Experimentation - a way forward for UFO research?

[PCarr]

These are just some quick notes, hoping to stimulate discussion. I do a series called Unidentified Science for the podcast API Case Files that will go into this in a lot more depth in the coming months.

We have been doing Field Investigation for a long time. I do it, and plan to continue, but it's seems clear at this point that we're highly unlikely to get a single case that blows the lid off the whole thing. Some cases have been really close to this (O' Hare comes to mind, or the Belgian wave), but nothing quite solid enough. It seems that the stranger the witness experience is, the harder it is to pin down exactly what happened (I'm working one such case now, and it's torquing my brain).

So FI isn't enough on its own. It's main purpose is to serve as a filter to weed out all the obvious misidentifications, delusions and deceptions, which all investigators agree form the majority of reports. The cases that pass this muster I call the "residual" - the cases that are sufficiently reliable, complete and detailed yet aren't clearly identifiable.

We have to look across many well-investigated residual cases (not raw reports) to look for patterns, and people have done that, going back to Dick Hall and Jacques Vallee in the 1960s. This requires some standardization of the data and QA on the investigations, but it can be done, and should be.

Another thing we have to do is to recognize that what we primarily deal with is not UFOs, but reports of UFOs. These reports are made by people. As difficult as it is to study the UFO phenomena in themselves, there have been some advances in studying people scientifically. Is there some way we can turn this into a way to understand the phenomena they experience?

I think that experimentation is one thing we should try. Here are a few hypotheses I would like to test:

1. People are more likely to report anomalous experiences when they do not fear public exposure or ridicule.
2. People are more likely to report anomalous experiences when they hold the investigators in high esteem.
3. People are more likely to report anomalous experiences when their neighbors are reporting them.
   
4. The residual reports are not correlated with any measurable witness characteristics such as socio-economic rank, education, ethnic background, etc., controlling for variables that may bias reporting.
5. The phenomena that stimulate reports are indifferent to observation or surveillance, and the number of reports will not vary as careful surveillance is placed over an area.

You can probably think of a few yourself. With the right patience, a little funding and enough people, we could test these things scientifically. We are looking for an odd signal in the noise. We don't have to assume anything about the nature of UFOs themselves (which is almost certainly wrong).

One thing we can do short term and cheaply is to add well designed meta questions to report forms, such as: "Do you feel anxious about making this report?" or "Are you concerned that friends, family neighbors or colleagues might think less of you if they knew you were making this report?".

What do you think?

 

[boomerang]

I think you are on the right track. For the most part, the only evidence with which we are left is the witnesses themselves.

The UFO phenomenon seems somehow inextricably bound up with the individual, and perhaps with his or her life. (I'm not necessarily talking about abductions) I would also like to see detailed (and maybe even longitudinal) studies of witnesses to the most credible high strangeness events in hopes of finding correlations or common denominators. This approach would be unavoidably of a "shotgun" nature, collecting as much personal info about witnesses as possible, both physical and psychological, and crunching numbers to see if anything gels.

The core problem here is, I think, the degree of intrusion necessary to study witnesses and their lives in detail. Although we might have an "ace in the hole" in the form of the current popularity in personal DNA testing. So perhaps witnesses would have little objection to having their DNA sequenced, etc. This sounds weird, but we are as you said, looking for an odd signal in a sea of noise. Focusing on possible personality changes wrought by "close encounters" is another possible avenue. Don't ask me how such changes might be operationally defined !

 

[exo_doc]

I like the way you are thinking here. Give the people a safe avenue to describe what happened and you could get more details. Good idea.

 

[Christopher O'Brien]

I've been saying something similar for years: the effect of an unusual experience on the witness(es) may be more important than the actual event itself.

 

[PCarr]

I think you are on the right track. For the most part, the only evidence with which we are left is the witnesses themselves.

The UFO phenomenon seems somehow inextricably bound up with the individual, and perhaps with his or her life. (I'm not necessarily talking about abductions) I would also like to see detailed (and maybe even longitudinal) studies of witnesses to the most credible high strangeness events in hopes of finding correlations or common denominators. This approach would be unavoidably of a "shotgun" nature, collecting as much personal info about witnesses as possible, both physical and psychological, and crunching numbers to see if anything gels.

