Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The photographs contained yet another clue to the fact that they were faked. The first two photos were shot at a 10 percent greater magnification than the second two, yet a land surveyor who attempted to determine the position of the UFO in the photos failed to notice this large discrepancy (Simpson 1979–80).

How do the witnesses’ reports of the UFO that was seen compare to the actual stimulus? As would be expected, great differences show up between what actually took place and what the witnesses reported. These differences cover almost every aspect of the situation. The actual light was stationed on top of the nearby hill. The witnesses’ reports had the light twenty degrees above the hill, in the air. The actual light was purple, but reports said it was purple and crimson. The light was stationary, but reports indicated that it moved slowly to the right and lost altitude. The light was said to dim considerably during the movement, a dimming which lasted twenty to thirty seconds. When it stopped moving, it increased in intensity. Ten to twenty seconds later, the UFO disappeared. According to the witnesses, the total duration of the sighting was one to one-and-a-half minutes. In actuality, the time from the first onset of the light to its final disappearance was thirty-five seconds. In addition, the witnesses failed to note that the light went out for five seconds. They only reported that it “dimmed.”

Aside from the partially correct report of the light’s color, nothing else in the witnesses’ reports was accurate. This is especially important when one recalls that these were not random witnesses taken by surprise. They were UFO buffs expecting—and prepared for—a UFO sighting.

The several cases described above are only a fraction of the numerous cases in which careful investigation has resulted in straightforward natural explanations for even very impressive-sounding UFO reports. Details of additional cases can be found in Hendry (1979), Klass (1974, 1983), Sheaffer (1981), Oberg (1982), and Menzel and Taves (1977). All these cases make clear the nearly total unreliability of eyewitness reports. In almost every case, the witnesses’ reports differed substantially from the actual stimulus, but in only a very few cases were the witnesses wilfully lying. Their knowledge about what UFOs “ought” to look like influenced their reports, along with the effects of visual illusions.

Another point emerges from a study of these explained cases: UFO organizations do a terrible job of investigating UFO reports. They are likely to naively accept witnesses’ reports at face value and to fail to look carefully for possible natural explanations. The prevailing attitude assumes that the witness is telling the truth, so there is no need to look for an explanation other than that of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Thus, time and time again impressive-sounding UFO reports are “investigated” by one or more of the major UFO organizations, declared to be genuine and verified, and highly touted in UFO publications and the popular press. Then, on careful investigation, the case is shown to have been due to some natural phenomenon or is revealed as a hoax. The results of the careful investigation almost never appear in the papers that printed the sensational false claims when the sighting was first stated to be “genuine.”

Proponents of extraterrestrial UFOs reply to this sort of criticism by claiming that although many, even a great majority, of UFO sightings are due to some type of natural or man-made phenomenon, there is an “irreducible minimum” number of sightings that skeptics cannot explain away. This is quite true—and a totally unconvincing argument. There will always be sightings that can never be attributed with certainty to any particular natural or man-made phenomenon, simply because the information needed to find the correct explanation is no longer available. Hendry provides an excellent example here. As editor of the International UFO Reporter, published by the Center for UFO Studies, he reported a case that took place in Nevada in 1977. In trying to track down an explanation he was “by sheer luck… put in touch with the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]” (Hendry 1979, p. 8). The EPA had sent aloft a balloon that was the source of the sighting. Had Hendry not had the good fortune to make contact with the EPA, that particular sighting would probably never have been explained. It would have become one of the “irreducible minimum” that the supporters of the extraterrestrial hypothesis claim proves their position.

As we have seen, eyewitness reports of UFOs are inadequate as support for the extraterrestrial hypothesis. By the end of the 1980s, the trend in UFO reports had moved away from the more prosaic “lights in the sky” type of sighting (although these still occurred) to dramatic tales of actual abduction of humans by aliens. These cases, along with cases involving photographs or physical traces (close encounters of the second kind) will be discussed in the next chapter.

If eyewitness reports are unconvincing evidence for the reality of UFOs as extraterrestrial visitors, some sort of physical evidence could certainly settle the case. If, as UFO proponents claim, Earth is being visited frequently by extraterrestrials, physical evidence in some form or another should exist. This chapter examines the status of the claims that such physical evidence has been found. Also examined are UFO photos and reports of humans being abducted by UFO occupants.

Authenticated, clear photographs of a UFO would be excellent evidence for UFOs as something other than hoaxes and perceptual constructions. UFO photographs certainly abound; the question is whether the extant photos are genuine. UFO photographs are extraordinarily easy to fake: a double exposure, a little trick photograph. With the advent of digital technology, the ability to create fake UFO photos (and videos) has increased enormously. Several simple but impressive fake UFO photos produced by Robert Sheaffer (Sheaffer 1981, 1998) are shown in figure 13. Sheaffer (1981, 1998) has pointed out that most people don’t realize how simple trick photography is and will accept photos such as those shown here as convincing evidence. As was noted in the case of the controlled UFO hoax described in chapter 7, UFO organizations are notoriously poor at spotting hoaxes, being inclined to accept statements that photos are genuine with little further investigation. Like the highly publicized UFO sightings that turn out to be explainable upon careful investigation, we will see in this section that highly publicized UFO photos said to prove the reality of the phenomenon turn out to be fakes when examined with a little care.

Most UFO photos show nothing more than indistinct blobs of light. Many such blobs appear only when the film is developed, although the photographer didn’t see any UFOs when the pictures were taken. Such blobs are defects in the film, lens flares, or by-products of film development. The numerous UFO pictures of “strange lights in the sky” that show nothing but vague blobs are photos of aircraft, seagulls, or balloons. Under certain viewing conditions, such familiar objects can lose their distinctive and familiar features and appear “mysterious,” often resulting in a UFO report and photographs. Night photos of blobs of light can easily be attributed to aircraft, the planet Venus, and other such causes (Sheaffer 1981; Menzel and Taves 1977). To be of value, a UFO picture should show at least some structure to the UFO and should have enough background to permit one to judge the relative size of the UFO, its distance from other objects in the picture, and—especially if successive photos are obtained—its speed and direction. Only a tiny minority of UFO photos contain such information. The ones that do are the best photographic evidence for the reality of UFOs.