What Went Wrong

Even the least controversial practice of ufologists, their accumulation of exhaustive data, cannot qualify as an absolute good. Important as such thoroughness is, too much information can be too much of a good thing. Mountains of facts can hide the total picture. The skies around Phoenix seemed overrun with UFOs as report after report flooded in, but the multiplicity of reports could be deceiving, a matter of many people seeing the same thing from different positions and angles. Some defenders of the Phoenix Lights fall back on this supposed multiplicity of objects to dispute both flares and a single flight of aircraft as causes, but this free acceptance of the confusing welter of reports may offer no more than false comfort. Later reflection has winnowed down the number of independent objects, with errors of timing and direction or confusion over lights from ordinary air traffic responsible for many “other” UFOs that night. The argument for multiple objects based on the mass of raw data grows thinner and thinner. Too much data is better to have than too little, but mere accumulation cannot serve as a goal in itself and data requires discriminate understanding to become useful information.

Another hazard for ufologists lies in their preference for literalist readings at the expense of judicious interpretations. The word of the witness holds great value. It brings listeners as close as they can get to the actual experience, and eyewitness testimony, the honest account of good people, stands in the highest popular esteem for reliability and trustworthiness. At the same time this word is not sacrosanct. A great deal of scientific research has probed the value of humans as instruments of observation, and these studies make clear that a more labyrinthine and treacherous process than observing an event and relating an accurate report can hardly be imagined s1See Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), especially pp.3-4,47,77-79,90-100,266; Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), esp. pp.36-43,62-63,107-111.. The witness possesses the authority of experience, but experience itself combines real events with imagined ones, with errors, misperceptions, preconceptions, and the reconstructions of memory, so that the story of the witness can do great mischief to the description of an event. An investigation has to be more than a conduit for testimonies; it also has to add value through an active process of understanding, to make proper sense out of literal testimonies through careful but unsparing critical evaluation.

When ufologists come to construct a scenario of events, they labor under the handicaps imposed by their own good intentions. In their effort to take every report at face value they strive to fit in every bit of testimony, but with the consequence that all faults and errors inherent in the raw data mix with the legitimate facts. The result is a half-truth that misleads their own understanding and provides detractors with an easy target. As a case in point, the Yukon sightings spread over several hours if we accept all witness time estimates, and a reentry event clearly would be impossible over such a long period. Yet the most definite timings when witnesses actually checked a clock limit the sighting to a short period around 8:30, the very time that happens to correspond to the reentry. A literalist reading of the times creates a UFO where selection of the best-case evidence resolves the sightings into a conventional event, for an obviously significant difference in outcomes. Perceptions of time are vulnerable to subjectivity, and critical rejection of some reported times as probably erroneous is not only reasonable, but clears away a major obstacle to solving the case. In this instance an exercise of judgment better serves the truth than strict adherence to the word of every witness.

A vital consideration in understanding reports is how they may go wrong. Even the most honest and conscientious eyewitness faces potential errors of perception and conception, of memory and communication, that threaten to distort anecdotal evidence at every step. How a witness perceives an event depends on physical conditions and perspective—for example, an advertising airplane looks very like a flying saucer when seen at a particular angle and distance. Personal differences like diminished visual acuity may limit perception, while some mistakes result from illusions like autokinesis, the apparent movement of a stationary light source against a dark background, or mistaken frame of reference, most familiar in the case of the “racing moon” against a background of broken clouds, when in fact the clouds are moving and the moon stands still.

All three example cases show witnesses convinced that the lights they saw were attached to some dark framework that they inferred or discerned only vaguely. A vivid part of the Phoenix Lights story was the enormous V-shaped craft; of the Yukon case the tub-shaped object as big as a stadium; of Exeter a barn-sized bearer of the flashing lights. The lights were plain enough but the object behind them became evident only because it blotted out the stars or appeared darker than the night sky. Many witnesses were convinced they saw these dark objects but ufologists would be wise to doubt, since such appearances can result from commonplace errors. One is the “contour illusion” as the mind tends to fill in gaps and connect unrelated objects into geometric forms, another is an illusion of contrast as the brighter lights make the adjacent field of view appear darker, and lesser lights like stars seem to fade out as if eclipsed by a solid object. These illusions are well-known in other contexts but ufologists often overlook them as potential complications in a UFO sighting.

