Reliability of V.J. Ballester-Olmos Richard W. Heiden Reliability of V.J. Ballester-Olmos Richard W. Heiden 2023 Vicente Juan Ballester-Olmos & UPIAR Cooperativa Iniziative e Studi UPIAR s.c. Corso Vittorio Emanuele II n. 108 - 10121 Torino - Italy
[email protected] - www.upiar.com Printed by Progetto Immagine - Torino DEDICATION Para Lucas: naciste pequeo pero llegars a ser grande V.J. BALLESTER-OLMOS To Betty, the love of my life. During the past 30-plus years she has too often had to share me with my interest in UFOs RICHARD W. HEIDEN INTRODUCTION by V.J. Ballester-Olmos with Richard W. Heiden 9 FOREWORD by Dr. Leonard S. Newman 19 I. CASE STUDIES 23 Chapter 1. Memory Games: A False Recall Episode 25 V.J. Ballester-Olmos Chapter 2. The Phoenix Lights: The Fallibility of Human Perception and Memory 39 Tim Callahan Chapter 3. Missile Flights and Fantasies 45 James T. Carlson Chapter 4. Meeting the Abductees: Betty Hill, Richard Price & Others 61 Peter Huston Chapter 5. Investigating Ball Lightning Eyewitness Reports 77 Dr. Alexander G. Keul Chapter 6. Very Close Encounter with a UAP in Levitation 94 ric Maillot and Dr. Jean-Michel Abrassart Chapter 7. The Real Ral, UFO Contactee and the Last Prophet 107 Claude Maug Chapter 8. The MUFON-ian Candidate: The Gulf Breeze UFO Case as Political Contest 121 Craig R. Myers Chapter 9. The Pascagoula Abduction: A Case of Hypnagogia? 137 Dr. Joe Nickell Chapter 10. Misinterpretations of Fireball Swarms from Satellite Reentries 141 James Oberg Chapter 11. When Testimony Becomes Testament: The Case of Ral, UFO Prophet, and the Question of Witness Reliability 153 Dr. Susan J. Palmer Chapter 12. The Legendary Cash-Landrum Case: Radiation Sickness from a Close Encounter? 166 Dr. Gary P. Posner Chapter 13. The Weinstein Catalog: Ufological Bullion or Fools Gold? 180 Tim Printy Chapter 14. The Changing Case of Prspera Muoz: An Abduction Remembered Over 41 years? 189 Jos Ruesga Montiel Chapter 15 Lunar Terror in Poland: A Doctors Dilemma 205 Wim van Utrecht Chapter 16 On the Credibility of the Barney & Betty Hill Abduction Case 220 Nigel Watson Chapter 17. Metamorphosis: Claimed Witness Accounts of the Great Lakes Fireball 229 of December 9, 1965 Robert R. Young II. PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 239 Chapter 1. On Eyewitness Reports of Extraterrestrial Life 241 Dr. Thomas D. Albright Chapter 2. Close Encounters of the Other Kind: On the Psychology of Alien Abductions 257 Dr. Jorge Conesa-Sevilla Chapter 3. Dissociation and Alien Abduction Allegation 266 Dr. Olivier Dodier Chapter 4. Alien Abduction: Takeaways 275 Dr. David V. Forrest Chapter 5. Hypnotic Regression and False Memories 283 Dr. Christopher C. French Chapter 6. Aliens, UFOs, and Personal Schemas 295 Dr. Stanley Krippner Chapter 7. Clinical Approach to UFO Sightings and Alien Abductions 299 Hlne Lansley and Dr. Thomas Rabeyron Chapter 8. Manuel Jimenez and the Perception of UFOs: Hypotheses and Experiments 313 Claude Maug Chapter 9 Cognition and Memory Distortion behind UFO Testimonies 331 Dr. Subhash Meena and Dr. Surabhi Das Chapter 10. Clinical Evidence in the Italian Phenomenon of Alien Abduction 339 Dr. Giulio Perrotta Chapter 11. From I Witnessed... to Established Hypothesis: UFO Cultures and Contexts 355 Dr. Scott R. Scribner and Dr. Gregory J. Wheeler Chapter 12. Forensic Cognitive Science and the UFO Phenomenon 368 Dr. Matthew J. Sharps III. ON WITNESS TESTIMONY 385 Chapter 1. UFOs: The Role of Perceptual Illusions in the Endurance of an Empirical Myth 387 Manuel Borraz Aymerich Chapter 2. Calibrating the Instrument: How Reliable Is Eyewitness Testimony? 402 Dr. Thomas E. Bullard Chapter 3. Bizarre Accounts: Remarkable Missile Sightings from the Canary Islands in the 1970s 419 Dr. Ricardo Campo Prez Chapter 4. Some Considerations About the Behavior and Reliability of UAP Eyewitnesses 433 Luiz Augusto L. da Silva Chapter 5. UFO Myth Propagation before the Arrival of Social Networks 440 Marcel Delaval Chapter 6. Witness Reliability: Accuracy - Reliability of Pilots - Personal Honor 447 Dr. Richard F. Haines Chapter 7. Memories Are not Documentaries: The Weakest Link in the Chain of UFO Evidence 454 Jochen Ickinger Chapter 8. Three Simple Tests of Eyewitness Reliability 467 Ulrich Magin Chapter 9. Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony in Extreme Close Encounters: 472 Abductees and Contactees Dr. Daniel Mavrakis Chapter 10. Satanists, Aliens and Me 488 Dr. Richard Noll Chapter 11. The UFO Testimony Reliability from 2000 GEIPAN Reports 497 Xavier Passot Chapter 12. Data are Worth a Thousand Accounts 504 Julio Plaza del Olmo Chapter 13. The Objectivity of Witnesses and the Subjectivity of Testimonies 513 Cludio Tsuyoshi Suenaga Chapter 14. Aliens Are Good to Talk With 524 Dr. Luise White IV. EMPIRICAL RESEARCH 529 Chapter 1. Alien Delusions: Some (Real) Clinical Cases 531 Dr. Carles Berch Cruz Chapter 2. Memory Distortion in a Social Judgement: People who Report Contact with Aliens are More Susceptible 537 Dr. Stephanie Kelley-Romano and Dr. Amy Bradfield Douglass Chapter 3. It Was as Large as the Full Moon 551 Hans-Werner Peiniger Chapter 4. When a Fire Balloon Transforms into a UFO 556 Hans-Werner Peiniger Chapter 5. Bedtime Alien Abduction Stories: A Checklist to Detect its Dreaming Nature 562 Michael Raduga Chapter 6. Fantasy Imagery and UFO Testimonies 570 Raoul Rob Chapter 7. Abilities and Limitations of Eyewitnesses Assessed on Atmospheric Entries of Meteoroids and Artificial Satellites 585 Dr. Jean-Pierre Rospars V. ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH 603 Chapter 1. Inside a Spaceship: Cognitive and Social Aspects of an Alien Contact 605 Ignacio Cabria Chapter 2. Alien Big Cats and UFO Testimonies: Similarities and Questions 615 Dr. Frdric Dumerchat Chapter 3. Belief in Aliens and the Imaginary: A Transdisciplinary Approach 632 Carlos Reis VI. METRICS AND SCALING 649 Chapter 1. Measuring the Subjectivity of UFO Testimony 651 V.J. Ballester-Olmos and Miguel Guasp Chapter 2. The Reliability of the UFO Sighting Story 656 Marc Leduc VII. EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES 671 Chapter 1. On the Fallacy of the Residue 673 Dr. Flix Ares de Blas Chapter 2. Scientific Case Studies: Research Guidelines for Dealing with the Lack 681 of Reliability of UFO/UAP Testimonies Dr. Leonardo B. Martins ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 697 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 711 The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony INTRODUCTION Some enchanted evening, You may see a stranger... And somehow you know, You know even then That somewhere youll see her, Again and again Oscar Hammerstein On June 24, 1947, nine objects shaped like a pie plate ... cut in half with a ... convex triangle in the rear were sighted from a private airplane by businessman Kenneth Arnold in Washington State, USA. The press coined the term flying saucer and it was accompanied by a huge journalistic coverage, giving rise to an avalanche of reports with objects described purely as saucers or discs, unlike what Arnold depicted to the Air Army Intelligence. The rest is history. The short-lived, panic-type epidemic (wave in the ufological jargon) that followed this seminal sighting in America was not isolated in time, though. It had had many antecedents in the preceding 50 years, both in USA and abroad. For example, the 1896-1897 flow of airship reports, the 1910s phantom ship scare, the 1930s mystery airplanes, or the 1946 ghost rockets invasion. There is ample literature on those topics. Those celestial sightings are part of a continuum that runs back to the history of mankind, full of astronomical and atmospheric and optical phenomena taken as wonders and prodigies due to ingenuity, ignorance, and religious beliefs of population. The mystical interpretations of surprising and terrifying occurrences in ancient times have coupled with contemporary UFO observations to paint a tapestry of events that logically work against an extraterrestrial origin. The first flying saucer visions materialized from hidden fears of war from the US citizens. It was immediately followed by innumerable popular books, immense media attention, millions of magazine articles, and lots of movies that helped build a worldwide, contagious case. In modern times, peoples perplexity with unrecognized planets and stars, fireballs, aircraft, and a thousand other potential sky and biosphere stimuli, plus the inevitable quota of hoaxes, has been read and interpreted in a unique spirit: spacecraft coming from other worlds. In the last seven decades, millions of people have reported seeing flying saucers or UFOs (now politically-correctly renamed UAP). The most reliable statistics for a scientifically controlled database estimate that only 2% of UFO reports remain unidentified after investigation, but the percentage is zero for any phenomenon defined with strong consistency. From 1947 onwards, lack of verifiable, anomalous physical evidence for the most dramatic manifestations of a phenomenon, untraceable permanent patterns in UFO data, and the disputed alien nature for the immortal UFO residue, as well as ongoing research, suggest a psychosocial hypothesis for the phenomena. In short, as far