The UFO Stimulus

[Burnt State]

To bring this forward to a more direct statement, where I think we part, is that a UFO event can be properly recorded with enough detail to declare it a UFO. More specifically, again, where we might part, we don't know if the actual craft being witnessed, itself changes, causing multiple witness to describe different visions. So this unknown goes in the record book. Stanford describes this, that in his videos the craft changes presenting different colors and shapes. It's also been recorded for years to be this way. This may have nothing then to do with the witness and more to do with the craft. I get that "details" vary. So do emotions, perceptions and individual realities. But does the "event" vary? Mostly, I think not. The reason I hold strongly to that belief, at least the main reason, is that I don't think we as humans would evolve the way we have without being able to identify knowns versus unknowns. It would become to complex. In fact, dare I say, we practice constantly to exploit those unknowns and seek confidence in living within those unknowns. We see a train coming, we all see a train coming (if we're looking). We give these things names, we've formed a language around these things and we share and interact with these things every second.

So when we think back to anomalous aerial phenomenon nearing the turn of the century people were seeing very curious airships as that was the language they had - they looked like ships except they were in the air. Descriptions of the occupants ranged from people dressed for formal tea, angry people in furs, Scandanavians, small dwarvish people, Japanese etc....

Now when people see a train they go, look, there's a train and everyone knows what it is and what to expect when they turn to look at it. Now say you grew up somewhere that never had trains or anything that even remotely looked like a train. And now you are in a strange land near some train tracks and a train is coming towards you. What is it? How do you describe it? What might you say it looked like?

It is quite common in UFO reports for witnesses looking at the same craft to report different shapes colours and in some cases some people standing beside those who saw a strange craft in the sky claim they say nothing going at all. Some UFO reports include descriptions such as: a honeycombed structure made with spider webs, a giant hotel, a large WWII tank, a blue floating book with a spinning sphere in the centre of it, or a saucer skipping through the air.

These external stimulus are something new and unfamiliar. They may appear as technological craft or balls of light. Describing them is not always easy. Sometimes we don't have the words for what is being seen. I'm not saying they are all hallucinations or there are no similarities in descriptions. I'm simply saying the act of seeing and describing is a very unique, complex event that will bear out great differences in any two experiences of a simultaneous reality. UFO's complicate this familiar process greatly as borne out repeatedly in complications in witness testimony.

 

[Constance]

Now here's a question. Did anyone actually say that?

It is the tendency of what you often express here in the forums, and sometimes even claim directly when rejecting traditional physically oriented ufo research in favor of investigating possible paranormal explanations for ufos in which the ufo is understood as a projection from the mind of the observer. You're of course perfectly free to think what you think and to attempt to persuade others to your point of view concerning the nature of the reality status of ufos. I object only to statements in which you minimize consciousness and mind to the point at which they are judged not to be reliable and serviceable to us in our efforts to understand what is real and unreal in the world we experience.

 

[Burnt State]

It is the tendency of what you often express here in the forums, and sometimes even claim directly when rejecting traditional physically oriented ufo research in favor of investigating possible paranormal explanations for ufos in which the ufo is understood as a projection from the mind of the observer. You're of course perfectly free to think what you think and to attempt to persuade others to your point of view concerning the nature of the reality status of ufos. I object only to statements in which you minimize consciousness and mind to the point at which they are judged not to be reliable and serviceable to us in our efforts to understand what is real and unreal in the world we experience.

Everything we see is a projection in the mind of the observor.

I think ufo's are very complex events and experiences embodying a full pantheon from physical craft to internal hallucination. So the event anomaly is very physical while all experience anomalies, as Clark reminds us, are only alive in the memory and the mind of the witness.

Witnesses are rarely accurate about the details of much of anything. But they will describe what they've seen according to what they believed they saw. This will include descriptions of everything from the real to the unreal and surreal. Accuracy, consequently, is not to be found in the mind of the beholder. However, a group of witnesses together can increase the odds of accuracy. This does not of course mean that what a witness says is not serviceable, but we need to remember that reality is particular to an individual and many other variables. Solo witnesses and their accuracy is on a sliding scale.

p.s. reading the quote below the bottom line is my bottom line and it's not about getting lost in our minds, but in clearly knowing the physical and how it drives us.

 

[Soupie]

To which I would then ask, where does that "creating our reality" line get drawn.

An excellent question. I think the line is being erased and redrawn from moment to moment, if that makes sense.