Conceptual errors occur when witnesses confuse what they see with what they expect to see. Some spectacular UFO reports, full of elaborate and sincere details of flashing, multicolored lights from a metallic craft that lands nearby, have resolved into nothing more unusual than the planet Venus distorted as it set by the thick atmosphere near the horizon s2See, for example, the Condon Committee’s case 15. Condon, Edward U., and Daniel S. Gillmor. Scientific Study of Unidentified flying Objects (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969), pp.290-291.. Space debris has provided the perceptual basis for more spectacular UFOs than the Yukon mother ship, as preconceptions of how a UFO should look serve as a conceptual template that reconfigures the burning lights high in the atmosphere into windows on an elaborate alien craft near the ground.

Memory solidifies the real and the erroneous alike into the personal experience of the witness, but memory itself remains plastic and pliant. It is subject to modification from rethinking, reconciling the experience as it was with the experience that should have been, or with the experience a witness wanted to have. New information becomes incorporated into the memory and the influence of other individuals or the media also presses for updates in the witness’s recollection of the past. Memory of a UFO is not a matter of replaying a permanent videotape but a process of reconstruction with modifications incorporated. Communication requires setting the memory of an experience into words, and words bring their own load of cultural baggage. The words we choose depend on the words available to us. For example, in describing reentry events some witnesses speak of a “formation” of lights. The word is a familiar one for several lights traveling together in the sky, but the term introduces an element of error into the account. A formation applies to objects flying together under deliberate guidance, like aircraft, whereas a “constellation” is the proper—but unfamiliar—term for a group of lights that happen to be flying near one another at the same time and going in the same direction. The narrators know what they mean but when they speak of a formation they may leave unintended and misleading impressions on the hearers.

No witnesses observe with their minds a blank slate, and any effort to understand both reports and interpretations must reckon with the expectations, wishes, and predispositions that guide the thinking of everyone involved. To understand an anomalous event means to connect it to some established framework. The witness has to find the categories and words to describe an observation; the interpreter has to find meaningful comparisons to make sense of what the observer describes. Ufologists bring a ready-made, well-developed system of facts and meanings about UFOs to a fresh report of mysterious objects in the sky. This accepted reality provides a template of understanding and with it ufologists incorporate the new observations into the old and established framework. The resulting story is a “UFO version” that makes sense of the described events in UFO terms. Application of the UFO framework begins as soon as the ufologist hears of an observation, and continues as the ufologist investigating a sighting asks questions and hears answers attuned to prior knowledge of the nature of UFOs. At worst this process imposes expectations in spite of anything contrary that the witness says; more often the imposition is more subtle, with the investigator slanting words of the witness to square with UFO doctrine in ways that seem more like a clarification than an alteration of the report. But in any case a body of exterior ideas colors everything written or said about a case from beginning to end.

The fact that witnesses often share UFO ideas goes far to lend the ufologist a helping hand. UFOs occupy such a familiar place in popular belief and cultural mythology that they have become everyman’s go-to solution for any unknown objects seen in the sky today. The witnesses in these three cases were willing enough to regard their sightings as UFOs, reported them as such, and attributed to them the properties expected of UFOs. Since ufologists shared the same ideas, investigators and witnesses joined in common cause as they cast these experiences as UFO events. The story that ufologists told mixed facts with interpretations and expectations yet scarcely differed from the story that the witnesses told, so that one narrative reinforced the other in happy agreement.

This shared version of reality provides mutual reinforcement for the prior beliefs of both witnesses and ufologists, with the downside that a readily accepted UFO solution may appear more inevitable that it should. The story of a UFO event promotes a chosen image of facts assembled according to a pre-existing template of ideas. A picture of what the witnesses saw shows the supposed object but also mingles truth and fiction in uncertain proportions. The “visual mythology” associated with these cases is especially instructive since it exemplifies how the “alien spacecraft” version of a UFO event can thrive from preferential treatment. The Exeter case has been the subject of multiple depictions throughout its long career. An illustration for an article by John Fuller appeared in Readers Digest for May, 1966, showing the UFO as a string of six grape-like lights over a farm-house. The UFO Phenomenon , a Time-Life Book pub-lished in 1987, dramatizes the event with a double-page depiction of a glowing red disk with panels of lights flashing around the perimeter. Another illustration circulating in the UFO literature by 1967 presents the Exeter object as a classic flying saucer with silvery metal hull, lighted portholes, fins, antenna, and a red glowing rim, so mechanical in appearance that a chrome grill and license plate would not seem out of place s3Fuller, John G. “Outer-Space Ghost Story.” Reader’s Digest (May, 1966), 72; The UFO Phenomenon (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1987), 100-101; cover of flying Saucers (Ray Palmer, ed.), no.55 (December 1967).. The Readers Digest picture was the least explicit. It portrayed the UFO as something strange and out of the ordinary without imposing too many questionable details, whereas the “flying saucer” version went to such extremes to transform the object into an extraterrestrial spacecraft that little of the original descriptions remained. The Time-Life illustration did not turn the UFO into a metallic craft but left no doubt that it was artificial and unlike anything from this planet—and of course this book enjoyed a wide readership.

