Ufo Flaps

"UFO Flaps: An Analysis" by Martin Kottmeyer First version appeared as UFO Flaps: An Analysis The Alexander Imich Award Winning UFO Essay in The Anomalist #3, Winter 1995/96, pp. 64-89. Rewritten and submitted to Story Encyclopedia Project with Wave charts August 28, 2000 revised again May 1, 2002 and subsequently FLAPs - Periods of time when reports of ufo amass at well above average rates are variously termed 'flaps' or 'waves.' Both terms possess connotative prejudgments. Waves suggest a natural semi-rhythmic phenomenon or the arrival of masses of people, as in the waves of an invasion or waves of immigration. Capt. Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book defined flaps as "a condition or situation, or state of being of a group characterized by an advanced degree of confusion that has not yet reached panic proportions" and is thus diagnosing a psychology problem, a crazy time. (Ruppelt, 1956) The presence of two terms to denote these times of accelerated ufo reporting behavior reflect the absence of consensus in ufology's attempts to understand what is behind the simple arithmetical truth that ufo numbers change rather than remain constant over time. It is not immediately obvious why the UFO phenomenon should not be a more or less constant occurrence over time whether one regards them as real or illusory. If they were alien transports connected with a survey of the planet or a study of mankind, the natural expectation would be that their presence should be methodical and unceasing. If they were accidents of circumstance or cognitive error, one would expect their occurrences to be fairly stable across time in a manner similar to the way traffic accidents remain numerically stable from year to year without showing periods of several-fold increases. THE FIRST THEORY The earliest forms of the Reconnaissance Theory of flying saucers only had to account for the 1947 wave of sightings. Given the extraordinary development of the atomic bomb a couple years earlier, it was somewhat natural to wonder if the equally new phenomenon of flying saucers was somehow connected. The idea was taken seriously in government intelligence circles; at least seriously enough to set up a UFO reporting net in the region of the Eniwetok bomb test. It failed to turn up anything. (Gross, 1986) Donald Keyhoe was a prominent spokesman for this theory and expanded on it with attempts to offer additional evidence in support of it. He observes there had been "a steadily increasing survey after our atomic bomb explosions in New Mexico, Japan, Bikini, and Eniwetok," and a second burst of activity after explosions in Soviet Russia. Attention was focused on the U.S. since it was "the present leader in atomic weapons." (Keyhoe, 1950) These observations however do not bear scrutiny. The June-July 1947 wave did not coincide with any bomb test. The first Soviet A-bomb was exploded on August 29, 1949 and revealed to the world three weeks later. Yet ufo numbers are seen declining consistently from July to October 1949 and the only thing resembling a surge does not take place until March 1950. The concentration of ufos in the U.S. was true for 1947, but 1954 ufo reports were concentrated in France and still later waves were focused in Spain and Latin America; places that have never been in the forefront of nuclear developments. In February 1951 Keyhoe predicted there would be an upswing in ufo activity in the spring of 1951 due to scheduled atomic bomb tests near Las Vegas, Nevada. Ufo historian Loren Gross has already pointed out the period happened to be the quietest on record. (Gross, 1983) The belief that the first waves of ufos involved the monitoring of atomic bomb developments persists to the present day; as one can see in Raymond Fowler's book The Watchers (1990) But it rests on no reasoned argument and can point to no successes, either in prediction or interpreting any of the waves since 1947. THE MARTIAN HYPOTHESIS Around 1952 a new interpretation of waves arose based on the recognition that waves seemed to peak around the time that Mars came closest to the Earth. Researchers in that era favored Mars as the likeliest abode of life and it made some sense that travelers might time their arrivals to conserve fuel. Numerous predictions were offered. In January 1952, Lonzo Dove predicted the arrival of a saucer armada on April 15-16 of that year. Dove claimed success with a photograph of a huge circular cloud 30 miles across that he took on April 16 . (Dove, 1953) The UFO numbers in the Blue Book files, however, tell a different story. There were only 3 ufo reports for the 15 , four for , and six on the 17 . Though this is trivially better than the numbers in March, it is pretty small for an