A very apropos article from Mr. Oliver Sacks:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/oliver-sacks-mishearings.html?_r=1

"A FEW weeks ago, when I heard my assistant Kate say to me, “I am going to choir practice,” I was surprised. I have never, in the 30 years we have worked together, heard her express the slightest interest in singing. But I thought, who knows? Perhaps this is a part of herself she has kept quiet about; perhaps it is a new interest; perhaps her son is in a choir; perhaps .…

I was fertile with hypotheses, but I did not consider for a moment that I had misheard her. It was only on her return that I found she had been to the chiropractor.

A few days later, Kate jokingly said, “I’m off to choir practice.” Again I was baffled: Firecrackers? Why was she talking about firecrackers?

As my deafness increases, I am more and more prone to mishearing what people say, though this is quite unpredictable; it may happen 20 times, or not at all, in the course of a day. I carefully record these in a little red notebook labeled “PARACUSES” — aberrations in hearing, especially mishearings. I enter what I hear (in red) on one page, what was actually said (in green) on the opposite page, and (in purple) people’s reactions to my mishearings, and the often far-fetched hypotheses I may entertain in an attempt to make sense of what is often essentially nonsensical.

After the publication of Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” in 1901, such mishearings, along with a range of misreadings, misspeakings, misdoings and slips of the tongue were seen as “Freudian,” an expression of deeply repressed feelings and conflicts.

But although there are occasional, unprintable mishearings that make me blush, a vast majority do not admit any simple Freudian interpretation. In almost all of my mishearings, however, there is a similar overall sound, a similar acoustic gestalt, linking what is said and what is heard. Syntax is always preserved, but this does not help; mishearings are likely to capsize meaning, to overwhelm it with phonologically similar but meaningless or absurd sound forms, even though the general form of a sentence is preserved.

Lack of clear enunciation, unusual accents or poor electronic transmission can all serve to mislead one’s own perceptions. Most mishearings substitute one real word for another, however absurd or out of context, but sometimes the brain comes up with a neologism. When a friend told me on the phone that her child was sick, I misheard “tonsillitis” as “pontillitis,” and I was puzzled. Was this some unusual clinical syndrome, an inflammation I had never heard of? It did not occur to me that I had invented a nonexistent word — indeed, a nonexistent condition.

Every mishearing is a novel concoction. The hundredth mishearing is as fresh and as surprising as the first. I am often strangely slow to realize that I have misheard, and I may entertain the most far-fetched ideas to explain my mishearings, when it would seem that I should spot them straight away. If a mishearing seems plausible, one may not think that one has misheard; it is only if the mishearing is sufficiently implausible, or entirely out of context, that one thinks, “This can’t be right,” and (perhaps with some embarrassment) asks the speaker to repeat himself, as I often do, or even to spell out the misheard words or phrases.

While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception — the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.

Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality — it does not occur to one to question them. But since all of our perceptions must be constructed by the brain, from often meager and ambiguous sensory data, the possibility of error or deception is always present. Indeed, it is a marvel that our perceptions are so often correct, given the rapidity, the near instantaneity, with which they are constructed.

One’s surroundings, one’s wishes and expectations, conscious and unconscious, can certainly be co-determinants in mishearing, but the real mischief lies at lower levels, in those parts of the brain involved in phonological analysis and decoding. Doing what they can with distorted or deficient signals from our ears, these parts of the brain manage to construct real words or phrases, even if they are absurd.

...

Collecting mishearings over the past few years without any explicit selection or bias, I am forced to think that Freud underestimated the power of neural mechanisms, combined with the open and unpredictable nature of language, to sabotage meaning, to generate mishearings that are irrelevant both in terms of context and of subconscious motivation.

And yet there is often a sort of style or wit — a “dash ”— in these instantaneous inventions; they reflect, to some extent, one’s own interests and experiences, and I rather enjoy them. Only in the realm of mishearing — at least, my mishearings — can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into a poetry bag, all-or-noneness into oral numbness, a porch into a Porsche, and a mere mention of Christmas Eve a command to “Kiss my feet!”"

 

[RnRJohnny]

"Ok I don't want to alarm anyone but my vision is pixelating on my periphery; i'm seeing triangular shapes almost."

Been there, seen that. Tell her to go to an optometrist: her eyes are being strained.


Sent from my SM-T330NU using Tapatalk

 

[Soupie]

Sorry to dig up this old thread, but some items recently came through my stream that were relevant.

Human and Artificial Intelligence May Be Equally Impossible to Understand

Neural networks are trained by feeding in data, then adjusting the connections between layers until the network’s calculated output matches the known output (which usually consists of categories) as closely as possible. The incredible results of the past few years are thanks to a series of new techniques that make it possible to quickly train deep networks, with many layers between the first input and the final output. One popular deep network called AlexNet is used to categorize photographs—labeling them according to such fine distinctions as whether they contain a Shih Tzu or a Pomeranian. It consists of over 60 million “weights,” each of which tell each neuron how much attention to pay to each of its inputs. ...

