PCarr
Paranormal Adept
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:
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?
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:
- People are more likely to report anomalous experiences when they do not fear public exposure or ridicule.
- People are more likely to report anomalous experiences when they hold the investigators in high esteem.
- People are more likely to report anomalous experiences when their neighbors are reporting them.
- 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.
- 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.
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?