The core problem here is, I think, the degree of intrusion necessary to study witnesses and their lives in detail. Although we might have an "ace in the hole" in the form of the current popularity in personal DNA testing. So perhaps witnesses would have little objection to having their DNA sequenced, etc. This sounds weird, but we are as you said, looking for an odd signal in a sea of noise. Focusing on possible personality changes wrought by "close encounters" is another possible avenue. Don't ask me how such changes might be operationally defined !

Not sure do you get a complete sequence from the cheaper services like 23 and Me? I mean, it's a long shot. There certainly doesn't seem to be much "special" about high strangeness experiencers.

The couple I am working with now are hard working salt-of-the-Earth hardy midwesterners. Up there, everyone is above average, I hear, but they are not highly sophisticated folks. Another experiencer in our case files (who gave us a close brush with physical evidence) is a Baltimore based medical technician who probably has a higher than average IQ, but is not particularly gifted.

One pattern I have observed is that the witnesses we stick with all feel that they are NOT special, and don't know why they have been singled out, and do not claim to understand what they are experiencing or why. Most wish that none of these things had happened to them and are genuinely upset when recounting their experiences.

 

[PCarr]

I've been saying something similar for years: the effect of an unusual experience on the witness(es) may be more important than the actual event itself.

Perhaps. I don't know anything about what is important in this context. My only real contention is that to separate signal from noise, we have to understand the noise better.

 

[boomerang]

Re 23 and Me--Raw data of some form is available, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to assess its completeness. I would suppose we would be searching for some kind of common pattern of amino acids or haplogroups (??) in a large enough sample of experiencers to indicate something beyond statistical chance. It does sound like a long shot.

One problem with studying this phenomenon is that a single incident, regardless of how well documented or how credible the witness(es) are, seems to contain little of scientific value. So we might be looking for data of a personal nature from large numbers of people, would we not?

Col. John B. Alexander offered a brief description of a possible process for ferreting out meaningful UFO correlations in his book: "Future War". I can't say that I understood the process as he described it. Perhaps it would be worth looking into.

 

[PCarr]

One problem with studying this phenomenon is that a single incident, regardless of how well documented or how credible the witness(es) are, seems to contain little of scientific value. So we might be looking for data of a personal nature from large numbers of people, would we not?

I'm trying to change that, but so far I can't promise that I will succeed, and I will certainly need expert help.

 

[IsaacKoi]

I would also like to see detailed (and maybe even longitudinal) studies of witnesses to the most credible high strangeness events in hopes of finding correlations or common denominators. This approach would be unavoidably of a "shotgun" nature, collecting as much personal info about witnesses as possible, both physical and psychological, and crunching numbers to see if anything gels.

The core problem here is, I think, the degree of intrusion necessary to study witnesses and their lives in detail.

The intrusion you mention has certainly contributed to problems with some previous attempts to collect, analyse and (especially) publish in-depth studies of personal information of ufo witnesses and abductees in the past.

Of course, there is a more general problem in ufology that many people come into the field with a lot of enthusiasm so have launched themselves into ambitious interesting projects - but get bored before they have done much more than talk about their plans. I think this more general problem has also contributed to the failure of several such projects in the past.

 

[PCarr]

The intrusion you mention has certainly contributed to problems with some previous attempts to collect, analyse and (especially) publish in-depth studies of personal information of ufo witnesses and abductees in the past.

Of course, there is a more general problem in ufology that many people come into the field with a lot of enthusiasm so have launched themselves into ambitious interesting projects - but get bored before they have done much more than talk about their plans. I think this more general problem has also contributed to the failure of several such projects in the past.

I don't think it's so much boredom as burnout. You will deal with lots of bogus reports, mentally ill people, and once and awhile you will hit a genuinely interesting case and be baffled and confused by it and no way to establish its validity, although you believe the witness is trying to tell you the truth about their experience.

Once metaphor that may represent something like the truth is that we are the cat chasing the laser pointer. Eventually we give up.

 

[Charlie Prime]

Is there some way we can turn this into a way to understand the phenomena they experience?

Many people and organizations already do this.

How is your proposal different?

 

[PCarr]

Many people and organizations already do this.

How is your proposal different?

Do tell. Which people and organizations?

You do understand that I'm talking about a scientifically valid understanding?

 

[Charlie Prime]

I don't know. I hear guests on The Paracast talking about such organizations.