Das, Batra, and their colleagues then try to get a sense of how the network makes its decisions by investigating where in the pictures it chooses to look. What they have found surprises them: When answering the question about drapes, the network doesn’t even bother looking for a window. Instead, it first looks to the bottom of the image, and stops looking if it finds a bed. It seems that, in the dataset used to train this neural net, windows with drapes may be found in bedrooms.

While this approach does reveal some of the inner workings of the deep net, it also reinforces the challenge presented by interpretability. “What machines are picking up on are not facts about the world,” Batra says. “They’re facts about the dataset.” That the machines are so tightly tuned to the data they are fed makes it difficult to extract general rules about how they work. More importantly, he cautions, if you don’t know how it works, you don’t know how it will fail. And when they do they fail, in Batra’s experience, “they fail spectacularly disgracefully.”

So here's what we have in a very very rough nutshell:

Scientists are creating artificial neural nets which are based on biological neural nets. They expose these neural nets to data sets (stimuli) and the neural nets become extremely adept at recognizing certain objects. However, these neural nets are "brittle" because when the data set is changed, the neural nets "fail spectacularly."

Just today I was listening to this episode of Radio Misterioso:

"Just a few days ago, I was alerted to a strange sighting from the UK in 2009. The witness, (who wishes to remain anonymous, and along with 3 others) reported seeing a passenger aircraft flying dangerously low over the British countryside. As they approached closer, they realized that the object appeared to be hanging perfectly still in mid-air. This was rather disconcerting, along with the fact that the airplane was perfectly white, with no markings whatsoever. We talked about this, my own stationary UFO sighting, and what might be happening to witnesses of weird stuff."

@Burnt State and I have speculated in this thread whether the human perceptual system--which also relies on neural nets but of course is order of magnitude more complex than artificial neural nets--is "brittle" as well. That is, does the human perceptual system have limits just like this artificial neural nets? The human organism of course has evolved in a data set known as the Earth. And the human organism has become pretty "tightly tuned" to the Earth data set for reasons of survival. But what happens when the human organism is exposed to new data set, ie, an anomalous stimuli?

Perhaps it fails spectacularly and perceives an aircraft to be hanging motionless in the sky. Or sees a dog-headed man smoking a cigarette under a street light. Or has an alien make it pancakes.

 

[victimized]

If any human being wants to realize the UFO condition, it is to realize that the occultist/scientists want you to understand the UFO artificial condition for their own purposes.

The occult organization wants the natural consciousness attacked by the artificial condition to give it information, so that they can resource the science of the artificial.....for they know that in origin scientific study/consideration a natural consciousness gave its own self the advice.

Yet they seem to forget that we are a natural DNA condition, and they want a model of an artificial DNA condition, which our natural life does not own and is not aware of....yet they attack our brain/mind seeing condition every day with this evil minded consideration.

Why do you think some human lives manifested an unnatural metallic implant beneath their skin? This is not artificial...it is implanted, stating that the natural iron cell interaction mutated....and mutation is not artificial you arrogant occultist.

When you all realize that the occultist already has informed you all about his theory and want....he wants origin energy.

No life existed when origin energy was formed......hence his want is to destroy natural life.

His belief is that he can pass origin energy through our bodies, nature, and into a machine.....his collider, yet the collider never existed when origin energy was formed...and passing black body radiation streams through the natural life....burns us, mutates our cells, causes implants, cuts into the flesh of animals and bores holes into Planet Earth.

Use your thinking ability, and use simple thinking instead of trying to rationalize the irrational data of an occult mind, and you might all realize that our occult brother is trying to destroy our life.

 

[Burnt State]

Sorry to dig up this old thread, but some items recently came through my stream that were relevant.

Human and Artificial Intelligence May Be Equally Impossible to Understand


So here's what we have in a very very rough nutshell:

Scientists are creating artificial neural nets which are based on biological neural nets. They expose these neural nets to data sets (stimuli) and the neural nets become extremely adept at recognizing certain objects. However, these neural nets are "brittle" because when the data set is changed, the neural nets "fail spectacularly."

Just today I was listening to this episode of Radio Misterioso:

"Just a few days ago, I was alerted to a strange sighting from the UK in 2009. The witness, (who wishes to remain anonymous, and along with 3 others) reported seeing a passenger aircraft flying dangerously low over the British countryside. As they approached closer, they realized that the object appeared to be hanging perfectly still in mid-air. This was rather disconcerting, along with the fact that the airplane was perfectly white, with no markings whatsoever. We talked about this, my own stationary UFO sighting, and what might be happening to witnesses of weird stuff."