Illustrations like these further a conviction that the sighting was so unambiguous and well-defined that the only legitimate question is, “How could anyone look at these pictures and doubt that the witnesses saw a mechanical craft of unearthly origin?” These depictions take much of the imagination out of the viewer’s reception. They tell the audience what really happened with explicit images that are compelling but misleading. These images impose a certainty that may not reflect the words of witness testimony with close accuracy, and sometimes go to extremes of distortion. Like the verbal construct of the sighting, they reflect choices ufologists make in how to tell the story, what to notice in the testimony and what to overlook, what to emphasize and what to downplay. These choices seem truthful and accurate to ufologists but betray a preference, perhaps largely unconscious, that the sight in the sky corresponded to the ufological ideal of an alien spaceship. Whether in visual or verbal form the UFO myth, like all myths, threatens to replace sloppy, ambiguous reality with an improved version, a clear and meaningful picture appealing to the public and ufologists alike, with no drawback aside from the inconvenient fact that it is a fiction or partial truth.

To speak of a “UFO mythology” does not mean to dismiss the subject as a mere false belief. In fact the term honors the complexity and rational integrity of a well-structured system, replete with its own accepted facts, meanings, and consequences, that equips the ufologist with a ready kit of intellectual tools to assimilate new observations and understand an unknown phenomenon according to the internal truths of the system. At the same time our ufological understanding is hypothetical, its factual building-blocks often putative rather than proven, its structures of understanding speculative rather than demonstrable. Many of those facts depend entirely on lowly-valued anecdotal testimony. Ufology does not share the experimental evidence and consensus support of an accepted science. Ufologists, unlike mainstream scientists, have not been able to nail down each plank in their structure and build each new step on the sturdy and established steps before it. Therefore the ufological version of reality remains mythical, a self-contained system of knowledge that is well-integrated, compelling, and rich in explanatory power, yet still consists of beliefs to a considerable extent. Mythic theories of reality may hit the target for truth, but without a proper scientific foundation they have increased likelihood of falling short or going astray. The burden of proof that UFOs are real outside their own belief system rests on the proponents.

Any attempt to separate the physical or objective truth about UFOs from wishes and illusions must also contend with human issues of personal commitment and social pressures. Skeptics and ufologists bring their own agendas to a UFO case. One side sees only the misidentification of conventional sights and a credulity that corrodes the rational order of society; the other side sees exciting new knowledge and the chance to be on the forefront of one of the most important discoveries in history. Both sides think they know the truth, both want to win, both will fight tooth and nail for their cause. Spectacular, well-witnessed, well-publicized events like the three cases discussed here raise the stakes for both sides. Ufologists see “ambassador” cases, the kind to send out to hostile audiences and win them over, the kind to defend at all costs as the best examples of the claims ufology promotes. When a governor backs one case and Hynek another, its value grows beyond simple rational argument to become a matter of ego and prestige for both sides; long familiarity adds to the investment. Once personal involvement tips over from mere curiosity into commitment, emotional ties to the case entangle with rational connections and retreat becomes difficult or ceases to be an option. The more entrenched this commitment grows, the more the committed resist any question or doubt. Ufologists are sure they have a handle on evidence for an amazing and important truth but they cannot persuade the opposition, to their considerable frustration and anger. As a result the dispute often veers away from evidence toward conspiracy theory and ad hominem attacks. The discussion itself becomes personal, emotional, sometimes ugly. An atmosphere corrosive of the dispassionate evaluation of truth settles over the subject to the detriment of all inquiry.

