The main reason for the establishment of this modest publication was to deal with the accusation by supporters of the ETH that ufologists who favour the psychosocial hypothesis ignore those cases that provide evidence of extraordinary physical events and concentrate on those where psychological explanations seem plausible. Unfortunately, the ETH supporters often cite cases which have already been explained. They are either unaware of these explanations or they discount them because they cannot bear to see their precious evidence gradually whittled away until there is nothing left.
Credulous
ufologists
Of course, most ufologists think they are too clever to
be taken in by hoaxers. It is quite obvious to them which
reports are not to be taken seriously. Unfortunately the
ETH believers are so desperate for apparently good cases
that they are easily taken in by obvious hoaxes, so long
as they are not too much like the old-fashioned contactee
stories.
The believers
are particularly susceptible to cases involving alleged
physical evidence. A good example is the business of the
Ubatuba magnesium samples, which arrived on the desk of a
Rio de Janeiro society columnist in 1957 with a note
claiming that they had come from a flying saucer which
had exploded in flames over a beach near Ubatuba, Sao
Paulo. Some ufologists actually believed the story, but
the more scientific ones pointed to the fact that experts
failed to establish what method had been used to
manufacture the samples as evidence that they were of
extraterrestrial origin. Few of them wanted to write it
off as a hoax after all the time and money that had been
spent on the case, especially as physical evidence is so
hard to come by.
ETH
enthusiasts are equally reluctant to write off the
Trindade Isle photographs, despite the fact that they
were taken by a man with a reputation as a trick
photographer and the fact that the statements of the
numerous other alleged witnesses to the sighting remain
suspiciously unavailable.
Jerome Clark
continues to plug the Trans-en-Provence UFO landing case
(only one witness), despite the detailed and devastating
study of the alleged landing traces conducted by Eric
Maillot. Of course we all know about those awful French
sceptics, who make Philip Klass look credulous in
comparison!
When you
wish upon a star
In his study of hoaxes and hoaxers, Nick Yapp writes:
We are often caught up in a hoax, because we leap at the opportunity that a hoaxer seems to present to us. And once we have leapt, there can be no twisting in mid-air and turning back. And the further or the higher we have leapt, the longer the hoax will run and the more helplessly we shall be enmeshed in it. We all have our weaknesses and we all have our dreams. We swallow what Jiminy Cricket tells us, that when we wish upon a star our dreams will come true. Hoaxers know this, consciously or sub-consciously. (1)
Experimental
hoax
In 1970 an experiment, which demonstrated the truth
of Yapp's assertions about hoax victims, was carried out
in Warminster. An organisation called the Society for the
Investigation of Unidentified Flying Object Phenomena
(SIUFOP) devised a simple hoax with the intention of
assessing the competence and objectivity of UFO
investigators.
Warminster,
in Wiltshire, was the location chosen for this experiment
because of its high density of skywatching ufologists.
The scheme was to provide those watching on Cradle Hill
with a simple visual stimulus, to introduce photographic
evidence inconsistent with the stimulus and to observe
the effect this evidence had on subsequent investigation,
recording and publicity. (2)
The
experiment consisted of shining a 144 watt lamp, fitted
with a purple filter, in the direction of a group of
skywatchers on Cradle Hill, about three quarters of a
mile away. Four SIUFOP members were among the
skywatchers. One of them had a camera mounted on a tripod
and pretended to take photographs when the light
appeared. There was also a fake UFO detector, which had
been synchronised to sound a buzzer 15 seconds after the
light appeared. When the light disappeared, the
photographer took two genuine photographs, which could be
used for comparison purposes. The two preceding frames
had been previously exposed with UFO images superimposed
on the landscape as seen from Cradle Hill.
The earlier
pictures had been taken from a different position and the
images of the UFOs did not correspond with the light seen
by the skywatchers. In these pictures two of the row of
street lamps shown in them were out, but they were on in
the two pictures taken just after the incident.
The next
stage of the hoax was the one were it was likely to fail,
or at least to arouse strong suspicions among the
ufologists present. The photographer, Mr Foxwell, asked
if anyone could get the film developed for him. One of
those present actually agreed, without asking any awkward
questions, to have it developed. It was handed to him and
the pictures eventually appeared in Flying Saucer Review.
Genuine
faked photographs
The photographs were examined by FSR's experts who
pronounced them genuine, as they totally failed to spot
any of the deliberate inconsistencies and made a number
of glaring errors in their attempts to interpret them.
