Anyone who’s ever tried to convince their skeptical friend of that one, irrefutable UFO case knows how frustrating it is to run up against that brick wall of denial that is the the “mass hallucination” theory. 

    The theory is that collective observations of anomalous phenomena can be explained by positing that all witnesses experienced the same, or similar, hallucinations at the exact same time, without any physical stimulus being present.
The idea of the mass hallucination is popular in entertainment media, where it’s often invoked as a rational explanation for supernatural phenomena.(1)

    The problem with mass hallucinations, though, is that they don’t actually exist - at least not as we understand them. Although tossed around in everyday conversation, there is hardly any mention of mass hallucinations in the scientific literature. Some have speculated on the possibility, but there is very little scientific basis for the idea that multiple people could individually generate the same visual imagery and auditory information. 


The science of collective hallucinations

    But as blogger Douglas Mesner has noted in an excellent critique of the mass hallucination concept, a few scholars have suggested that it might be possible for crowds to agree on the details of a collective observation, even without everyone observing it for themselves.(2) This concept is sometimes referred to in the literature as a “collective hallucination,” although this concept too is poorly supported.     
​
    In 1895, Gustave Le Bon suggested that people in crowds are liable to enter a kind of hypnotic, and highly suggestive trance state, priming them for hallucinatory experiences.(3) Once someone suggests the presence of something - a sign in the sky, for example - then everyone else naturally accepts it’s presence. Enough people would succeed in hallucinating the image to create a convincing frenzy, and everyone else would just buy in to the hype, even without seeing the thing for themselves. 

​   Psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones have referred to collective hallucinations in their book, Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking.(4) Like Le Bon, they claim that collective hallucinations are only possible when large groups of emotionally aroused people are assembled in one place and primed by suggestion. The online Skeptic’s Dictionary has an entry for collective hallucinations as well, and defines it in much the same way.(5) 

    It would be highly unlikely for all members of the crowd to see anything closely resembling the primer’s description unless it were a highly detailed one, but the crowd would naturally, through shared discussion of the event, correct for discrepancies in accounts of the hallucinated imagery. Knowing what we know about the fallibility of human memory and our natural tendency to align our memories with those of others, it is not hard to imagine how a few hundred conflicting memories could be gradually harmonized over successive retellings. 

    Thus what allows the collective hallucination to really take hold in the crowd mind is not so much the witnesses’s failure to perceive what’s really there at the time of the sighting, but their failure to correctly recall the details of the sighting after it had already taken place.

    The collective hallucination theory is not implausible, and could account for a few of history’s most most spectacular anomalous events. One such example is the famous Miracle of the Sun in 1917, a mass sighting that represented the culmination of months of alleged entity encounters reported by three young shepherd children. A crowd of 70,000 spectators were primed by the prophecies of the three children, and emotionally aroused by the suggestion that they had seen the Virgin Mary. That some people in the crowd agreed on witnessing a spinning silver disc, falling objects, and some colour distortions in the clouds, without any real-world changes actually taking place (and while staring into the sun!), is not beyond reason.(6)


The limitations of collective hallucinations
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    But it’s important to remember that collective hallucinations, at least as Zune and Jones define them, take place under very specific circumstances, and take their strongest effects long after the hallucination takes place. Not all anomalous observations occur under these conditions, and many are reported in such a way as to nullify the full effect of distortions through collective recall. 

    Unlike the Miracle of the Sun, most anomalous events aren’t presaged beforehand. The 10,000 or so residents of Phoenix Arizona, for example, who witnessed the “Phoenix Lights” had no warning that a giant, boomerang-shaped craft would drift over their city for two hours only on the night of March 13, 1997.(7) And viewing it individually, from separate households, they had no way of priming each other for suggestion, or of sharing their observations amongst each other. ​

    Although the Phoenix Lights eventually spawned a media frenzy, police, news stations, and reporting centres received hundreds of calls before any of the news had gone public. Nearly everyone reported the exact same thing, at the exact same time. This assures us that the witnesses did not unwittingly converge their accounts in discussing it with each other. The crowd model of mass sightings can’t be applied in all cases.

​    It’s also important to remember that collective hallucinations have not been demonstrated through any kind of scientific process, experimental or otherwise. The whole theory rests on flimsy epistemic foundations. It is an extrapolation of the better-understood concept of hallucination without any unique data to back it up. 


Hallucinations and hysteria

    The idea that mass hallucinations are an accepted scientific phenomenon may well be the result of a confusion with the term, “mass hysteria.” Mass hysteria, a well-attested-to, if little understood phenomenon, is generally accepted as an explanation for the spread of certain beliefs, behaviours, and psychosomatic responses. It is not accepted as an explanation for group perceptions, visual, auditory, or otherwise. ​

​    For example, in 1518, some 400 people in Strasbourg, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, were swept up in a craze that saw them uncontrollably dancing for sometimes more than a month without rest. Some died from exhaustion while others simply “danced it out,” but authorities were never able to determine what had caused the epidemic. The “dancing plague” seemed to be contagious, but nobody picked up any hallucinatory experiences.(8)

​
    Another example comes from the West Bank of Palestine in 1983. 943 Palestinian girls and some female Israel soldiers complained of fainting spells and feelings of nausea. Although both Palestinians and Israelis accused each other of deploying chemical weapons, no cause was ever identified. Investigations concluded that while perhaps 200 of the earliest cases may have been due to real environmental contaminants, all subsequent ones were psychosomatic in nature.(9)

    Again in this case, though many claimed to experience bodily symptoms with no discernible cause, no-one claimed to see or hear anything that wasn’t actually there. Our bodies and nervous systems seem to have ways of reproducing the experiences of others around us; our perceptual systems do not, at least not nearly to the same extent.



The mass hallucination theory: straw man, or honest confusion?

