individuals with differing temperaments, abilities, and
expectations, who witness rare and ephemeral sights in the sky, most of which
turn out to be false alarms. The
witnesses most likely to report probably have preconceived notions and biases.
No standardization in the observational process and little in the descriptions
of sightings is possible. Face-to-face
meetings between investigator and witness are rare. The resulting data is raw in the worst
sense—heterogeneous, inconsistent, and suitable only for crude analysis. UFOs make unruly subjects even for field
techniques.
If
individual reports of unknowns comprise the foundation of a case for UFOs,
patterns of consistency in these reports add the next essential layer. Each separate unknown may be impressive in
itself but only multiple cases with significant similarities build evidence for
a recurrent phenomenon. Without this
support the unknowns remain random oddities and may have no further
significance. With a consistent pattern
to unify them, these oddities begin to acquire an identity. Unknowns and their patterns provide mutual
support and the case in favor of UFOs grows at once in strength—if, of course,
we find such patterns.
The
typical studies applied to mass UFO data are statistical comparisons, either
content analysis for consistent descriptions of appearances and activities or
frequency searches for patterns in the time and place of UFO events. These efforts have led to limited
results. A finding like more UFOs are
seen in early evening than at any other time may be consistent but not
surprising, while discovering that UFO reports are more frequent on one weekday
than on any other comes as a surprise but carries no apparent meaning. Searches for a recurrence pattern in UFO
waves have led to predictive successes but they did not hold true for very long
and might have been artefactual after all.
Content analyses that show most UFOs are round and most occupants are
short humanoids enjoy an unmistakable robustness, but as Ballester Olmos warns,
such findings hold equally true for IFO cases and reflect popular images.
This
sort of analysis offers ufology its best option to make a case for UFOs with
the data in hand. Rather than waiting
for a piece of spaceship to fall into our laps, or for the Government to show
us the bodies, all those intriguing cases we have accumulated transform from
dusty files into tools for actual scientific work. But have we tried and failed at this
enterprise already? I don’t think
so. From my own experience, a comparison
between abduction reports with high reliability and those of low reliability
revealed that consistency in sequence of events and descriptive content was
much higher in the high-reliability cases.
In the low-reliability cases where presumably more of the stories were
hoaxes or fantasies, plots and content varied far more. A comparison of two samples of UFO occupant
cases found stronger preferences for certain descriptive options among the high
reliability reports than in the general run.
The
reason behind these consistencies might be cultural influence or investigator
bias, but actual observation in contrast to imagination might also be the
cause. At least the possibility is worth
exploring. So many IFO reports in the
sample, so many human errors and shortcomings in descriptions plague the record
that they threaten to smother the signal from the very much smaller body of
UFOs. In the past good minds have had to
work with bad data limited in both quantity and quality, and the disappointing
results come as no surprise. Today we
have much larger samples and data of better quality to escape the garbage
in-garbage out problem that dogged earlier efforts. I see reason to believe that some distinctive
consistencies in the phenomenon may yet be forthcoming, and that reliance on
quality cases as the database will reveal those consistencies in sharper
relief. At least the effort should be
made before we give up the spaceship.
Vicente-Juan
invited me to collaborate in a dialogue of views on UFOs for this 70th
anniversary event. He may not have
expected quite so much difference in conclusions, but in fact we disagree on
very little. His criticisms of ufology
are on target and his exposure of its failures as a scientific enterprise are
as necessary as they are painful. We
differ only in the conclusions we draw.
He is ready to drive nails in the coffin and lower ufology into the
grave; I still see sparks of life and wish to avoid a premature burial. A very much alive Mark Twain once quipped
that reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated. A similar pronouncement for UFOs may not
stretch the truth quite so much, but even this 70th anniversary need
not be the end of the line. Maybe I
grasp at straws like a true believer still holding out, but I still perceive a
mystery amid the clutter and avenues, or at least alleyways of research not yet
explored, or not adequately followed up.
Until that happens I will continue to see a future for ufology.
Valencia
(Spain) and Bloomington (USA), June 24, 2017.
Vicente-Juan
Ballester Olmos worked 30 years for Ford Motor Co. in Spain as Analyst and Department
Manager (Finance).
An active investigator of the UFO phenomenon since 1966, he has authored 10
books and over 480 publications (see his bibliography at http://cdufo.info/bib/bibliog1.pdf). He has delivered lectures in Europe
and America and has been a staff member or consultant of the major UFO
organizations in Spain as well as in foreign countries. A specialist in UFO
“landing” reports in the
Iberian Peninsula
and in military-sourced UFO reports in Spain, he played a remarkable role in
the declassification process of the Spanish Air Force UFO archives, 1992-1999.
Since year 2000, Ballester Olmos manages the FOTOCAT Project, a database of
reported UFO and IFO sightings where pictures, films, videos or digital images
have been recorded, occurred up to December 31, 2005 (with over 12,200 entries). Married, father of two daughters and one son,
he is an avid reader and a great fan of country music.
Manager (Finance).
An active investigator of the UFO phenomenon since 1966, he has authored 10
books and over 480 publications (see his bibliography at http://cdufo.info/bib/bibliog1.pdf). He has delivered lectures in Europe
and America and has been a staff member or consultant of the major UFO
organizations in Spain as well as in foreign countries. A specialist in UFO
“landing” reports in the
Iberian Peninsula
and in military-sourced UFO reports in Spain, he played a remarkable role in
the declassification process of the Spanish Air Force UFO archives, 1992-1999.
Since year 2000, Ballester Olmos manages the FOTOCAT Project, a database of
reported UFO and IFO sightings where pictures, films, videos or digital images
have been recorded, occurred up to December 31, 2005 (with over 12,200 entries). Married, father of two daughters and one son,
he is an avid reader and a great fan of country music.
FOTOCAT Project: Apartado de Correos 12140, 46080
Valencia, Spain
Email address : ballesterolmos@yahoo.es
E-mail address: tbullard@indiana.edu
For bibliography quotation purposes, the formal reference to this article will be as follows:
Ballester Olmos, V.J. & Bullard, T.E. (2017), “The Nature of UFO Evidence: Two Views,”
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