@Burnt State and I have speculated in this thread whether the human perceptual system--which also relies on neural nets but of course is order of magnitude more complex than artificial neural nets--is "brittle" as well. That is, does the human perceptual system have limits just like this artificial neural nets? The human organism of course has evolved in a data set known as the Earth. And the human organism has become pretty "tightly tuned" to the Earth data set for reasons of survival. But what happens when the human organism is exposed to new data set, ie, an anomalous stimuli?

Perhaps it fails spectacularly and perceives an aircraft to be hanging motionless in the sky. Or sees a dog-headed man smoking a cigarette under a street light. Or has an alien make it pancakes.

Yes those examples you list are some of my favourite ones and it's important that there's a group sighting there to acknowledge that unique phenomenon we calm the madness of crowds. The human beast is also a collective animal when it comes to survival and so shared visions amonst the tribe makes sense in my mind. We like gathering together to burn the witch, sacrifice virgins to our gods and will perform all manner of ritual in order to commune in with the abstract alien idea of god in our minds. We easily convince ourselves and others of the unreal all the time. We sell stories.

And we both fail miserably when confronted with anomalous stimuli and we also construct relevant collective interpretations in order to insure the safety of the group. If I was in the family abode in Kelly-Hopkinsville and believed long eared floating aliens were trying to invade my home I would freak out and get out the shotgun too. So it's not a wonder that everyone in that house also believed and saw similar strange creatures.

There's also something interesting about this brittle brain of ours that inevitably constructs certain anomalous narratives out of the intetsection of strange stimuli & whatever has been programmed into the memory banks of the perceiver. This for me lies at the heart of the paranormal experience. We have always seen things.
Because the mind functions to try and make sense of the inputs within a given data set. It's what it does.

This in turn prompts strong emotions for the perceiver and some experiences will be so profund and memorable as to mark the experiencer in such a way that they may feel compelled to share their story. We are creatures of narrative and love a good yarn, love to feel new things and share in the fantastic. We are natural responders to wild images and irrational tales, as every good listener longs to wonder at, or even be changed by, weird stories. These stories are a part of our culture and feedback into the memeplex of our society. In this way the paranormal is a brittle brain bending popular experience.

 

[Randall]

... Witnesses are rarely accurate about the details of much of anything ...

Details are one thing, and there's a reason for that. We tend to filter out a lot of the irrelevant stuff. Consequently what is left over and fairly accurate is the important stuff. So for example, the average modern day citizen who sees a jumbo jet fly over might not remember what airline it's from, or the exact make and model, and how many rivets it had, but chances are really good that he or she will remember that what they saw was a jumbo jet, and in general, whether or not it seemed like a normally functioning jumbo jet.

And what's more, they'll probably be able to tell you about where it was seen, what direction it was heading, the approximate time of day, whether or not its altitude was abnormally low, whether or not they heard any noise, if they saw any bright lights on it, about how long it took to fly past, and the basic weather conditions at the time. Plus that same person can usually tell the difference between jumbo jets, other kinds of airplanes, helicopters, parachutes, balloons, birds, kites, and a host of other stuff that might get seen in the sky.

So when a witness says what they saw a jumbo jet fly past, regardless of the finer details, it's likely that what they saw was a jumbo jet. And if they say what they saw wasn't any of those things because it looked and behaved totally differently, and some follow-up investigation is done, and the investigators are also not able to determine what sort of natural or manmade object could have been observed, and they are satisfied that the witness isn't simply fabricating a story, then it doesn't seem reasonable to me to simply dismiss their sighting as some sort of misperception.

 

[Jeff Davis]

UFO stimulus: I am not certain I know what UFOs are, but I believe I do, and I also believe to some certain speculative degree that I understand how they seemingly interact with the conscious mind of the observer. This speculation based understanding is no different than any other with respect to UFOs. Any forwarded understanding, or proposition for what UFOs are, and representative of, is THOROUGHLY SPECULATION BASED. There is positively no defined understanding of what a UFO is, and I mean NONE.

The stimulus itself, now that is in fact what is most interesting to myself, and I'd bet is as well to just about anyone who's bright enough to realize that there is a very real measurably morphological affinity to this most puzzling group of Fortean phenomena. But ultimately, with respect to stimulus, the question always comes down to internal vs external. Naturally in the long run, logical speculation tends to side in the end with a compromising "both". Just in case you didn't know, "both" in this case is Greek for "if you don't want to go insane, you'll leave it at that.