    That “collective hallucinations” are so weakly supported in the psychological literature has led Mesner to question if the “mass hallucination” theory isn’t just a straw man argument employed by anomalists to make the only assumed alternative  explanation - that the observations were true to reality - seem like the more rational choice.
    I’m sure Mesner’s statement is at least partly correct. However, it has also been my experience that the mass hallucination theory is invoked more commonly by those who take a debunking position on a topic, but who also don’t necessarily understand the limitations of the collective hallucination theory.

    Whether it’s used as a straw man or just confused with similar concepts like mass hysteria, there just isn’t enough scientific support for such things as mass hallucinations to accept them as a definitive explanations in any particular cases.


Conclusion

    Good explanations for anomalous phenomena are built on good science and robust theories. The mass hallucination theory, in any name or form, is neither of these things. 

    In many cases, explaining group sightings as mass or collective hallucinations is about as speculative and ultimately pseudoscientific as explaining them as UFOs. It is not a more “rational” alternative to any supernatural explanation, and it should not be accepted as the default explanation for multiple-witness accounts.




- Jason Charbonneau





(1) For a list of references to “mass hallucinations” in popular culture, see: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SharedMassHallucination

(2) Douglas Mesner, “Mass Hallucination, Hysteria, and Miracles,” The Process is, published July 12, 2012, accessed Oct 27, 2016: http://www.process.org/discept/2012/07/12/mass-hallucination-hysteria-miracles/    

(3) Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind (Kitchener: Batch Books, 2001), 24-25: http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/lebon/Crowds.pdf

(4) Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones, Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking, 2nd Ed. (New York: Psychology Press, 2014), 114-118 and elsewhere.

(5) “Collective Hallucination,” Skeptic’s Dictionary, updated Oct 27, 2015. Accessed Oct 27, 2016: http://skepdic.com/collective.html

(6) Also noted by Zusne and Jones, 118.     

(7) Lynne D. Kitei, The Phoenix Lights. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2010.

(8) Paul Wallis, “Mystery explained? 'Dancing Plague' of 1518, the bizarre dance that killed dozens,” Digital Journal, published Aug 13, 2008: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/258521

(9) Andrew Kincaid, “The West Bank Fainting Epidemic,” Oddly Historical, published on Dec 27, 2014, accessed Oct 27, 2016: http://www.oddlyhistorical.com/tag/west-bank-fainting-epidemic/

       This past June I attended the 2016 Alien Cosmic Expo (ACE) in Brantford, Ontario, which pulled together a terrific panel of ufologists for what was billed as “Canada’s first public hearing on UFOs.” The goal, like that of the Citizen Hearings in Washington D.C. a few years earlier, was to increase public awareness of UFO secrecy, and to urge the government to disclose what it knows about the elusive aerial phenomenon. 

    The expo’s orientation towards “disclosure” - the official release of all government information on UFOs - follows the dominant trend in ufology today. But I’d like to argue that this narrow focus on government secrecy works to the detriment of scientific inquiry, and slows the advance of our knowledge on UFOs. It is both scientifically and pragmatically ill-advised to rely on government disclosure as a source for truth: one can never assume that the government has the answers, and one could never trust them if they did. 

    We should shift our focus towards scientific discovery, not disclosure, as a means of getting answers on the UFO phenomenon. 
​

The Narrow Agenda

    Overall, ACE 2016 was a terrific success. Some of ufology’s finest were among the crowd: Paul Hellyer, Richard Dolan, Travis Walton, Grant Cameron, Steve Bassett, Nick Pope, and the one-and-only, Stanton Friedman. Each was given a chance to state their case to a panel of outside journalists, writers, and media representatives, and to respond to questions that they posed.
​
    Together, the speakers; provided a broad-strokes overview of government UFO research, both public and classified; highlighted some of the major documents suggesting the existence of a coverup, and; speculated on the extent of our leaders’ knowledge of UFO secrets. Their knowledge on these subjects was considerable, and the facts that they presented were significant. Every member of the table, and particularly Bassett, the godfather of modern UFO disclosure, exemplified the value of speaking truth to power through Freedom of Information requests and the critical questioning of our political leaders. 

    So assured were they of the value of their work that none of them but Pope seemed to have acknowledged the challenge posed by a PhD student on the media panel. After a particularly disclosure-heavy round of hearings, the student observed that when activists are told that their allegations are off the mark, or that the government has nothing to hide, they reject these “false” disclosures as misinformation. They hold out for “true” disclosure, defined as nothing short of full confirmation of their beliefs. How do we break out of this unfalsifiable, circular thinking, she asked, and move down a more productive avenue of inquiry?

Stephen Basset's remarks at the 2016 ACE, followed by a Q&A. The panel question discussed above begins at 16:31.

     Bassett scoffed at the question, pointing to the usual declassified documents as proving the existence of a deep, and as-yet undisclosed government secret. Pope, the former Directorate of Defence Security and UFO desk officer for the British Ministry of Defence, was the only one to really take seriously the challenge implicit in the student’s question: is disclosure just a waste of time?
​
    In his own response, Pope freely acknowledged the critical flaw in the disclosure agenda: namely, that it assumes as its starting point that the government does indeed have something to disclose. It if doesn’t, of course, then the movement couldn’t possibly achieve its goal of making them disclose it.

    Perhaps Pope was most willing to acknowledge the flaws of the disclosure movement because he, like several prominent ufologists today, does not believe that the government is covering up as much as we often assume. Pope recognized the MoD’s fundamental dishonesty in insisting that UFOs were not of defence interest while they actively engaged in research behind the scenes. But Pope insists that the PR front - one very similar to USAF’s own - was only a means of deflecting media inquiry and escaping public accountability for chasing after UFOs. ​

    In other words, the government was lying, but they weren’t hiding any answers on UFOs origins: only the embarrassing truth that they, too, were looking for an answer that they couldn’t find. 


What’s the Government Hiding?

