Things That Are Not There
During the 1960s, the “flying saucer” term persisted, connoting (variously) alien craft, flying discs created by other nations, and, possibly, discs controlled by the United States. When a noticeable bump in UFO reports occurred in 1965, popular publishing reacted with UFO/flying saucer magazines and comic books.
Because most of the newsstand material exemplified the pulp publishing tradition, the Air Force felt secure that little of it would be taken seriously by the public. On the other hand, the extraterrestrial theory refused to die, and the military establishment wondered if Americans continually hammered by the idea might grow dissatisfied with official USAF explanations.
Over at Blue Book (led since 1963 by USAF Maj. Hector Quintanilla), tension was commonplace. Quintanilla had been appointed to the job. He had little affinity for UFOs one way or another, but he did try to establish an “every report is valid until proved otherwise” culture at the project. Although funding continued to dry up, Quintanilla, like Major Friend before him, felt some obligation to make his time at Blue Book useful. During the 1963–69 period of Blue Book activity, project officials grew increasingly savvy about the veracity of discrete reports; particular interest was paid to myriad things that often were innocently misidentified as alien spacecraft. In a 1968 memorandum sent to the “UFO Officer” at Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, Capt. C. H. Van Diver, USAF, Blue Book cited such explainable things as optical mirages (issues of refraction or “simulation effects”; clouds and birds; radioactively charged gases emitted from the sun; and other heavenly bodies, including meteors, stars, and planets).
Identifiable man-made objects figured in what Blue Book placed in a “Miscellaneous” sighting category: missiles, planes and contrails, chaff, flares, satellites, reflections, flares, and fireworks. Incorrect radar analysis accounted for some of the sightings. And as expected, Blue Book made allowance for hoax sightings.
Research by Dr. Robert J. Low of the University of Colorado suggested other issues relevant to the veracity of UFO sightings. (Responding to public complaints about foot-dragging by the Air Force in 1966, the Department of Defense awarded the University of Colorado a grant to study, in conjunction with the Air Force, UFOs and UFO reports.) At the top of Low’s list was “human perception,” a factor weighted with physical, intellectual, and emotional facets. Fallible brains could make for inaccurate reports. Eyes could be mistaken, as well; Low cited “[d]ust on the cornea” as one culprit in misidentification.
Fingertip pressure or “electrical means” on or near the eyes can conjure things that are not really there.
Light sources produce afterimages, and the apparent size of those afterimages cannot be estimated accurately. Gamma movement (the illusion that searchlights and other large sources of illumination fade away rather than vanish after being turned off) fooled numerous witnesses.
Anyone, particularly laypersons, has difficulty with “celestial angles” while attempting to determine an object’s size, location, speed, and movement. The problem is exacerbated when objects are near zero degrees or near ninety degrees.
Autokinesis (which Low referred to, vis-à-vis UFO sightings, as “Auto kinetics”) is a phenomenon of visual perception by which the eyes, when focused on an object discerned without a frame of reference (as in, say, an empty sky), exhibit very small movements. Psychologist Muzafer Sherif utilized the phenomenon during doctoral experiments on conformity he conducted at Columbia University in 1936. He sat test subjects, three at a time, in a dark room and asked them to look at a pinpoint of light on a wall. What he wanted, he explained to each threesome, was an account of how and how much the light moved. Although Sherif ensured that the light always remained stationary, subjects (unfamiliar with autokinesis) invariably described movement, arriving at an estimate of the nature of the movement that satisfied all three subjects.
When the test was repeated later, subjects that had been part of threesomes went into the dark room alone. Despite the presumed lack of peer pressure and concomitant social obligation, the solo subjects still described movement.
Sherif’s principal idea was that social cues are not here-and-gone phenomena that are easily discarded when one is in solitude. To the contrary, those cues, as guides to “proper” social behavior, are internalized. The perception of each member of every threesome had been supported by the perceptions of the two other people. That support—mutual agreement that the light had moved— exemplified the kind of social cue that encouraged each subject to see movement while in the room alone.
Although Sherif’s research was grounded in social psychology, his work had natural applications to investigations of UFO sightings. The purely physical nature of autokinesis might explain some UFO sightings; although Dr. Low did not use his memo to elaborate on the significance of autokinesis (“Auto kinetics” is all he wrote), one might infer that Low was alluding to Sherif’s work. In that context, the social “confirmation” of UFO sightings by others probably encouraged sightings in situations where autokinesis was likely to occur.
In a bit of condescension that is nevertheless difficult to argue against, Low dryly observed that people who read about UFOs are more likely than other people to report them, and that “[n]on-scientific personalities are more likely to report UFO’s [sic].” The memo dismissed all “personal recollection” (that is, eyewitness reports) as “very unreliable.” Low and the university also noted that quantifiable testing (“controlled experiments” in Low’s words) had yet to be developed after nearly twenty years of Blue Book/Air Force activity. Valid photographic evidence was in short supply, a fact that Low implicitly attributed to lack of scientific method on the part of Blue Book researchers, rather than to an impossibility of such images.
Available investigative hardware, and people not adequately trained to operate it and interpret results, struck Low as another sticking point. Perhaps astronomers, weather observers, FAA personnel, and radar operators were hobbled by inadequate “instrumentation” and deficient instruction.
In a note about press coverage, Low pondered “an inter-connection or correlation” between that coverage and sightings. Further, he wondered “[t]o what extent do the reports of UFO’s [sic] reflect the culture of the times.” Finally, in a vague and cryptic reference, Low asked about “Possible conspiracy. (Yes or no. If not, how do you convince the public?)” One assumption is that Low referred to government/military conspiracies to keep the truth about UFOs under wraps—but the government/military brought him into the investigation. If those institutions maintained a conspiracy, why would they risk the probing of Low and other outsiders?
Perhaps Low alluded to a conspiracy imagined by the UFO community, or one maintained by UFOlogists.
With Low’s comments out of the way, Capt. Van Diver closed his four-page memo to Kirtland AFB by writing, “[W]e were instructed [by Blue Book superiors] to keep ‘open minds’ at all times during our investigations. Since we are now in a period in which space travel lies just ahead, it is within the realm of possibility that others (extraterrestrial in nature) may also have the same capability.” That statement suggests a fair turn of mind, but if Blue Book had a fatal flaw, it is this: the committee was staffed mainly by skeptics.