IMO, John Keel and Jacques Vallee were and have been the closest to revealing the real nature of what is behind this seemingly apparitional phenomenal myriad from a human perspective stand point.

When MR. @Soupie states: "I didn't capture it with the Flatlander reference, but what I am wondering is whether some aspects of these phenomena are simply beyond the capabilities of human sensory systems, but importantly, not all. Therefore any interaction with the phenomena might result in the experience of exotic features blending into the features beyond our capacity to receive."

This very much somewhat echoes what MR. Keel himself championed as his ultraterrestrial hypothesis. That indeed UFOs hailed from beyond the electromagnetic spectrum where our own native perceptual capabilities lost all their apparent rhyme and reason. However, Keel felt the case was to made for an ascribed objective ability of these ultraterrestrials to appear to us as they themselves desired to appear to us for less than above board reasons. In short Keel came to precisely the same conclusion that Vallee did in messengers of deception, albeit Vallee claimed at the time that this was a sort of progressive human control system rather than a ploy by an alien species to overcome and do away with us via some sort of covert invasive process. I tend to side with Vallee in some respects, and Keel in others. However, I do not see an immanent invasive threat apart from the mind of the experiencer themselves in some cases.

Personally, I am of the opinion that most UFO experiences are most definitely attributable to an initial external stimulus, and that stimulus in and of itself is purely informational in nature. This interactive stimulus is rendered from a combination of cognitively attributed imagination & memory as a sort hypnotically induced confabulation wherein the visually interpreted stimulus takes on a life of it's own much like a dream does. The trigger for this experience is a consciousness/cognitive rift created in the fully aware mind of the observer. The rift itself is a product of a subtle but extremely powerful distortion in the observers field of awareness. Because the phenomenal experience itself is visual in nature, the more intense the disturbance, all but the the experiential visual receptors are dumbed way down due to instinct. This is much like cases wherein great child centered potential tragedy arises and mothers or others with a deep sense of connection to those in trouble garner tremendous physical strength in which they are able to overcome seemingly impossible physical adversity. All neural energies are redirected to a cognitively determined point of threat at the behest of powerful experiential survival instinct. If the initial distortion is too powerful, or progressively becomes as much, the witness blacks out. Unlike the typical separation of cognition and consciousness wherein a tired mind/body manifests sleep, all temporal linearity within the mind of the witness is lost due to the immediate separation effect. The more minor, or least potential of which distortion induced blackouts, can result in one or a combination of several subcognitive states of lucid awareness. These lucid episodes become a form of directed dreaming wherein the memory of the witness creates an extremely subtle experiential outline for consciousness/cognition to improvisationally repair itself and come back online so to speak, (reestablish connection) wherein alien contact can play out into a myriad of ends.

There is a ridiculous amount more obviously, including multiple witness events, but I need to get back to work.

 

[Burnt State]

Details are one thing, and there's a reason for that. We tend to filter out a lot of the irrelevant stuff. Consequently what is left over and fairly accurate is the important stuff. So for example, the average modern day citizen who sees a jumbo jet fly over might not remember what airline it's from, or the exact make and model, and how many rivets it had, but chances are really good that he or she will remember that what they saw was a jumbo jet, and in general, whether or not it seemed like a normally functioning jumbo jet.

And what's more, they'll probably be able to tell you about where it was seen, what direction it was heading, the approximate time of day, whether or not its altitude was abnormally low, whether or not they heard any noise, if they saw any bright lights on it, about how long it took to fly past, and the basic weather conditions at the time. Plus that same person can usually tell the difference between jumbo jets, other kinds of airplanes, helicopters, parachutes, balloons, birds, kites, and a host of other stuff that might get seen in the sky.

So when a witness says what they saw a jumbo jet fly past, regardless of the finer details, it's likely that what they saw was a jumbo jet. And if they say what they saw wasn't any of those things because it looked and behaved totally differently, and some follow-up investigation is done, and the investigators are also not able to determine what sort of natural or manmade object could have been observed, and they are satisfied that the witness isn't simply fabricating a story, then it doesn't seem reasonable to me to simply dismiss their sighting as some sort of misperception.

Can I add a more important layer if I haven't conveyed this before properly. Watching a jumbo jet is now a very commonplace event in our time. If one sees a jet it's an automatic prerecorded event for our brain to replay. Easily done.

But if you are witnessing a murder as in recent American police shootings of black people we have seen that no two witnesses have consistent stories to tell.