    This was exactly the point that was made by retired Colonel. Dr. John B. Alexander in his book, UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities (2012).(1) Alexander investigated UFO secrecy from within the government during his extensive career in military intelligence, and found next to nothing to support the contention that a secret cabal of US military men are hiding the evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. Any apparently pernicious attempts to discredit UFO research - the Robertson Panel, or the Condon Report, for example - were made primarily in an effort to keep people from asking questions the government couldn’t answer, and making demands the government couldn’t meet. 

    But today’s disclosure movement is doing exactly that. It’s asking questions the government can’t answer: questions like, “where do UFOs come from?” and “why are they here?” The government can’t answer these questions because, more than likely, nobody in the government - or at least in any of the parts still accountable to the public - can answer them.

    And why should we assume that secret government research has turned up anything that public research hasn’t turned up already? “Hard” evidence for alien visitation is notoriously elusive, and whatever intelligence is behind it clearly has no interest in making itself widely known. What could the US government possibly do to drag it out into the light? 

    Many, of course, would insist here that the “aliens” have made a back room deal with the US government: that they have traded knowledge and technology for free access to abduction victims, or something to that effect. To fully refute this idea would take an article of its own, but suffice to say that the UFO and alien phenomena are decidedly apolitical - manifestly, at least - and seem to prefer selective, personalized interactions over institutional arrangements. Why should we assume that an intelligence so obviously advanced - an intelligence capable of altering our spacetime at will - would have any need to make secret pacts with our heads of state, or cooperate with their national security agendas?  

A Hopeless Agenda

    Moreover, there seems to be a massive problem with falsifiability inherent in the disclosure agenda. If disclosure activists are right, then it would be easy enough for the US government to confirm this. But if they’re wrong, it’s hard to imagine any government proclamation that would convince them of this. How could any administration (especially one so strongly accused of dishonesty as the US government) with nothing to disclose ever convince everyone that it really has nothing to disclose? Any statement from a government source could be called a lie, and who’s going to convince a bunch of conspiracy theorists that it’s actually the truth?

    The only statement that disclosure activists would likely ever accept would be one that confirms what they already believe. Unless they’re told they’re right, then some activists, at least, will carry on fighting the government forever, practicing a hopeless exercise in self-validation. Whatever statements we get from government, there will always be someone crying “coverup!” and holding out for “true” disclosure.

    Not only is it unlikely to succeed, disclosure is a distraction from more productive efforts to explain the UFO mystery. By focusing so exclusively on disclosure, we are neglecting scientific investigation into the UFO evidence that’s already freely available to the public. Why ask the military for answers to questions we normally ask of the academic community? After all, we’d never consider the Air Force a reputable source for information on any other scientific topic. 

    Clearly we’re barking up the wrong tree. Academics and private researchers are much better equipped to explain the origin of the UFO phenomenon, and they can do it with or without government help.


Conclusion    

    I absolutely support the efforts of disclosure activists like Bassett and Cameron, and I am extremely grateful for the efforts of the Alien Cosmic Expo organizers (I had a great time!). Activists have rescued a impressive number of government documents from a fate of eternal secrecy, and events like the ACE are how they share what they’ve learned with everyone else. 

    But we should not be focused so exclusively on government disclosure that we forget that there’s still a great deal we can, and should, learn about the UFO phenomenon through channels outside the U.S. government. Even if it’s true that there’s a top secret team of scientists investigating UFOs deep within the underworld of the U.S. military, there’s no reason to think that they’ll find something we can’t find on our own with publicly-funded, peer-reviewed research.
​
    No authoritative proclamation could ever take the place of scientifically-verified fact. There’s a lot we can learn by questioning our governments, but we should always keep in mind that the truth about UFOs will ultimately be discovered, not disclosed. 




- Jason Charbonneau


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Notes

(1) John B. Alexander. UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011. 

    John Horgan recently wrote an article for Scientific American in which he argued that today’s consciousness research is devolving into pseudoscience. (1)  Horgan took a monistic, materialist stance on the philosophy of mind, which he made clear enough, but his criticism of opposing views was muddied by a heavy reliance on a particular word that’s become increasingly common in the skeptical literature.

    “Woo” or “woowoo” is used everywhere as a catch-all pejorative for unorthodox metaphysical views, and the debate over anomalous phenomena is suffering for it. Debunkers’ heavy reliance on vaguely derogatory words like “woo” comes at the expense of more precise, critical terminology, and it’s confusing tongues in the debate over anomalistics. Although it’s meant as a general criticism of unscientific methodology, “woo” is often used as a substitute for better articulated critiques, leaving those whose work has been criticized with no way to respond to the attack, or even understand the controversy.  

    Woo is not a scientific term, but a loaded, catch-all smear tossed around to tarnish the credibility of all minority beliefs in science. Woo, and all words like it, should be unwelcome in science journalism and debate. 


Defining Woo

    What does “woo” mean, really? How can we define it, and how can we distinguish what it denotes from more rigorous scientific concepts?

    As Horgan explains, woo is the kind of “metaphysically flakey” verbiage that proponents of pseudoscientific theories employ to persuade audiences of their claims. Horgan opposes woo to “serious suppositions,” and helpfully explains that the term can be used as both an adjective and a noun.

    After some research, I found the definition of “woo” (or “woo-woo”) to be frustratingly elusive. The skeptic’s dictionary defines it as referring to “ideas considered irrational or based on extremely flimsy evidence or that appeal to mysterious occult forces or powers.” (2)  It is a “derogatory and dismissive” term synonymous with “nonsense, irrational, nutter, nut, or crazy.” 

    A dictionary quoted in the definition defines it as “concerned with emotions, mysticism, or spiritualism; other than rational or scientific; mysterious; new agey.” 

    RationalWiki defines “woo” as “dressing itself in the trappings of science… while involving unscientific concepts.…”(3) while the Collins English Dictionary defines it as “involving irrational superstition.”

    A enormous range of ideas could fall within these broad definitions: “irrational,” “new-agey” “mysterious” and “mystical” are all highly subjective terms, and not sufficiently precise for defining categories of analysis.

