Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Hendry (1979) reports another impressive example of the power of constructive perception. The actual stimulus was the planet Venus. The woman who reported the UFO

described it as a “star,” only much brighter. It was positioned low in the southwest sky, starting around seven o’clock in the evening on January 30, 1976—exactly where Venus was located at that time. She did not see Venus in addition to this “object.” She then watched the light descend gradually to the horizon during an hour’s period of time, which is exactly what Venus would do. This setting motion was perceived by her as being “jerky”; her husband thought that it was only a star, but she encouraged him to perceive the “jerky” descent, too, which got him excited. After staring at it for a sufficiently long time, the woman became convinced that she was looking at the illuminated window of a UFO and that she could see the round heads of the occupants inside, heads with silvery-colored faces. She then proceeded to see this apparition in the same place every night for successive nights. Yes, I told her that it was Venus. Her reply: “You are talking to a woman fifty-four years old. I know what stars look like.” (p. 85)

People’s conviction that they have seen a real flying saucer, when in fact they’ve seen nothing of the kind, can be very convincing to others. No one is so likely to be believed as someone who truly believes what he is saying. Such belief sometimes pushes believers to absurd lengths to maintain their beliefs. This effect is seen in the series of UFO sightings in Westchester County, New York, from early 1983 through late 1984. The sighting reports were impressive, as is often the case. People who were pillars of the local communities reported seeing UFOs the size of a football field with multicolored lights. These UFOs could not have been aircraft since, according to the reports of numerous witnesses, they were too big, made no sound, hovered for minutes at a time in one spot, made perfect right-angle turns in the air, and winked in and out of existenceappearing here, then disappearing, only to reappear suddenly, moments later, somewhere else. The late J. Allen Hynek, who was director of the Center for UFO Studies, said in the center’s publication, International UFO Reporter, that these sightings were among the most impressive in the history of UFO reports (Hynek, Imbrogno, and Pratt 1987). He felt there was no possible way to “explain away” these sightings by scores of witnesses. But, in fact, the reports had a prosaic explanation: they were all a hoax. A group of private pilots flying from a small airport in Stormville, New York, had been flying in formation at night. They would fly along with all their lights out and then, on cue, turn on both the red and green wing lights and the bright white landing light. They flew in a boomerang formation, and many of the witnesses reported that the UFO had a boomerang shape. The appearing-disappearing trick was easy to pull off, too. When all the lights were turned out at once, the UFO vanished. Thirty seconds later, after the planes had flown about one mile, the lights were all turned back on at once, so the UFO appeared to have moved from one spot to another in the twinkle of an eye.

The reports of the UFO hovering motionless for minutes were based, as the reader might by now expect, on the lack of cues available to the witnesses to tell them how far away the planes were. All they saw were lights in the night sky. In the absence of any other cues, the brain uses the size of the actual retinal image to judge distance. Small lights on aircraft don’t significantly change retinal image size as the plane moves toward or away from the eye. Thus, the perception is of unchanged distance, even though the planes are moving. As far as the lack of noise is concerned, many modern private aircraft are quiet and are only heard when directly overhead. They may not be heard even when overhead if they are above one thousand feet, depending on the wind conditions and the presence of other noises on the ground.

The pilots at Stormville Airport had a good time with their hoax. It was revealed, however, by the local paper (Walzer 1984) and in a long investigative article in the November 1984 issue of Discover magazine (Garelik 1984). The response of several of the local UFO buffs has been surprising. Not willing to admit they were fooled they devised a bizarre and astonishingly elaborate conspiracy theory to explain what happened: The night-flying pilots were put up to their tricks by the real UFOs who wanted the hoax to cover up the existence of their activities and to obscure the real sightings!

One final example will show, in an elegant controlled experiment, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in UFO reports. Simpson (1979–80) describes a controlled UFO hoax set up to determine just how distorted witnesses’ reports of a UFO can become. The hoax was carried out on Cradle Hill in Warminster, England, on the night of March 28, 1970. Simpson describes the stimulus for the hoax:

At 11 P.M. a 12-volt high-intensity purple spotlamp was directed from a neighboring hill toward a group of about 30 sky-watchers on Cradle Hill, three-quarters of a mile away. The lamp was switched on for 5, and then 25, seconds, with a 5-second pause between. During the second “on” period, a bogus magnetic field sensor, operated among the sky-watchers by a colleague, sounded its alarm buzzer, apparently indicating the presence of a strong magnetic field. (UFO folklore states that strong magnetic fields are a characteristic of UFOs, so this sensor was not an unusual sight.) In practice, the alarm was simply synchronized to sound while the distant spotlamp was on. The “strangeness” of the purple light was thereby enhanced. (p. 33)

Another important aspect of this hoax was the production of fake photographs of the UFO. Four exposures were produced, but two had been taken months previously and doctored to show UFOs that did not look at all like the “UFO” produced by the purple lamp. The UFO in these two photos was much more saucer-shaped. It was in a different position in each of the two photos, indicating movement. In one photo it was above the hill; in the other, below it. Another important point about the first two photos is that, because they were taken months before the actual hoax, they showed an incorrect pattern of streetlights along a road running at the base of the hill. Due to repairs on some of the lights, that pattern changed between the time these photos were taken and the night of the hoax. Two additional photographs were taken on the night of the hoax, after the sighting. They did not show any UFO, but they did show the current pattern of street lights. This difference in the pattern of the street lights is an obvious clue to the fake nature of the photographs. The important question was whether anyone would spot it.

The film was given to Flying Saucer Review , a major international UFO magazine. Flying Saucer Review stated that the negatives had proven “genuine beyond all doubt” (Simpson 1979–80, p. 34). The photographs were submitted to several experts, who declared them genuine. Consider the opinion of Pierre Guerin, director of research at the Astrophysical Institute of the French National Center for Scientific Research: “In my opinion there is no question of the object photographed being in any possible way the result of faking” (Guerin 1970, p. 6). Guerin did spend some effort to explain why the UFO in the photographs was so different in appearance from the UFO that was seen. Impressive scientific jargon abounds in his statement: “The object photographed was emitting ultraviolet light, which the eye does not see. Around the object, however, a ruby-red halo, probably of monochromatic colour and doubtless due to some phenomenon of air ionisation, was visible only to the eye and in actual fact made no impression on the film” (p. 6). Now, if someone with the title of director of research at an astrophysical institute told you something in an area seemingly related to astrophysics, you would tend to believe him. But in this case an expert was misled by a rather obvious hoax. He failed to spot the clues in the photographs and went on to a grandiose pseudoscientific explanation of a phenomenon that never really existed in the first place. This sort of carelessness is, it turns out, a hall-mark of investigations by UFO proponents, a point we will return to later.