Now imagine that what is being witnessed is some rather strange, rare unknown stimulus. And perhaps there is something also to be said about the state of the witness and what they bring individually to this unreal "alien" experience. These intersections are interesting to me and I know from talking with others who have had up close Ufo encounters they have found it to be profound and life altering to various extents. I can identify with that. There appear to me a number of unique factors of which those are some. Emotions, brain chemistry, identity, memory etc. all play roles in this unique experience that is extremely different than watching a jumbo jet fly overhead.

 

[Randall]

Can I add a more important layer if I haven't conveyed this before properly. Watching a jumbo jet is now a very commonplace event in our time. If one sees a jet it's an automatic prerecorded event for our brain to replay. Easily done ... I know from talking with others who have had up close Ufo encounters they have found it to be profound and life altering to various extents. ... all play roles in this unique experience that is extremely different than watching a jumbo jet fly overhead.

I'm going to be really careful here. In the context of UFO sightings, are you suggesting that because a UFO experience isn't mundane to people, that people can't be reasonably sure that what they experienced was something alien? Because if that's was you're suggesting, then there a couple of serious problems with that, one of them a huge contradiction in logic, and we should clear that up.

 

[Burnt State]

I'm going to be really careful here. In the context of UFO sightings, are you suggesting that because a UFO experience isn't mundane to people, that people can't be reasonably sure that what they experienced was something alien? Because if that's was you're suggesting, then there a couple of serious problems with that, one of them a huge contradiction in logic, and we should clear that up.

It's not like you are looking at a rare bird or something. We're talking about a stimulus that we may not have the sensory apparatus to properly view nor comprehend hence the often surreal descriptions people give during up close sightings. You can call that a problem in logic if you like. And because the experience is often far more exhilarating and arresting than looking at the mundane biologically we are also possibly predisposed to having an altered experience. This is often how people describe these events. I'm not talking about seeing a weird light in the sky as that's fairly mundane on its own. I'm saying that when we are under duress and when our system is not able to properly understand what the stimulus is that things go wonky perceptually.

 

[Randall]

OK let's look at this part first:

I'm saying that when we are under duress and when our system is not able to properly understand what the stimulus is that things go wonky perceptually.

The UFO experience spans a wide range of stress types depending on the witness and the details of the experience. Therefore what you're saying can apply more, or less, or barely at all. So although it should be a factor to consider, it's not reasonable to paint all sighting reports with the same broad brush. The idea is for us to clarify the situation, and the incompetent weak-minded witness argument is a favorite way for skeptics to muddy the water. We want to avoid that sort of thinking, but still recognize that you have a valid point.

It's not like you are looking at a rare bird or something. We're talking about a stimulus that we may not have the sensory apparatus to properly view nor comprehend hence the often surreal descriptions people give during up close sightings. You can call that a problem in logic if you like. And because the experience is often far more exhilarating and arresting than looking at the mundane biologically we are also possibly predisposed to having an altered experience. This is often how people describe these events. I'm not talking about seeing a weird light in the sky as that's fairly mundane on its own.

Now you're getting into some specifics, and we'd need to look at specific cases to see how well it applies. Based on my experience looking at many cases in the literature, and talking to witnesses in person, I think it's definitely reasonable to suggest that subjective interpretation based on the witnesses' knowledge base and worldview are factors to consider. But at the same time, I did a brief search for scholarly articles related to stress induced misperceptions, and din't find anything that specifically applied. So maybe if we run across something like that, we should post it up for us to have a closer look.

 

[Burnt State]

I'm being specific and not using a broad brush. Close encounter cases with entities or ships freak the hell out of people.

Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts

I would have posted more and cited the many intersting studies that do look at how emotions affect perception ...they are out there...but I'm leaving again. Be well my friend and thanks for the continued positive engagement. I tried to msg you but you're not accepting private convos.

Ciao.

 

[Randall]

I'm being specific and not using a broad brush. Close encounter cases with entities or ships freak the hell out of people.
Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts
I would have posted more and cited the many intersting studies that do look at how emotions affect perception ...they are out there...but I'm leaving again. Be well my friend and thanks for the continued positive engagement. I tried to msg you but you're not accepting private convos.

Where's the option for accepting or not accepting private conversation requests?

On the article you link to above: I've seen many similar articles, but nothing more specific, and if we want, we can also create an article giving scientific reasons why eyewitness evidence can be very good, and when we weigh out the pros and cons, what we find is that influencing the mind to relay information that isn't reasonably accurate requires very specific situations. In the article for example, false memories were created by deliberately setting up subjects in a very intentional way that we wouldn't normally find in day-to-day life. With respect to ufology, that could apply to leading witnesses during investigation or hypnotic regression.