David Simpson
and Ken Raine of SIUFOP attended a meeting of FSR experts
in September 1970. Although they gave them some hints
which would probably have enabled them to detect the
inconsistencies, their suggestions were ignored and the
hoax remained intact.
In SIUFOP
Newsletter No. 19 (January 1971) David Simpson published
an article about the Warminster UFO photographs entitled
"The Hoax of 1970?". In this he criticised the
investigations carried out by FSR consultants, giving his
reasons. He also asked why no one had bothered to
interview the photographer. However, FSR failed to take
these broad hints. The only visible effect of them was a
brief comment by editor Charles Bowen: "By mid-January,
1971, news had reached me that there had been a little
lightweight criticism of the Cradle Hill photographs." (3)
Pathetic
cheats
The hoax lasted for two and a half years and was
ended when Mr Foxwell confided in a friend who also
happened to be a friend of Carl Grove, who happened to be
a contributor to FSR. Charles Bowen was furious and
denounced the hoaxers as "pathetic cheats".
In his
summary of the experiment Simpson wrote:
The vast amount of literature published leads one to the conclusion that the pictures were considered very significant by UFO researchers, yet despite this and their impressive list of consultants, the investigators concerned did not analyse the evidence critically. Not once did they interview Mr Foxwell, yet without his photographs the sighting would have been insignificant. Their statements and actions were often not those of people trying to understand a strange event, but those of people prepared to ignore relevant criticisms in order to support a cause. (4)
Of course, most UFO hoaxers never confess, so their not unwilling victims are kept pleasantly mystified indefinitely.
References
1. Yapp,
Nick. Hoaxers and their Victims, Robson Books,
London, 1992, 204
2. Simpson, D.I."Experimental UFO Hoaxing", MUFOB New Series 2, March 1976.
3. Bowen, Charles. "Progress at Cradle Hill", Flying
Saucer Review, 17, 2, March/April 1971, 11
4. Simpson, op. cit.
THERE SEEMS
to be some misunderstanding about our attempts to analyse
reports which are believed by some to constitute evidence
in favour of the ETH. Our theory is quite simple. The
null hypothesis is that not one of the available UFO
reports represents a genuine sighting of an
extraterrestrial spacecraft. Some reports remain
unexplained because of insufficient or inaccurate data.
It is already
becoming clear that, when faced with conflicting evidence
or testimony about a case, ETH supporters reject or
suppress evidence which indicates a mundane explanation
in favour of that which points to an alien spacecraft.
There is also a tendency to believe that when the
sceptical explanation doesn't fit (some sceptics are
rather too keen on force-fitting explanations), then one
is justified in accepting the ET explanation, rather than
looking for another likely solution to the problem.
The one great
weakness of the ETH is the notion that it is supported
simply by failing to find satisfactory explanations for
puzzling UFO reports. This means in practice that ETH
supporters are often reluctant to consider mundane
explanations. Anyone who explains any of their cherished
cases is simply labelled as a debunker. For example,
serious ETHers tend to pick out radar-visual cases as
strong evidence to support their cause, because these are
obviously neither hoaxes nor hallucinations. Jerome Clark
thinks that the RB-47 case of 17 July 1957 is a good
example. Yes, but hasn't Philip Klass, after a great deal
of research, provided a detailed explanation for the
incident? Hasn't Clark noticed? Of course he has. His
comment is: Despite a convoluted reinterpretation by
debunker Philip J. Klass, who speculated that a complex
series of radar errors and the fortuitous appearances,
consecutively, of a meteor, the star Vega, and an
airliner were responsible for the event, the incident
remains as puzzling today as it was in the early morning
hours of July 17, 1957. (1)
Here we have
a clue to the mentality of ETH proponents. If it's
explainable, then the explanation must be simple and
obvious. A convoluted explanation won't do, especially if
it is provided by a debunker.
Clark's
principal, often repeated, objection to the psychosocial
hypothesis (PSH) is that it is merely an exercise in
literary criticism as opposed to the scientific study of
multi-witness reports and hard evidence by ETH
ufologists. Yet, when we ask for details of those reports
allegedly ignored by the literary critics and armchair
ufologists, what do we get? Nothing, apart from a few
very old cases, nearly all of which were satisfactorily
explained years ago.
In fact,
Clark doesn't like dwelling on particular cases, as they
always fall apart when subjected to careful, critical
examination - literary or otherwise. He prefers to rely
on the cumulative effect of hundreds of reports which, if
taken at face value, tend to suggest that the ETH might
be a rational explanation for them. He also praises the
work of Michael D. Swords who argues that the existence
of space-travelling ETs is possible. I entirely agree
that it is possible, but is it actual? What we need is
hard evidence, not scientific speculation.