    In practice, “woo” is used about as liberally as its definition allows, and often, the implied meaning can be hard to infer. In Horgan’s article in Scientific American, the word “woo” appears a total of 14 times, including it’s prominent use in the article headline. In every case, however, it is used as the only criticism of the idea, with no supporting argumentation. 

    Other writers opt for the “woo” label even where they’re able to articulate more specific criticisms. After a public debate, Michael Shermer mocked Deepak Chopra’s phrase, “the womb of creation,” by calling his ideas the “woo of creation.” (4)  Chopra had attempted to integrate quantum mechanics into the philosophy of mind, a task taken up in much the same way by mainstream academics such as Roger Penrose of Oxford University and Stuart Hammeroff at the University of Arizona. 

    But even after engaging with Chopra’s ideas in a constructive and critical fashion, Shermer chose to label them all as “woo,” as if to suggest that his refutation had rendered them all a pseudoscience. After an earlier debate, Shermer identified in Chopra’s statements the “very embodiment of woowoo” which he boiled down to an excessive reliance on jargon-heavy sloganeering. (5)  Chopra then accused Shermer of using “woowoo” to describe anything expressed in terms he didn’t understand. 
​​
    Sometimes, debunkers attach the “woo” label to people, rather than to ideas. James Randi puts people like Oprah Winfrey into a broad class of “woo-woo” people who believe things uncritically, and gravitate to the most fantastical explanation for common events. (6)

So many subjects, people, and ideas have been stuck with the label “woo” that one begins to wonder if it means anything at all. As these uses attest, “woo” denotes a kind of pseudoscientific thinking that is closely entangled with mystical spirituality and other new-age beliefs. Exactly how they violate scientific standards is undefined. 


The Problems with Woo

    By using the word “woo,” skeptics disguise exactly what it is that they’re objecting to in an idea. These words obscure the real points of contention and make it nearly impossible for those stuck with the label to defend their views. Where does one begin to refute an accusation of woo? What could one say to defend an idea against such an unfocused critique?

    In many cases, what debunkers are objecting to is merely the aesthetic value of the content, and not any particular methodological failings. To say that someone believes in something because of its pleasing implications is not the same thing as saying that the idea is epistemologically unfounded; and to say that something is “mystically” orientated, or “new-agey” is not the same thing as saying it’s unscientific. None of these labels help us to flag or articulate violations of scientific methodology.

    We cannot simply infer epistemological errors from a claim’s topical connection with mysticism and spirituality. If an idea is unscientific, then it must contain some epistemological flaw that can be identified and articulated in scientific terms. We should use these terms, rather than the more playful ones provided to us by pop culture commentators.
    
​One could imagine that the label “woo,” also acts as a warning sign in the skeptical community. Once a skeptic labels something as woo, other skeptics know to avoid it, and otherwise free-thinking individuals are discouraged from looking into the topic for themselves. Tossing the “woo” label around does nothing to inform inquiring minds about new ideas, and encourages the blind rejection of unfamiliar concepts.

​
Beyond Woo

    Labelling ideas as “woo” has become a way for debunkers to dismiss ideas they don’t like while avoiding any meaningful criticism or debate. To rely on this label is to take a short-cut to refuting ideas, without going through the real work of holding them to scientific standards.

    “Woo” is used today as “communist” was during the McCarthyist paranoia of the 1950s: as an all-encompassing slur for “othering” ideological opponents. it’s liberal application spreads prejudice and stigma without identifying any specific, actionable problems or violations of scientific methodology. Ironically, although it’s meant to distinguish pseudoscientific ideas from scientific orthodoxy, the “woo” label only helps blur the boundary between the two.

    Its a bit of a cliché now to say that words have power, but it’s especially true in scientific debate. How we label, categorize, and refer to scientific suppositions is central to establishing the fault lines of the debate. When we don’t use scientific terminology in labelling alternative views, we obscure the real points of controversy. This increases the risk of debaters talking past each other for lack of knowledge of the other’s true position. But if properly employed, neutral, scientific language can clarify debate, and keep refutations focused, supported, and debatable.
    There is no more room in scientific debate for nebulous words like “woo” than there is for whatever kinds of nebulous ideas it’s meant to apply to. “Woo” has got to go, but so too does the way in which we label it. 

• Jason Charbonneau

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1. John Horgan, “The Mind–Body Problem, Scientific Regress and “Woo”" Scientific American, July 11, 2016, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-mind-body-problem-scientific-regress-and-woo/
2. Bob Carroll,“woo-woo” Skeptic’s Dictionary, March 12, 2008: http://skepdic.com/woowoo.html
3. Rational Wiki, “Woo,” last updated June 12, 2016: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo
4. Michael Shermer, “The Woo of Creation: My Evening with Deepak Chopra,” scienceblog.org, uploaded April 5, 2011, accessed July 18, 2016: http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/04/05/my-evening-with-deepak-chopra/
5. Michael Shermer, “The Future of God Debate Sam Harris and Michael Shermer vs Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston,” YouTube video, uploaded by AllSamHarrisContent, August 27, 2012, accessed August 22, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E99BdOfxAE
6. James Randi, “James Randi, P5 - Woo-woo (CFI Toronto 2011/09/27),” YouTube video, uploaded by firefly4f4, October 10, 2011, accessed July 18, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmNI_P7SaA

     A few weeks ago, the CARE Program for Integrated Health and Healing at the University of Alberta posted a notice about an upcoming spoon-bending workshop on campus. Participants (mostly doctors, but other community members were invited as well) would be guided through a meditation that would enable them to warp a spoon with the power of their minds - and a certain amount of pressure from their hands. The event was the concluding presentation in a series exploring integrative medicine as a complement to conventional health care, and it was intended to be a fun activity to end on.(1)

    The would-be presenter, Anastasia Kutt, an energy-healing therapist in Edmonton, Alberta (Western Canada), was prepared for a skeptical audience and hoping for an “educated conversation.” 

    She was immediately disappointed. 