Psychology Today: Why Your Memory is Far Better Than You Think

So yes, if we are to be responsible in gauging the accuracy of reports, we do need to be fair and recognize the strengths and the weaknesses of the mind in the context of the witness and other details in a report, and I emphasize the word fair. Just because problems can happen doesn't mean they happen in every case, and such problems shouldn't automatically be invoked every time no other mundane explanation can be found. I've seen more than one skeptic who couldn't explain a case in mundane terms jump to some version of the weak minded witness argument. I've had it done to me. You can imagine how I well take that ... LOL, and if I don't like the way it feels, I imagine others don't feel any better about it.

 

[Ron Away]

I'm being specific and not using a broad brush. Close encounter cases with entities or ships freak the hell out of people.

Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts

I would have posted more and cited the many intersting studies that do look at how emotions affect perception ...they are out there...but I'm leaving again. Be well my friend and thanks for the continued positive engagement. I tried to msg you but you're not accepting private convos.

Ciao.

My sighting didn't leave me freaked out at all.Just left me extremely puzzled and in no doubt as to what I saw.I'm sure I didn't hallucinate,imagine or misidentify what I saw.It was by definition an unknown flying object,the like of I'd not seen before or since.In my police career my eyewitness accounts have been accepted in numerous court cases though I don't claim to be infallible.If no obvious explanation is available to sceptics then the witness reliability can be attacked.This thinking is as flawed as believing every odd light in the sky is E.T visiting.

 

[Jeff Davis]

My sighting didn't leave me freaked out at all.Just left me extremely puzzled and in no doubt as to what I saw.I'm sure I didn't hallucinate,imagine or misidentify what I saw.It was by definition an unknown flying object,the like of I'd not seen before or since.In my police career my eyewitness accounts have been accepted in numerous court cases though I don't claim to be infallible.If no obvious explanation is available to sceptics then the witness reliability can be attacked.This thinking is as flawed as believing every odd light in the sky is E.T visiting.

Twice I have had what I absolutely know were UFO sightings. I am not referring to star or planet sized bright lights in the nigh sky either. The first was very up close and personal and I and one other individual experienced the silence that can be felt that is often associated with events bearing out the high strangeness often associated with close UFO sightings and encounters. The second was a sighting with my father that occurred on a near perfect clear day. The first event lasted roughly 20 minutes and was at night. Remarkably bizarre aerial behaviors were observed in myriad. The second which lasted all in all for a very much shorter length of time, was a broad daylight sighting which included seeing two identical objects that followed one another by about 2 minutes apart on a very similar "flight" path in the sky up until each individual object's departure from the area, were remarkably clear in detail. In neither case was I freaked out or fearful in the least. Excited if not elated absolutely, but I absolutely know what my human sensory capabilities beheld, and what is now potentially etched upon my memory of these events.

In the first event's case I firmly believe that what I saw intentionally or unintentionally interacted with me experientially. Although I maintained an absolute volition and wit about me at all times during the experience, my sensory conscious awareness was dramatically effected. I was in a relatively close proximity to this visually beheld phenomenon.

The second experience was entirely without any type of interaction apart from normal internal cognitively decoded conscious awareness. I was close enough to very clearly discern what it was that I had visualized, but no where near as close to the objects as was I the first time.

I do not believe that the majority of those who witness UFOs are doing so because they are emotionally shocked or prompted into witnessing what they remember and report. If this were the common case there would be virtually no cases wherein two independent witnesses remembered and reported seeing the same described object. There are hundreds and hundreds of such reported cases.

 

[Burnt State]

Last comment:

What people appear to be referring to here in their own examples are not close encounter cases but lights in the sky or far away daylight objects. While these can be profound for those present who see them they are not getting us closer to what the stimulus is. In these examples the reliability of the witness has nothing to do with it. I believe everyone has the capacity to faithfully but the interpretations are only of value to the individual who may imbue them with as much significance as they like.

What I am referring to on this thread is the much more powerful experience of Hynek's CE definitions of objects seen less than 500 feet away and or the witnessing of humanoids/entities. These cases repeatedly come with very intense emotion and do mark people in much more significant ways. I'm talking about the ship you see hovering directly overhead that are so close that you can see the rivets or that smooth clean surface, the structured craft seen hovering in a field forty feet away from your parked car or in one my personal favorites from Wendy O'Connors' audio collection where the ship covers the entire width of the highway, appears to be made out of a spider webbed honeycombed structure and the two humanoids outside it that are greeting the witness look like giant catfish from the waist up and appear to be breathing using some surreal gill structured object on their backs. These cases speak directly to saying something much more specific about the nature of the stimulus.