armada and not very impressive placed against July's numbers, which ran in the dozens daily. Edgar Jarrold of the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau predicted 1954 and 1956 would be exceptionally heavy and 1953 and 1955 would be fairly light. He called it right for the light periods, but 1954 was exceptionally heavy only in France, and 1956 saw nothing of consequence. (Jarrold, 1953) Aim Michel first thought the Martian Hypothesis was confirmed when a prediction he made for a wave in the late summer of 1954 came true. In his second effort he predicted a wave for eastern Europe or the Middle East in October or November 1956. When this was "double refuted," he endorsed the verdict of the Civilian Saucer Intelligence that the Mars correlation failed. (Michel, 1958) Harry Lord of the Tynesdale UFO Society issued a forecast in 1963 utilizing the Mars theory. He predicted flaps for late '62/early '63 (No), early '65 (No), late '67 (Yes), late '69 (No Way!) and a large peak in late '72 (No). (Lord, 1963). When the Vallees looked into the theory in 1962 they would concede, There is no connection of an obligatory character between the Mars oppositions and the saucer phenomena peaks. They agreed if one works with data limited to the period 1950 to 1956 one can argue a correlation as strong as one in a thousand against chance existed. Data before 1950, notably the 1947 peak, and the data starting with the Sputnik flap of 1957 however fail to show anything one can call a mechanical correlation. (Valles 1962) Jacques Vallee would later further discredit the theory by pointing out that pre-1947 waves did not conform to the Mars cycle. Yet another disproof was offered by Charles H. Smiley, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at brown University who computed 14 ideal minimum energy orbits for transportation from Mars to Earth and Venus to Earth between 1956 and 1965 and determined the likely arrival times plus and minus ten days. He then looked at the number of ufo reports to Blue Book for these periods. They were self-evidently insignificant and corresponded to no flaps. (Smiley, 1967) The space probes to Mars pitched additional dirt on the grave when they showed it to be quite lifeless. Richard Hall offered a variant that proposed that flaps correlated with Venus, but it was DOA. Ivan Trong, a Swedish researcher, proposed that saucer activity became highly active ten weeks before Venus reached the closest point in its orbit and Earth intersects the tangent from Venus. He predicted Venus would be sending a peak in the last week of May. He announced vindication pointing to cigar-shaped motherships seen all over Argentina on May 27. Oh, hell! (Troeng 1962) MATHEMATICAL MODELS A number of attempts to predict ufo waves eschew any theoretical justification and simply base themselves on patterns in the data that suggest cyclicity. Keyhoe tried this in his historic article for True. Noting peaks of saucer activity in July 1947 and July 1948, he predicted it would peak again in July 1950. Activity peaked in March that year. (Girard, 1989) Brinsley le Poer Trench (1957) posited the existence of a 2 year cycle and the next peak should be in the first part of June of 1957. The peak that year was in November. In December 1971 NICAP reported on the discovery of a five-year cycle and predicted there would a flap in 1972. That year had 152 reports compared to 137 in 1971 and they proclaimed success in bold headlines proclaiming "1972 Upholds Five-Year UFO Cycle." By November 1973, however, NICAP was reminded what a true flap is all about: "First Flap in Six Years Resurrects UFOs as National Controversy." Jenny Randles spoke of a 21-month cycle in the Pennine area of Great Britain and confidently predicted May/June 1984 would prove to be rather interesting. By her own later account, 1984 saw only 23 ufo cases and the best clustering happened around April 15 and 25. She found these cases rather interesting, while admitting they may be associated with military exercises. Writing in 1986 she acclaims her prediction came true: "I don't know how." (Randles, 1983, 1986) The most famous cycle theory was a 61-month pattern offered by David Saunders. He claims it led him to predict in advance a 1972 wave in South Africa. (Saunders, 1976) Allan Hendry characterized the South African reports as a minor flurry and not a wave and also questioned the propriety of using Bloecher's 1947 data in Saunders' since it was a special delimited study. When removed from consideration, the remaining data show the baseline collection of 1947 reports in Blue Book's files had only a small swell of numbers inconsonant with a major flap. (Hendry, 1976) There have been a number of efforts to rehabilitate