The witnesses adhere with similar tenacity to their experience. They may bow to authority on quanta and dark matter since these subjects are remote and recondite, but an experienced anomaly places witnesses on the front line and they defend the fact of their experience and perhaps also their rough-and-ready understanding of it against any doubters or detractors. An experienced anomaly is a very personal matter and likely to inspire more emotional defensiveness than rational defense. Ufologists side with witnesses to defend their truthfulness and to oppose the undeserved ridicule that often befalls them. An embattled union takes shape and once the wagons circle, social solidarity keeps everyone behind the defensive perimeter loyal to the common cause. The defenders expect the worst from the opposition and resist even a reasonable conventional solution like flares for some Phoenix sightings. Again truth falls as a casualty in the crossfire of human motives.

By far the most hazardous step in an investigation occurs when ufologists decide on the meaning of the data they have gathered. However thorough, voluminous, and meticulous the testimonies may be, they need interpretation and explanation to make any sense; and if ufologists are hesitant to evaluate the testimonial evidence, they seldom hesitate to draw conclusions about its underlying cause. The investigator’s choice stamps an identity onto the case that holds more importance for everyone involved than all the data and all the hard work that came before it. Whether the case is a matter to forget or to treat as a revolutionary challenge to current consensus opinion starts here, and here concentrates the disputation over the truth of the chosen identity. The same data may support either a conventional or an unknown conclusion depending on the reasoning behind it, and the decision, along with all the arguments pro and con that it inspires, often depends on more than straight objective evidence. This outcome can turn on such unwelcome factors as errors, preconceptions, or shortcomings in knowledge.

These influences weigh on ufologists’ conclusions in all three of the examples. Observational errors—like the illusion of a dark object behind lights and a readiness to regard separate lights as part of one solid object, mistakes about size and distance, and subjective perceptions of the duration of an event or the sense that an object reacts to the presence of a witness—create testimonial “facts” that are dramatic and compelling, but false. Left to stand unchallenged, these false facts lead to persuasive stories or illustrations and go out into the world to persuade the public that the evidence confirms genuine UFOs of high strangeness. Take away the desired appearances and the cherry-picked evidence, give equal weight to alternatives and unsupportive testimony, and an apparently robust case may diminish to a thin, pale shadow of its former self. Whether ufologists will face these flaws and follow up with the right questions remains uncertain. The three sightings met preconceptions for a desirable UFO event so well that resistance confronted even the most substantial criticisms, and the cases circulate today in the UFO literature as examples of the best evidence for UFOs without regard for the significant strikes against them.

Some ufologists are hard-nosed and duly skeptical. Richard Motzer questioned the 8 o’clock Phoenix Lights as aircraft and the 10 o’clock sightings as flares from an early date; Martin Jasek tried out a list of alternatives before deciding none of them could explain the Yukon UFO. Some ufologists also bring deep expertise to their explanations. Bruce Maccabee and others plotted one formation of Phoenix lights to a military test range far from the city for convincing proof of flares. Martin Shough determined that the attractiveness of a KC-97 as the source of the Exeter UFO could not save this explanation from the mathematical incompatibilities of distance and duration.

Most ufologists are less circumspect, less inquiring, less ready or able to weigh alternatives. The failure to face telltale counterevidence can begin at the basic level of common sense. For example, if we accept that multiple UFOs converged on Phoenix between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. one evening, and that most of those UFOs were a mile in size, we should ask ourselves how many giant UFOs can share the sky and yet be seen only one at a time. The easiest way out of this bind admits that most witnesses saw only one big something, while various individuals confused the issue by reporting other unrelated lights or objects. Few ufologists have asked this question in any public forum, and maybe just as well from a proponent’s perspective, because the flight of aircraft solution gains credibility if most people reported the same large “object.” The Yukon case poses problems that should be game-stoppers from the start: Why does the UFO stay to the north and always pass left to right for observers along 200 miles of highway? A single distant object explains the observations readily enough; otherwise the UFO has to restage its appearances for each witness, for an understanding as inelegant as it is unlikely.

Perhaps the single most important key to the right solution is having the right expertise. Ufologists work hard to amass evidence, collect testimony, and build a case that a genuine UFO underlies the sightings. That case can be persuasive and impressive, as in these three examples. The testimony said yes to the anomalousness of the events and efforts to find alternatives said no to their viability, leaving an unknown event as the only solution that fitted the evidence. As far as the investigators’ facts and reasoning went, the UFO conclusion won out as the best available. Maybe some of the effort was clumsy or partisan or overly rhetorical, but at least ufologists made a good-faith effort to reach the truth, and if it just happened to favor the outcome they desired, then, after all, somebody had to be right. Only in these three cases it made no difference that the ufologists did everything right, since in the end it seems that their answers were wrong. In the final reckoning expertise made all the difference.