The lights and objects seen at a distance may have a myriad of explanations for believers and skeptics alike, but the close encounter experience is the thing that screams out "alien" and is what I'm exploring in terms of trying to understand the nature of both the stimulus and it's response. As we have the report and the powerful experience that has altered a witness we perhaps can try to better ascertain the nature of the stimulus by examining more closely the nature of the response, its impact and who exactly the witness is.

Examining the nature of perception and how it works, what affects it biologically & sociologically and how different people may be more prone to seeing things certain ways may offer better clues than talking about the much more commonplace and leas detailed distant object or light. Not to take away anything from how that may have affected individuals who have had such experiences but those generic sightings do not carry the same weight as the Polish farmer in Emilcin who gave a ride on his horse and cart to two small purplish humanoids who raised him up into their craft, covered in tiny propellers on spires, using a platform and pulley system.

So this is an opportunity to look more closely at the interaction between the stimulus and the response. For the ETH crowd this case is all about aliens from space but it's as nonsensical as humanoids exchanging water for tasteless pancakes. What kind of creatures need propellers or would use a pulley system to raise up their human guest for his medical exam while he stares in awe at the large black birds that are twitching held in some kind of suspended animation.

In these cases we perhaps can gather up much more information about the nature of how the stimulus is interacting with a man who has no real education or exposure to media to colour his views of what aliens or alien ships look like. We can learn from close examination of such cases.

Human beings are the interpreters of these unique events and they need the emphasis as we have only their "alien" story to work with and them.

 

[Ron Away]

Last comment:

What people appear to be referring to here in their own examples are not close encounter cases but lights in the sky or far away daylight objects. While these can be profound for those present who see them they are not getting us closer to what the stimulus is. In these examples the reliability of the witness has nothing to do with it. I believe everyone has the capacity to faithfully but the interpretations are only of value to the individual who may imbue them with as much significance as they like.

What I am referring to on this thread is the much more powerful experience of Hynek's CE definitions of objects seen less than 500 feet away and or the witnessing of humanoids/entities. These cases repeatedly come with very intense emotion and do mark people in much more significant ways. I'm talking about the ship you see hovering directly overhead that are so close that you can see the rivets or that smooth clean surface, the structured craft seen hovering in a field forty feet away from your parked car or in one my personal favorites from Wendy O'Connors' audio collection where the ship covers the entire width of the highway, appears to be made out of a spider webbed honeycombed structure and the two humanoids outside it that are greeting the witness look like giant catfish from the waist up and appear to be breathing using some surreal gill structured object on their backs. These cases speak directly to saying something much more specific about the nature of the stimulus.

The lights and objects seen at a distance may have a myriad of explanations for believers and skeptics alike, but the close encounter experience is the thing that screams out "alien" and is what I'm exploring in terms of trying to understand the nature of both the stimulus and it's response. As we have the report and the powerful experience that has altered a witness we perhaps can try to better ascertain the nature of the stimulus by examining more closely the nature of the response, its impact and who exactly the witness is.

Examining the nature of perception and how it works, what affects it biologically & sociologically and how different people may be more prone to seeing things certain ways may offer better clues than talking about the much more commonplace and leas detailed distant object or light. Not to take away anything from how that may have affected individuals who have had such experiences but those generic sightings do not carry the same weight as the Polish farmer in Emilcin who gave a ride on his horse and cart to two small purplish humanoids who raised him up into their craft, covered in tiny propellers on spires, using a platform and pulley system.

So this is an opportunity to look more closely at the interaction between the stimulus and the response. For the ETH crowd this case is all about aliens from space but it's as nonsensical as humanoids exchanging water for tasteless pancakes. What kind of creatures need propellers or would use a pulley system to raise up their human guest for his medical exam while he stares in awe at the large black birds that are twitching held in some kind of suspended animation.

In these cases we perhaps can gather up much more information about the nature of how the stimulus is interacting with a man who has no real education or exposure to media to colour his views of what aliens or alien ships look like. We can learn from close examination of such cases.

Human beings are the interpreters of these unique events and they need the emphasis as we have only their "alien" story to work with and them.

Without boring people with specifics,I saw a solid flying object around 50 metres away from the window of the plane I was flying in.Clear daylight,no obstructions,I don't drink and have never used drugs.The affect on me was WTF!.I wracked my brains trying to rationalize what I saw.Didn't know then,still don't know now 15 years later.I'm Mr Average in every way and don't think the object was there for my benefit,I just happened to see it.