    An outcry from skeptical tweeters pressured CARE’s director into cancelling the workshop and spurred Kutt’s resignation from the program. Meanwhile, the media amplified debunkers’ scorn in an over-blown and one-sided treatment of the controversy. 

    The #spoongate controversy demonstrates the narrow limits of our tolerance for unorthodox views in the modern university system, and offers a warning on the intellectually-stifling effects of suppressing discussion for appearances’ sake. It also raises questions about the role of academic institutions in regulating thought and practice, and implores us to take a more committed stance on intellectual freedom in the university. 


The Spoon-Bending Workshop Controversy

    Sometime before June 1, Timothy Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, came across a poster for the event and took offence to its being taught at a “science-based” institution. 

    In an interview with the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, Caulfield insisted that spoon bending has been thoroughly debunked, and expressed concern over the effect that hosting such an event would have on people’s confidence in university science.  Whatever the university’s role in organizing the workshop (and Caulfield himself was unsure), he felt that even including the U of A logo on the poster was damaging to the credibility of the institution. “It really does seem like [programs like CARE] are part of academia and that, to me, is problematic.” (2)

​Tyson’s opinion seems to be that the only true test for the reality of UFOs involves a physical specimen and a lab-based analysis. Bringing an alien ashtray to the lab, according to Tyson, could not fail to reveal a wealth of information about UFO abductions that the abductees themselves could not. The scientific value of such a specimen is accepted as a given: “it’s not about eyewitness testimony at that point, because you have something of alien manufacture, and anything you pull off a flying saucer that crossed the galaxy is going to be interesting.”

    Tyson’s line of reasoning makes the epistemological assumption that physical evidence is inherently more valuable than eyewitness testimony, in any abundance. It is an assumption seemingly taken for granted by all science educators and many university scientists. (2)

    But this assumption cannot be justified epistemologically. Insisting on physical specimens as a prerequisite for scientific inquiry is a wholly arbitrary way of establishing a standard of evidence, and it precludes scientists from ever establishing the truth status of many anomalous and perfectly mundane experiences. More importantly, it distracts us from seriously engaging with scientific and epistemological questions like, “what’s the claim we’re trying to prove?” and, “what counts as evidence in its favour?” or, “what counts as evidence of its falsification?” These important questions are left unanswered when we insist on the old “show me the evidence” routine, and they will never be addressed until we give it up. 


Physical Evidence for UFOs?

    Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal to Tyson’s statement is to point out that we have lots of physical evidence for UFOs, and that none of that evidence seems to matter. The late Dr. Roger Leir has removed 16 different “alien implants” from the bodies of alleged abductees, and had them tested at some of the world’s most prestigious labs, including Los Alamos National laboratory, and the Material Sciences lab at the University of Toronto. Many of these tests returned some very puzzling results that have yet to be explained. (3)

    Ted Philips, a citizen scientist with the Centre for UFO Studies (CUFOS), spent years collecting physical traces from alleged UFO landing sites, and published his findings in a public CUFOS report in 1975.(4)  Philips documented 561 cases involving dehydrated soil, irradiated ground, scorched vegetation, and many more puzzling effects. A study directed by Physicist Peter Sturrock of Stanford University, published in book form in 1999, brought a wealth of new physical trace cases to the attention of the scientific community. (5) 

    To my knowledge, none of these cases have received more than cursory comment from debunkers, and certainly not from Dr. Tyson. 

    Why? Because physical evidence is not the silver bullet that science educators make it out to be, and insisting on it is merely another strategy for avoiding engaging with the evidence that we do have. Tyson’s arbitrary standard of evidence is a knee-jerk answer to the question never asked: what kind of evidence would prove the existence of something we can’t explain? This question requires a great deal more thought than most skeptics give it in their insistence on something - anything - physical. 


The Limitations of Physical Evidence

    Physical evidence can’t always tell us as much as we often assume, and it’s not the ideal form of proof for many types of claims. Rather than being the golden standard of scientific inquiry, it’s more fitting to think of physical evidence as one of many possible proofs available to the inquiring mind, and of laboratory analysis as one of many tools in the scientist’s arsenal. There are of course many forms of evidence -  observational, experimental, and anecdotal, to name a few - and their importance in any given case will vary with the nature of the claim.
​  
  The value of physical materials as a basis for new claims about the universe is highly dependent on the nature of the claim itself, and for many types of claims, the value is actually quite low. 

    Take the claim that there is life on Mars, for example. In this case, we could reasonably expect a simple and unambiguous proof in a physical specimen. Life, at least as we understand it, bears certain unmistakable signs in its physical makeup, and even the smallest sample would suffice to find them: a tuft of hair, or a piece of bone. There are other claims, however, for which physical evidence would not allow such unambiguous conclusions.

    Let’s satisfy Tyson’s standards and say that someone did snatch an alien ashtray in the midst of an abduction experience, and carried it back for laboratory analysis. If the claim was that a race of extraterrestrials had taken the witness aboard a spaceship, then an ashtray would be of little value in establishing the truth of it. The most that any lab study could possibly conclude is that it was in fact manufactured (i.e., that something had created the ashtray), and further, that the ashtray does not match the composition or design of any known manufacturers.

    This conclusion would not, however, be proof of alien visitation, let alone abduction. There is no test that could positively identify a new civilization on the basis of an ashtray, or any isolated specimen, alone. One could always argue that the ashtray was a deliberate hoax, or some lost artifact from a long-defunct (human) manufacturer. 

    Furthermore, no sample can be identified without something to identify it with. We’ve yet to find or study any extraterrestrial beings, and therefore have no information on which to base our criteria for something being definitely alien in origin. With nothing to match the sample to, we couldn’t possibly identify a specimen as anything at all. 

    Besides, what elements could an ashtray possibly contain to match it back to an undiscovered civilization? As far as we know, all matter on other planets is composed of some combination of the same elements we’ve identified here on earth, and we have no reason to think another species would manufacture objects of radically different composition. Even if we did retrieve an alien artifact, it probably wouldn’t contain anything to rule out the possibility that it was made here on Earth. 

