Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The Condon Committee issued its report in 1969 and concluded that there was no evidence that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. In December 1969 the air force officially got out of the UFO business, closing down Project Blue Book for good.

The conclusions of the Condon Committee and the government’s official withdrawal from UFO investigations have not ended public furor over UFOs. A 1973 Gallup poll showed that 11 percent of American adults believed that they had seen a UFO. Another Gallup poll conducted in 1978 showed that 57 percent of Americans believe that UFOs are “something real.” Klass (1978–79) was rightly critical of the wording of the UFO-related questions on the Gallup polls, pointing out that “something real” does not necessarily mean “something extraterrestrial” and that even skeptics would agree that UFOs represent “something real.” Nonetheless, these figures testify to the high degree of belief and interest in UFOs on the part of the American public.

After the issuance of the Condon Report several pro-UFO groups continued to investigate UFO sightings and to claim that there is good evidence for their extraterrestrial origin. A major argument put forth for the reality of extraterrestrial UFOs is the large number of reports that continue to be made. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a former skeptic where UFOs were concerned, changed his mind and came to support the extraterrestrial hypothesis (he also coined the term close encounters of the third kind and was an adviser for the film of the same name) based on the large number of sightings (Hynek 1972). Hynek, who died in 1986, frequently emphasized not only the large number of sightings, but the fact that they come “from all parts of the world and in many instances from remarkably competent witnesses” (Hynek 1976–77, p. 77). This is a theme sounded over and over again in the UFO movement. The fact that many UFO witnesses are trained pilots, radar operators, or other professionals, and that they are not crazy, drunk, or on drugs leads UFO proponents to conclude that they must have seen just what they say they saw. This conclusion is, in fact, fundamentally wrong. The great failure of the pro-UFO movement has been its unwillingness to accept the fact that human perception and memory are not only unreliable under a variety of conditions (and these conditions are exactly those under which most UFOs are reported) but that perception and memory are also constructive. That is, perception is a function not only of the actual sensory stimulus that is picked up by the eye or the ear, but also of what we know and believe about the world, even if that knowledge and belief are wrong. The constructive nature of perception is greatest when the actual sensory input is weak, unclear, or ambiguous—just the type of sensory input present in most UFO sightings. Memory, too, is constructive. Experiments reviewed below show clearly that what we remember about an incident can actually be changed after the fact. When this happens, the witness truthfully testifies to remembering something that never happened.

The fact that knowledge influences how we perceive the world, that it modifies the pure sensory input received from the sense organs, is of vital importance: It allows us to make sense of what would otherwise be a very confusing world. Perceptual psychologists have studied so-called perceptual constancies for more than one hundred years years. These constancies are among the best examples of the constructive nature of perception.

Consider color perception. A red apple will look red under a wide variety of lighting conditions. Under normal white light the apple looks red because the red wavelengths of light are reflected from the apple skin to the eye. By changing the light that falls on the apple, it is possible to change the composition of the light that is reflected from the apple skin to the eye. But, except for extreme cases, changes in reflected light do not result in a change in the perceived color of the apple. It is still perceived as red. This effect depends on the perceiver’s knowledge that the object is a red apple. If that knowledge is removed, the color does not appear the same under different lighting conditions. This can be demonstrated by placing two identical red apples in two boxes. Each box has a small hole that permits the viewer to see only a small section of apple skin. This is not enough for the observer to figure out that the object is an apple. As far as the observer is concerned, all he is looking at is a section of color. If the light is different in the two boxes the color of the apple skin will appear very different to the observer. In this situation, the observer doesn’t know the color is that of a red apple, and with this knowledge eliminated, the perceived color is almost totally a function of the actual wavelengths of light reflected to the observer’s eye. Hence, knowledge plays a major role in determining what color is perceived. It must be emphasized that this is not a conscious process on the part of the observer; rather, the brain automatically takes into account what is known about the object and adjusts the perception accordingly.

Another form of constancy is called size constancy . What happens to your perception of a friend’s size as he or she walks away from you? Nothing, of course—your friend’s size stays perceptively constant. But the actual sensory information that your eye is sending your brain changes radically as your friend moves away from you. The image your friend casts upon your retina decreases in size constantly as the distance between the two of you increases. The size of the retinal image when an object (your friend, in this case) is ten feet away is half what it is when the object is five feet away. But you know that people and other objects don’t shrink simply because you are farther away from them. In the real world they stay the same size. Their size is constant, and the brain’s knowledge about this fact allows it to compensate for the change in retinal image size and produce a perception of size that is constant, just like the real object. Again, if that knowledge is lacking, size constancy is lacking. Certain tribes in the African jungles live in an environment where they never have the opportunity to develop size constancy because when something moves away from them, it is obscured by the jungle. When individuals from these tribes are exposed to an object far away from them, they badly misjudge its size, thinking that large objects far away are really small objects close to them. However, after a few days’ experience, they develop normal size constancy (Turnbull 1961).

Another impressive example of constructive perception also concerns color vision. People who have normal color vision perceive the entire visual field as colored. This is taken for granted. But in spite of this, the cells in the retina of the eye that enable us to see color are found mostly in the very center of the retina, in an area called the fovea. If we depended only on retinal input for color perception, we would perceive a small central area of color, while the rest of the visual field would be black and white. This can easily be demonstrated: Have a friend look straight ahead, then slowly move some colored object (a colored pen or pencil is ideal) into his or her field of vision. There will be a point at which the person will be able to see something in peripheral vision and will be able even to identify it, but will not be able, if the object is unfamiliar, to say what color it is. If the object is unfamiliar, the person will not be able to identify its color until it is well inside the field of vision.

Another example may clarify this point. As I sit here writing this, there is an orange-red door off to my left. I can just see the door out of the corner of my eye and I clearly perceive it as colored, in spite of the fact that the light being reflected off the door to my retina is falling on a part of the retina where there are no color receptors. Since I know what color the door is—it is very familiar to me—my brain constructs a perception of the color. How the brain manages this is not known, but the phenomenon demonstrates the great importance of knowledge in even the simplest types of perception.