as UFO close encounter claims are concerned, all seems to be in the mind; the alleged incidents forming a global-scope legend or folklore in progress. Some Enchanted Evening, South Pacific, 1949. https://pulp.hypotheses.org/1180 V.J. Ballester-Olmos, UFO Waves: An International Bibliography, https://www.cnes- geipan.fr/sites/default/files/UFO_Waves. An_International_Bibliography November 1 2015.pdf https://www.cnes-geipan.fr/fr/actualites/baisse-cas-d Thierry Pinvidic (ed.), OVNI. Vers une Anthropologie dun Mythe Contemporain. Bayeaux (France): Editions Heimdal, 1993. Introduction Nuts-and-bolts ufologists still holding their classical views, notwithstanding, other UFO believers have shifted their beliefs into a paraphysical, paranormal, and esoteric framework, necessarily to accommodate the apparition of supposed spaceships and alien entities with the absence of the required physical proof. From the pioneering work of H. Mnsterberg up to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the concept of witness reliability has been in question. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and social scientists have also entered UFO investigation. What mental phenomena would engender remarkably unusual, non-hoaxed imaginings? Literature in this field is already extensive, citing visual illusions, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, temporal lobe epilepsy, hypnopompic and hypnagogic imagery, fantasy-proneness, dissociation, altered states of consciousness, false memory, post-traumatic stress, and hallucinations, as well as a number of psychopathologies. In 1996, Newman and Baumeister promoted a discussion to help provide alternatives to the false are they crazy or liars? dichotomy. It was a clever proposition and this book attempts to continue this open discussion. The acceptance of a true anomaly behind UFO sightings lies in the dogma that the testimony of witnesses is absolutely reliable, even if the stories told are abnormal by mainstream science standards. But this is far from certain; it is merely a presumption that matches the fantasies of the proponents. Single witnesses and shortage of material verification lie in the antipodes of how real-life works. Not only are there no error-free witnesses, but peoples imagination and prejudices can play unforgettable games on them. Peter Rogerson once alluded to the usual doctrine of the inerrancy of eye-witness testimony. UFO study presents us with a dilemma: disbelief vs credulity. The first is a minor sin (as it self-corrects with evidence). But the secondaffecting most ufologists todayis a major obstacle to progress, because: how do you amend a blind belief in the nonexistent? This is what this book is all about. The core of the enunciated phenomenon is not in automated or technological recordings (none of the myriads of photographs, films, videos, and digital imagery is valuable either) but on naked human testimony. In our considered opinion, future research efforts are to be focused on this raw material. That is the raison d'tre of this group work, to exploring causes and functions of such visual chimeras. But not only that. How do anthropologists, historians, philosophers, physicists, and other scholars observe the phenomenon of UFO reporting? This book addresses this issue as well. In this conjuncture, the present books purpose is to ascertain the opinion currently held by UFO study specialists and/or academics on the worth and reliability of propositions of extraordinary UFO narratives claimed to have been lived in reality. The plan is to hold a fresh On the Witness Stand. New York: McClure, 1908. No matter what eyewitness testimony in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science. The Amazing Meeting, Keynote Speech, 2008. Leonard S. Newman and Roy F. Baumeister, Toward an Explanation of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon: Hypnotic Elaboration, Extraterrestrial Sadomasochism, and Spurious Memories, Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 7, Peter Rogerson, Neither sceptical nor scientific, Magonia Review Blog, April 30, 2014. https://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2014/04/neither-sceptical-nor-scientific.html The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony inquiry from a wider spectrum of expertise. We purport to exhibit a state-of-the-art in the scientific examination of UFO tales, measured mainly, but not exclusively, from the perspective of social sciences. It is not our objective to judge the behavior, ethics, motivation, or intention of UFO witnesses. We are just trying to assess the value of testimonies of