    Demanding physical evidence, in this case, would have the effect of privileging “mundane” explanations: if the specimen was, in fact, constituent of something known and ordinary, the analysis would probably provide definitive proof. But if the specimen was, in fact, something extraordinary, the most any analysis could possibly do would be to reach no conclusion at all. The specimen would remain forever unidentified, much like Dr. Leir’s alien implants, and debunkers would go on insisting that it’s probably just something man-made.


Sampling the Intangible

    The problem with physical evidence is not just that it can be ambiguous when obtained. In other instances - as in the study of energy fields, behaviours, and most psychological phenomena - direct, physical evidence is often impossible to obtain at all. Imagine asking Jane Goodall to provide physical evidence that chimpanzees exhibit social bonding. Would we be forced to conclude that chimpanzees are mindless beasts when she inevitably failed to place something in a petri dish? Of course not. It would be wrong in this case to conceive of the subject in a strictly material framework, and it would be fruitless to seek out physical proof. 

    Many anomalous experiences are similarly difficult to place within a material framework. Many are thought to occur solely in the minds of the witnesses, involving no external stimuli whatsoever. Others are thought to be composed of something other than matter. Ghosts, for example, are typically thought to be immaterial, or ethereal beings: perhaps something from another dimension. But whether they’re holograms, illusions, or disembodied souls, one would not be justified in expecting them to leave tangible proof of their passing through.
​
    But is it not fitting to think of UFOs as a primarily physical phenomenon? Not really. UFOs are often seen as structured objects, and they occasionally appear on radar, and leave physical traces in the environment. However, some UFOs don’t show up on radar, even when their presence is confirmed by other physical means. Other UFOs don’t even take a consistent form, but appear instead as amorphous blobs of light. Many UFOs are reported to blink in and out of existence, rather than propel themselves away, and others are visible only to certain witnesses, and unnoticed by other would-be observers. 

    These features have led thinkers like Carl Jung, Jacques Vallée, and John Mack to remark that UFOs are strangely both physically “real” and subjectively constructed in the minds of observers. (6) In other words, they may be caused by some objective, real-world stimuli, but they don’t come to us from elsewhere, as other stable, physical objects. Rather, they manifest themselves according to the subjective thoughts and experiences of their witnesses, in the place, time, and form that is appropriate for the immediate sighting.  
​

     Last night, David Paulides, author of the much discussed non-fiction series, Missing 411, gave a talk at the University of Toronto. The talk was organized by the folks at Conspiracy Culture bookstore, a hub for alternative thought in the downtown area which had previously brought the great Graham Hancock to the city. For $20, I thought it could make for an interesting evening.
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    I first heard Paulides’ work mentioned in the comment section of a popular post on reddit submitted by an anonymous writer who claimed to be a  search and rescue officer at an unidentified U.S. national park in the U.S. The writer claimed to have worked on many cases of unexplained, and seemingly inexplicable, disappearances, and some that involved apparently supernatural phenomena. He or she also claimed, remarkably, that it was normal for search and rescue workers to encounter mysterious staircases deep in the wilderness which experienced officers admonished their juniors to avoid. A commenter mentioned the similarity of the writer’s stories to some of the cases presented in Missing 411, and I followed up on the reference.

    I’ve yet to read any of the books in the series, but my understanding is that  Missing 411 catalogues the hundreds of missing persons cases, primarily in North America, left unaccounted for by local investigators: sudden and inexplicable disappearances in which the body was either never found, or found only much later in highly unusual circumstances. Although Paulides was deeply involved in Bigfoot research for a number of years, he never ascribes a culprit to any of the disappearances he catalogues, but simultaneously insists that conventional explanations - murders, abductions, and suicides, for example - have all been ruled out.   

​     Paulides had a kind of understated presence, but spoke convincingly throughout. He said relatively little about himself, claiming only to have worked as a  police officer, an HR professional, and in some advanced position within an unidentified high-tech company. He said nothing of his Bigfoot research, perhaps in a effort to avoid discrediting himself to newcomers unsympathetic to anomalous phenomena, and did not discuss how he became interested in cases of missing persons (most likely because it came up during his investigations into Bigfoot encounters in national parks, something he’s admitted to elsewhere). 

    The vast majority of Paulides’ talk was spent on reviewing the data he’s collected, with very little in the way of either introductory or concluding remarks. He began by showing a few maps of where the disappearances were clustered (around the Rocky and Appalachian mountain ranges, with virtually no incidents in the Canadian prairies or through the American mid-west), then highlighted a few trends in the data. For example, he mentioned that in cases where a body was eventually found (most cases), autopsies often revealed that the person was not at the location of discovery for all, or even most of the time they were missing. More interestingly, there seems to be some sort of a connection to water: cases do not occur far from any large bodies of water (the prairies), and many bodies are eventually found floating in shallow bodies of water such as rivers, ponds, or marshes. All cases were investigated by local police departments and/ or search and rescue teams, and most were cleared of any suspicion of “foul play.”      

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    Throughout his talk, Paulides reminded the audience why these kinds of cases weren’t compiled earlier: local departments, he claimed, thought locally, and weren’t particularly concerned with - or even aware of - what similar things may have happened on the other side of the continent, or 50 years prior. Their job is to provide details in the case that might help lead to evidence of foul play. If none are found, their job is over, even if other aspects of the case are left unexplained. 

    Given the great span of time and space over which these disappearances have occurred (Paulides mentioned that the earliest ones go back at least as far as the 19th century), federal investigations units like the FBI have no reason to suspect the work of a serial killer or a secret cult. The cases are effectively disregarded, and inevitably forgotten, much like anomalies in scientific disciplines. As a remedy, Paulides proposed a national, or trans-national investigations unit that could be notified and dispatched in all cases that matched a similar profile. This unit could then test for otherwise unscreened factors (like the presence of GHB, the “date rape” chemical) that Paulides suspects might provide clues as to what is going on. 