Ufologists may have fought a fair fight and supported the popular side of the issue, but a hard and unfortunate fact about the truth is that it is neither democratic nor fair. Hundreds or even thousands of witnesses of the Phoenix Lights thought they saw either a formation of five lights or a V-shaped craft bearing these lights. One witness turned his telescope on the lights and recognized five lighted aircraft. One against a thousand does not carry much weight if every vote counts the same and one dissenting voice out of a thousand scarcely seems worthy of notice. Many witnesses have decried the aircraft explanation as wrong, or accused the dissenting witness of incompetence. Yet he had the experience, the right equipment, and reached a tenable conventional solution that also happened to square with the video tape showing independent motion among the lights. This one witness saw better than the thousand who lacked a good telescope, knowledge of the appearance of aircraft when seen through that telescope, or readiness to accept a conventional solution. His expertise and situation prepared him to be the better observer, and for that reason his lone testimony outweighs a thousand others. At least anyone receptive to a conventional solution and willing to accept it as more likely than an alien spaceship can choose the airplane solution with a reasonable confidence that it is true, even against the governor and multitudes of sincere witnesses and earnest field investigators—not fair, just true.

A telling fact in favor of a conventional solution for the Yukon UFO was the reentry of a Russian rocket over northern Canada at the time of the sightings. In this case witnesses described appearances that conformed to other observations of space debris burning in the upper atmosphere. The ufologists investigating this case considered and rejected this possibility, but their reasoning depended on some of the times cited by witnesses and some assumptions about position that ruled out the visibility of the reentry where the witnesses were located. This reasoning was sound but its factual basis was not. Some reported times were inaccurate, while skeptics consulted an expert with authoritative knowledge of the reentry event and found that timings and positions coincided too closely to doubt that the reentry was responsible for the sightings. The ufologists worked hard and well to reach their conclusion but the skeptical expertise trumped their limited and faulty knowledge—again not fair, but true.

An emergent theme in these reflections is how important just the right knowledge turns out to be for solving UFO cases. It works very much like a key, a narrow and exacting implement that succeeds when it fits and otherwise does nothing. A case like Exeter that seemed iron-clad against conventional explanation as skeptics tried one wrong key after another finally opened, at least a crack, for a scenario with multiple military aircraft. Real-world events do not necessarily have one solution, or a simple solution, or a tidy solution. The real world is complex and difficult, its puzzles insoluble even to a roomful of bright and tenacious people, until someone with just the right knowledge or perspective or insight hits on the answer. Like a crossword puzzle clue, the result may seem obvious once it is found but until then appears meaningless and destined to remain forever unknown. The wonder is that successes come as often as they do, given the diversity of causes that might lead to a UFO sighting. Not so much a cause for wonder, under these circumstances, is the failure of ufologists to discover a conventional solution even when one underlies a case.

Ufologists comprise a diverse group from many backgrounds and specialties. Taken as a whole they gather a great deal of expertise, but in practice they apply little of this potential variety to the investigation of UFO cases. One cause for this shortcoming is the amateur nature of ufology, another the lack of time and resources, yet another a personal commitment to the extraterrestrial hypothesis or some other favored paradigm. No well-drilled professionalism prepares a UFO investigator to overcome self-taught prejudices or pressures originating in the ufological community and investigate cases with ideal scientific detachment. Moreover, in dealing with real-world events that are complex and by their very nature unfamiliar, no individual is likely to enter the field equipped for every eventuality. A mysterious event calls for the broadest spectrum of expertise to make sense of it and get at the truth. Doubters and skeptics may hold that expertise, or have access to it. Ufologists may not like people who question the reality of UFOs, but in rejecting the contributions these opponents can make for reasons of their attitude or old enmity, the result is defending a belief at the expense of finding the truth. Some ufologists feel perfectly comfortable with that restriction, but I would rather hear less combative rhetoric and more willingness to listen to anyone with knowledge and insight to contribute, no matter whether the dialogue leads for or against my preferred outcome.