If we look at
the UFO literature we can see that the few good books are
written by those who favour the PSH. Some potentially
good books are badly flawed and rendered practically
worthless to serious students of the subject because they
have had the ETH clumsily grafted on to them, simply
because that's what the punters want to read. (For those
who can't read too well, there are usually lots of silly
sketches and the usual ludicrous fake photographs of
UFOs, and even more ludicrous photographs of ETH
ufologists at silly conferences.)
However,
there are signs that this sort of thing is at last on the
way out. The American UFO Magazine announces that is
broadening the scope of its coverage , which means, in
practice, that it is gradually being changed to just
another magazine which tediously rakes over the details
of the X-Files, Star Trek, and other science fiction TV
series and films. In Britain, similar things are
happening to Alien Encounters, which is also devoting
lots of space to SF films and computer games. British UFO
magazines have always had difficulty in filling their
pages, because most British ETH proponents are either
semi-illiterate, or as mad as hatters, or both. The few
sane and literate ones are only pretending - not very
convincingly - to support the ETH in order to sell their
books to the credulous hordes.
American ETH
enthusiasts appear to be much better educated and more
intelligent. This means that they can retail their lies,
fantasies and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook more
smoothly and effectively. However, I suspect that the
American public are beginning to become bored with their
absurd posturings and intellectual dishonesty.
With the
gradual and inevitable demise of the ETH, ufology will
fade into obscurity and become a subject of interest only
to a handful of psychologists and folklorists.
Reference
1. Clark,
Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the
Extraterrestrial, Visible Ink, Detroit, 1998, 507
Re hoaxing
and why do Walton's gang keep it going after all this
time. Money plays a part - i.e. there was always the
prospect of a film, a TV show and so on. Without
re-reading the case, I don't know how much police
involvement there was, and whether it constituted a
significant waste of police time/resources.
With the
passage of time persons involved in a hoax are less
likely to admit to it, since the public tend to forget
about the original case. Who would care that much if the
MJ-12 forger were to admit it now? Also, ufology being
what it is, a confession after a long lapse of time will
likely not be believed (the usual he was forced to say
this by the authorities argument). Also, what would the
other hoaxers say were one of the party to own up? Would
they all defend their original position or not? Would
they risk being sued for fraud (making money from the
publishers, film company, etc.)?
In November
1952 six people claimed to witness a desert contact
between Adamski and a man from Venus. All signed
affidavits to this effect. That was 45 years ago, yet not
one, to my knowledge, has ever since recanted and
admitted the said event never took place. And who would
care now if one did? Would Adamski diehards even believe
any such admission now? I doubt it.
Christopher
D. Allan, Stoke on Trent
Whatever the
solution to the Travis Walton story, we should not
overlook the obvious fantasy elements in it. Such as
meeting the hazel-eyed, sandy-haired, dark-skinned human
being who escorts him through a sort of air lock into a
huge room, where they descend down a short, steep ramp.
In this room is the craft in which they arrived and two
or three other flying saucers, oval craft 45 ft in
diameter, rather smaller than his which was 60 ft in
diameter and 16 ft high (The Walton Experience, pp
121-124). This is not too different from George Adamski
being led from the scout ship, down some steps into the
landing bay of the mother ship. Walton has added some
1970s touches to the story and fleshed it out, but the
plot is the same. George is led into a room where he
meets other crew members, including women. Travis is led
into a room where there is another man and a woman.
Then there is
the episode just before that when Travis plays with the
controls and sees the stars whizzing around.
We should not
take the descriptions of what happened the night of
Travis's disappearance too literally; the guys in the
truck were obviously scared out of their wits and it
seems like human nature to envisage them making the light
ever more concrete and menacing as they talked excitedly
on the way back. The scarier the light was, the more they
could excuse themselves for running away and leaving poor
Travis to his fate.
Travis's
story, which only covers a brief period, reads like a
dream, perhaps even a nightmare he had the night he got
back. Perhaps he didn't wander around, but in some sort
of fugue state got into a motel somewhere and holed up
for a few days, till his senses returned.
If there is a
solution, it probably lies in the notes made by the law
enforcement authorities, reporters and others at the
time, not in books written two or three years later, when
the ufologists, news persons and ghost writers had woven
the story into a neatish narrative.
Peter
Rogerson, Manchester
Note for paranoid ufologists: This letter arrived unsealed. Although it had a first-class stamp, was correctly addressed and was postmarked 15 June, it was not delivered until 19 June.