    Paulides offered almost nothing in the way of explanation, although he did highlight a few strange trends in the data. Few of these trends, however, offer any obvious clues in the identification of a culprit, motive, or mechanism for the disappearances. A large percentage of missing persons were runners, physicians, or hunters, for example. There are other clusters of sex and age consistency that are equally as puzzling. Victims tend to be bright, happy, and upstanding people, with no reason for ending their own life. They tend to disappear one-at-a-time (rarely in pairs), and strangely, their shoes are almost never found. Most bodies, when discovered, are found in socks or barefoot, and often completely naked. Often they are found miles from the place of disappearance, across natural barriers they could scarcely have traversed on their own. Other peculiar details are far too varied and nuanced to list here. 

    Pauldies spoke for a little more than an hour and a half, then allowed some time for Q&A. I was pleased when an audience member asked Paulides about the alleged forest stairs made popular in the reddit post mentioned above. I had wanted to ask him about this myself, but wasn’t sure if I’d get a chance at the mic. Paulides immediately identified the forest stairs as a myth, propagated by fans of his work looking to generate a few easy hits, or up-votes, as it were, online. He didn’t dwell on the subject for more than a few sentences, but he insisted that the hundreds of search and rescue workers he’s interviewed in his career have never mentioned any such phenomenon. I left feeling as though the anonymous, reddit-famous search and rescue officer was likely little more than a clever charlatan with a penchant for supernatural horror tales. Oh well, I guess some things are just too intriguing to be true. 

    All in all, it was a great evening, and I walked away convinced that there was a genuine, undiscovered phenomenon at the heart of these disappearances. I also couldn’t help but be impressed by the bullet-proof nature of the evidence. Contrary to most UFO sightings, for example, in which something comes and goes often without any contact with the surrounding environment, Paulides’ cases involve undeniable deaths and disappearances, often with recovered bodies. These are data that can't be dismissed, and are very difficult to explain away: how could any debunker presume to provide an explanation that the coroner, family, and investigators couldn’t give themselves?

    Unfortunately, I did not walk away with a copy of any books in the Missing 411 series, as Paulides misjudged the demand and brought too few copies. I wasn’t particularly disappointed, however, as I felt that Pauldies had provided an adequate review of the data in his talk alone. Whether I ever buy his books or not, I’ll certainly keep an eye on developments in Paulides’ work. You should too. 

    And I highly recommend that you read into some of the cases chronicled in Missing 411, or watch one of Paulides’ talks on YouTube. The specific circumstances of some of the disappearances are truly bizarre, and far more unsettling than they might seem when discussed as a whole, as I’ve done here. Just don’t be surprised if you lose your enthusiasm for camping. 


- Jason Charbonneau

    The famous Canadian UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman, did a documentary in the early 1990s called “Flying Saucers are Real,” an homage to Donald Keyhoe’s UFO classic, The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950). The title seemed as basic and straightforward a statement as any advocate of UFO research could make. But while I’m certainly an advocate for UFO research, I’d like to argue the opposite: flying saucers, or the disc-shaped craft that supposedly carry extraterrestrial visitors from far away planets into our atmosphere, are a figment of our social imagination. They are not real. 

    Let me be clear: I absolutely believe that there is something wholly unexplained in the UFO data. Unexplained, or Unidentified Flying objects are undoubtedly a part of our reality, and they are more than worthy of scientific interest. I also acknowledge that many of these objects are described as being disc or saucer shaped, and could therefore justifiably be referred to as “flying saucers.” I’m even open to the notion that these “saucers” may be carrying alien beings.

    I’m merely trying to argue that the concept of the flying saucer, and all that we assume about its pilots and origins, is a human creation based on a narrow, and arbitrary sampling of global UFO reports. The flying saucer label does not represent the wider UFO phenomenon, and even excludes many of the sightings we’d consider true airborne anomalies. We need to stop using the term, “flying saucer” as a substitute for UFO, UAP, or other more neutral terms, if not drop it from our vocabulary altogether. 


The First Flying Saucers

    So where did this term come from, and why do we use it in the first place? Its history is actually quite short, given the long history of UFOs. People have seen things in the sky they could not explain for at least as long as they’ve been capable of recording them, but “flying saucers” are a product of the post-war era. Ufologists have discovered that people saw metallic, disc-shaped craft at least as far back as the turn of the twentieth century, but we had no name for these objects at the time, and no obvious category to place them in. As a result, they weren’t often recorded, and they weren’t widely discussed. 

    This all changed when an American businessman and pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw what he thought were a fleet of unusual aircraft over Mount Rainer, Washington in June 1947. Arnold described the craft he saw as “delta-shaped,” and claimed only that their movement resembled that of a saucer skipping over water. Media reporting on the incident, however, twisted his words, and dubbed the objects “flying saucers.” 

    Despite the inaccuracy, the term stuck, and it even spawned a few imitations. Just two weeks after Arnold’s sightings, the Roswell Daily Record broke the infamous story of the Roswell crash. “No Details of Flying Disk are Revealed,” ran the sub headline. From then on, “flying disc,”and “flying saucer” have been treated interchangeably. 

    The concept of the flying saucer was solidified in the popular imagination after a few key photographs made it to the media: one over New Jersey in 1952, and two from a farm near McMinnville, Oregon in 1950. The McMinnville UFO photographs are among the most famous ever taken, and are considered today as emblematic of the UFO phenomenon. ​

    The image of the spinning, metallic disc quickly made it ways into popular culture. Flying saucers were featured in magazines and comic books everywhere, and even shown on the big screen. 1951’s landmark science-fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, had the aliens landing in spinning, silver discs. In Forbidden Planet (1956), set in a far away future, even the humans flew flying saucers. The sleek, domed saucer became a symbol of the space-faring civilization, and hung around for a very long time in popular culture. 