Saunders' work, but the absence of waves in January 1983 and February 1988 spelled an end to its believability. (Partain, 1985) Or at least should have, but Donald Johnson in 1990 suggested that the February 1988 Knowles family CE-2 was "right on target in terms of time and place" and added that two other cases of major importance happened that same night in Australia and Tasmania. He felt this marked the beginning of a major ufo wave, but pointed to no confirming data. Johnson offered a new prediction that a flap would occur in Guam on April 1993 and Vangard Sciences said they had a fellow in Guam who wondered if any folks would be coming to monitor this flap. (Johnson, 1990) Undeterred by this seeming failure, on January 8, 2003, he issued a release predicting, There will be a worldwide UFO wave in the month of March 2003 that will reach its maximum between March 15 and March 25. I am reasonably confident that this wave will involve Northern Europe. Another likely region is the Pacific Ocean, including Japan and the Hawaiian Islands, and possibly the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. I wanted to go on the record now, a full seven weeks before the anticipated peak in UFO activity, before any upswing in reporting starts. A paper outlining my reasons for this prediction will follow.(Johnson 2003) Richard Hall, Wendy Connors, and myself expressed feelings this would almost certainly fail. Perversely, the period happened to have the lowest activity of 2003 and on March 21 a day with no reports at all - the only day in 2003 where that happened. (Kottmeyer 2003) I have seen no evidence that there was any activity peak specific to Europe. Johnson appears not have presented that paper outlining his reasons for the prediction, but it easy to infer it was a modification of Saunders 61-month cycle theory, adjusted to take account of apparent early arrivals he observed in his 1990 paper. Dick Hall called for Johnson to comment on the apparent disconfirmation of his theory, but there was no reaction published on UFO Updates. (Hall 2003) Incidentally, the original Saunders theory would have predicted a wave for May 2003, but NUFORC data peaked in September as you can see in this chart. Arrow points to where Johnson predicted a flap should be. With such failures, hope has faded for a simple mathematical model of mass ufo appearances. BEHAVIORIST NOTIONS Jacques Vallee looked at the pattern of ufo flaps and theorized it was a schedule of reinforcement like that used by behaviorists to instill irreversible behavior. The pattern of periodicity and unpredictability would help us learn new concepts. This control system allegedly also explains the absence of contact and why the phenomenon misleads us. That would preclude genuine learning. (Vallee, 1975) This theory is amazingly perverse at even the simplest level. Within behaviorist theory, to be reinforcing, a stimulus must be of a positive, rewarding character. (Ruch & Zimbardo. 1971) It must induce pleasure instead of pain. The overwhelming majority of ufo cases involve fear. (Vallee, 1977; Swiatek-Hudej, 1981; Moravec, 1987) Ufo flaps are usually times of anxiety, confusion, and near-hysteria. During the 1973 wave, mothers kept their children from going to school for fear they might be kidnapped. Clearly, learning in any form is unlikely in such an emotional atmosphere. The suggestion, usually made in passing, that flaps are a way of desensitizing humanity to their presence, of getting us used to them perhaps in preparation for The Landing, at least gets the emotional valences of ufo experiences right. (Hall, 1988) The manner of presentation, however, is wrong. Desensitization is best accomplished by gradual increases in the intensity of the aversive stimuli. (Skinner, 1974) Appearing in sudden waves and withdrawing for long intervals only favors anxiety and acute fright. (Smelser, 1963). TOURIST THEORY A more promising line of speculation in the extraterrestrial mode exists in DeLillo and Marx's Tourist Theory of Ufos. They offer as a model the whims of earthly tourism. This year we go Europe; next year the fares to South America look inviting. Maybe a few will brave Africa for a safari in between. Unsystematic but curious gatherings might follow news of Earth-Zoo personnel capturing an unusual specimen of wild humanity. Concerted campaigns by this or that agency competing for business might also yield an occasional bustle of traffic. (Marx & DeLillo, 1979) This is quite ingenious and would seem to be virtually untestable and immune to argument with respect to the numbers. There are, however, broader considerations that work against the theory. The most interesting things in a foreign culture tend to be located in urban settings: their museums, architecture, shops, churches, and shrines. Ufo experiences tend to be in rural settings and the aliens don't debark for tour busses. Souvenir hunting is rarely seen. There's only one or two cases of an alien with a camera. Gillespie and Prytz (1984) offer a cruder variation in their thoughts about ufo waves. "Flaps stick out like sore thumbs, and can be explained readily by External Intelligence for similar reasons that the Sydney Cricket Ground receives a 'flap' of Sydney-siders on Rugby Grand Final Day - it is a unique place for a certain people at a unique time!" So why were UFOs drawn to Earth and the United States in June/July 1947, July/August 1952, November 1957, August 1965, March/April 1966, and so forth? What made these times uniquely interesting for the aliens? Gillespie and Prytz don't seem ready to say. Instead they complain that those who advocate the idea ufo phenomena are internally-generated haven't explained why these are unique times either "probably because it is in the 'too hard' basket. Difficulty is not disproof. The necessity of a psychological and sociological approach is mandated by the fact that nine out of ten ufo reports involve misinterpreted stimuli. This percentage does not alter significantly during flaps or periods of calm. (Ballester-Olmos, 1987) Ufos never outnumber IFO reports in any period. Take away all the unsolved cases, and the IFOs still display the large changes present in the total report population. If extraterrestrial craft are causing flaps, you still need an explanation for why one true report spawns nine false ones. Copycat behavior would be the first possibility, yet IFO cases do not generally seem to be in the proximity of unsolved cases during major flaps. This is particularly troubling in the 1965 wave that seemed to lack national coverage of a major case off which a rash of copycats could work. SILLY SEASONS Sociological explanations of ufo flaps can be divided into two general categories, which for convenience can be termed 'silly season theories' and 'crisis theories.' Silly season theories build on the premise that news media are a sufficient cause of flaps. The spread of news causes the spread of copycat behavior. The example of the Forkenbrook experiment forms the model of these theories. This hoax for a sociology class demonstrated how a false report could generate so much excitement in a locale that it spawned reports in several neighboring communities, including one from a man who said he had seen the ufo for some two weeks and knew it was going to land. There is no denying this model has application in certain local flaps. The Socorro case of April 24, 1964 spawned misidentifications of things like aircraft, birds, and a fire in a dump in nearby locales. Yet the Socorro case allegedly got national attention. Why didn't it spawn a nationwide wave of reports? Why didn't the Mantell crash spawn a nationwide flap? Why didn't the Val Johnson case or the Snowflake, Arizona (Travis Walton) case spawn nationwide reactions? These questions are relevant since some silly season theorists put great weight on the assumed effects of single cases that get wide coverage. The Air Force cited the Levelland Whatnik as the primary cause of the November 1957 wave. (Strentz, 1982) This is plausible if one regards the slowly elevating numbers of mid and late October as not a true beginning of the flap, but a more or less irrelevant flurry that would have been disregarded if the post-Levelland spike had not appeared. Herbert Hackett indicates the week of the 1947 flap was "a slow week from an editor's viewpoint" and he felt the newspapers milked the story by continually repeating the Kenneth Arnold flying saucer story with different experts consulted for their opinions. Hackett (1948) regarded Air Force denials as a paradoxical reinforcement of the concept. He gives a tally of the amount of space given to the story in the Los Angeles times each day, presumably to offer some measure of the amount of reinforcement they gave. It is curious to note that if one juxtaposes Hackett's tally to a tally of ufo report numbers from the Los Angeles area the effect of media is not compelling. One half of the reports occur before the story ever reaches Page One, and by July 10 there are no ufos reported, even though it was still on the front page the day before. (Gross, 1976) This finding parallels remarks by John Keel (1969/89) and Richard Hall (1988) that media coverage often seems to lag behind the increase in ufo numbers rather than precede it. The reason for this can be discovered in Herbert Strentz's analysis of ufo journalism. Strentz posits the creating a flap is a "lowering of barriers" that newsmen set up before they will put