weird tales when these do not harmonize with palpable evidence. As UFO literature shows, many thousands of supposed witnesses do not report simple lights in the heavens but swear to have encountered machines that had touched down and were physically near. They remember it as a vivid, real experiencelanding of objects with humanoid crews who on occasion also abduct their observers and practice malicious medical procedures. The assertion that these accounts are, in fact, extraterrestrial visits from alien races, is a false teatro acted in front of us all that merits urgent intervention of experts in psychology, as none of these situations has ever been substantiated by proof to convince societyleast of all scientiststhat they happened as reported. In sum, something that affects people, sometimes cruelly, cannot be left in the hands of charlatans, gullible people, fanatics and believers, UFO writers, UFO sects, or the UFO entertainment industry. It is a field mainly for social scientists. If this ensemble of experiences is not untrue and merely fictional, what else is it? Can it be classified as a sickness that needs a cure or medical care? Literature has it that several psychological conditions generate similar stories or tales like the ones we have described. But is it possible to lay down the factors that yield or facilitate this class of alien encounter experience? Can we list them to help defining the problem? Looking for an Etiology: AED The alien encounter disorder (AED) is a non-pathological, short-lived, non-impairing, non- repetitive cognitive disturbance characterized by the vision of a flying object coming out of the blue, approaching the witness, hovering or landing at close range, with (optionally) emerging creatures showing absurd behavior, and taking off again speedily in a short time. The alleged contact may sometimes include communication (mental or oral), physical interaction, kidnapping, or abuse. There is a deficit of recurrent features in dimension, shape, dynamics, colors, noise, odor, aftereffects, etc. On the contrary, at the end of the day there are as many descriptions as informers, like particular cases of individual sociogenic episodes. The usual situational and environmental features that boost and enhance the perceived occurrence of this unreal, but real-to-the-subject event, comprise a combination of these setups: * loneliness (single or dominant witness) * isolation * outdoors scenario (driving, in the fields, or alone in a rural home) * mostly nocturnal experience (~85%) (non-sleep-related), occasional daylight experience * while engaged in normal activities * standard reporting (not recovered via hypnosis regression) * media-inducement (publicity of similar events) * overexposure to UFO literature * closeness to active ufologists Introduction We are confident that the described candid encounters with visiting aliens are delusional experiences. These must necessarily be associated to common triggers. We presume that, in addition to the factual conditions listed above, certain personal or particular psychological conditions have to concur as well. Those precursors must be identified for diagnostic purposes. Generally, this emotional condition occurs and vanishes, never to come back, but leaves a track of enduring false recollections, except in abduction claims, where an alleged abductee may claim repeated experiences. What is the mechanism behind it, one that crosses borders and cultures? Are the press, book, movie, and TV industries relevant in the spreading of this iconography? Most probably. This kind of abnormal cognitive episode has similarities and differences with other known psychological processes. It is akin to a dissociative disorder. On the other hand, it importantly differs from sleep paralysis, or the common bedtime occurrences of visitation episodes , as it manifests in the waking state at times when the subject is engaged in ordinary activities. It is one endowed with a very specific and essential scenario: the image of the arrival of extraterrestrial vessels with occasional beings performing idiotic behavior that soon board their celestial ships before disappearing. To date, a poverty of psychological examination of eyewitnesses prevents us from determining if an array of certain common conditions, symptoms, or factors preexisted to what it is claimed as valid observations. They need to be identified and scaled for due recognition of cause to effect. The theoretical condition we propose lies between the thresholds of the common observational errors and the conscious frauds and hoaxes. It contains a creativity input that can b