    It’s true, many of the early UFO reports of the late 1940s involved disc-shaped craft (“like two inverted saucers” was a common description), but others didn’t. The famous Maury Island sighting of 1947, the same month as Arnold’s, involved doughnut-shaped craft dropping molten metal from their hulls. The craft that supposedly abducted the Hills in 1961 was described as being in the shape of a pancake, with two little wings on either side. And many sightings over the years, including one over an Italian football stadium in 1954, involved cigar-shaped craft hanging motionless in the air. (1)

    The term “flying saucer,” and the mythos that came to surround it, was a media creation, one that began in the wake of Arnold’s sighting and never quite went away.


Where have all the Flying Saucers Gone?

    That the term lingered for so long is even more surprising in light of the more recent trend towards seeing more complex types of craft. The officers that chased a UFO across two states in 1966 said that the object was shaped like an ice-cream cone, with a lop-sided, rounded top. Betty Cash and two passengers were stopped in the middle of a highway in 1980 by a hovering, diamond-shaped craft. Thousands of people in the Hudson Valley area in the 1980s and 90s reported triangular or boomerang-shaped objects, and in 2012, a mother and daughter in rural Wisconsin saw a brilliant, lampshade-shaped object fly over their neighbour’s home. (2)

    Still other sightings involve objects that aren’t obviously craft - or objects, for that matter - at all. Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s collected hundreds of reports of “nocturnal lights,” or points of light in the sky hardly discernible from a star if not for their movement.(3)  Many UFO sightings, then and now, fall into this category. To call such a thing a “flying saucer,” or even a “flying craft,” is more than a bit presumptuous.

    But even in cases where the UFO is seen within 150m - what Hynek would have called a “close encounter” - the object does not always appear as a structured craft. As early as 1969, the French ufologist, Aimé Michel, published the extraordinary account of a physician in Southern France who watched two glowing discs approach the window of his home and merge into one, seamless object. (4) Last April, a Colombian newspaper editor took photos himself of a shape-changing UFO that flew over Bogota and at times took the form of a figure eight. (5) What sense does it make to refer to these aerial anomalies as “saucers?”

    People no longer report saucer-shaped craft with the frequency they once did, and other kinds of UFOs have become more common. It’s to the point now that sightings of traditional discs are vastly outnumbered by sightings of all other types of craft. (6) There is an enormous range of UFO forms, and most of them look nothing like discs or saucers. As part of its regular analysis, MUFON, one of the world’s leading independent UFO research groups, categorizes sighting reports according to the shape of the object seen. Objects are widely distributed across more than 20 different categories of shape, but many more fall into the “sphere” category than any one other. In the month of February 2016, 111 UFOs were classed as “spherical,” whereas only 42 were classed as being in the shape of a “disc.” Other categories include “oval,” teardrop,” “square,” “diamond,” and “chevron.” (7)

    Referring to this whole range of structures as “flying saucers” is more than simply misleading: it is locking us into a single mode of thought, and preventing us from exploring alternative answers to the UFO question. When we refer to an unidentified object as a “flying saucer” or a “flying disc,” we are prejudicing the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFO origins. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are generating the assumption for ourselves and for others, that “genuine” UFOs are physical spaceships from another planet. Even the weaknesses of the extraterrestrial hypothesis not withstanding, it is unscientific to assume it from the outset, merely as a function of our choice in terminology. If we’re going to leave the door open to alternative theories, we need to use terminology that allows for this. 


Conclusion

    In Flying Saucers and Science, Friedman defends his use of the term, “flying saucer” by claiming that “Flying saucers are, by definition, unidentified flying objects, but very few unidentified flying objects are flying saucers.” (8) Perhaps so. But if flying discs are just a subset of UFOs, then there are many others under this umbrella category that deserve our attention, for all the same reasons. 

    It is unscientific for Mr. Friedman, or any ufologist, to continue using “flying saucer” or “flying disc” to refer to the great range of anomalous aerial phenomena. It’s time to retire these antiquated terms and reconsider how we label what we can’t explain. ​


- Jason Charbonneau


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Notes:

(1) Richard Padula, “The Day UFOs Stopped Play.” BBC.com. October 24, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407 (accessed April 14, 2016). 

(2) “MUFON annual report 2012.” Mufon.com. http://www.mufon.com/2012-annual-report---top-cases.html (accessed April 14, 2016 ).

(3) Examples can be found throughout in J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

(4) Aimé Michel, “The Strange Case of Dr. X” in Flying Saucer Review, special Issue no. 3. September 1969. Noufors.com. http://www.noufors.com/Documents/Books,%20Manuals%20and%20Published%20Papers/Flying%20Saucer%20Review/ (accessed April 14, 2016), 3-15. 

(5) Jon Austin, “Shape Changing UFO Caught on Camera as Newspaper Editor Spots Alien Craft.” mirror.co,uk. May 15, 2015. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/shape-changing-ufo-caught-camera-5511582 (accessed April 14, 2016).

(6) Micah Hanks, “What Ever Happened to the “Flying Saucer” Shaped UFOs?” mysteriousuniverse.com. December 24, 2015. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/12/what-ever-happened-to-the-flying-saucer-shaped-ufos/ (accessed April 14, 2016). 

(7) Statistics from the “February 2016 UFO Sighting Statistics” email from mufon.com, sent to the author on March 31, 2016.

(8)  Stanton Friedman, Flying Saucers and Science, Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2008, 57. 

Jeffrey Kripal, scholar of comparative religion at Rice University, and Whitely Strieber, the famous writer and abductee, have recently published a ground-breaking book on the supernatural and what it means for our understanding of reality. Kripal has long been an advocate of bringing the paranormal "back to the table" in academic debate, and he has a lot to say on just how this should be done. In this interview from 2011, Kripal discusses how anomalous phenomena came to be banished to the realm of popular media, and underscores our need for a "new way of knowing" in order to grasp the complexity of the supernatural. Read the interview, read the book:

​http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/04/26/reading-the-paranormal-writing-us-an-interview-with-jeffrey-kripal/