Friday, December 17, 2010

Mirage Men, the Movie?

Pilkington's Mirage Men was about as good a look into a UFO convention from a documentary viewpoint as one could hope for, complete with interviews with Richard Doty himself. It too is to be released as movie by John Lundberg and Mark Pilkington at some point in the future, and that is one to look forward to. 
Another really entertaining look at the more, shall we say eccentric, aspects of UFO conferences is in the form of a Rick Wood podcast from the 2010 X Conference. His interview with an attendee there manages to encompass, in the persona of this one true believer, just about every aspect of the UFO phenomena that makes you want to cringe and deny that you have any interest in such a field like this. Yet, while it is quite embarassing it's also immensely entertaining at the same time, not unlike convincing yourself you are slowing down by that car crash to make sure everyone's okay rather to see just how really bad it is.

The title, Jimmy Carter, Underground Alien Bases and Talking Velociraptors From Outer Space, is almost worth the price of admission in and of it self. ( Check it out here and here.) But beyond the entertainment value alone, there are some useful points to be pulled out of this interview. One is the incredible mashup of belief that has evolved, or rather is in a constant state of evolutionary flux, a sort of transconceptual miscegenation. The other is that in this ufological/ufoological evolutionary flux, there is not necessarily the survival of the strongest but of the weirdest. Not that any of the old concepts every completely die out, they just wait to be picked up by once again by newcomers unfamiliar with why they were laid aside in the first place.
Which makes one wonder if indeed there is any truly bad publicity other than no publicity when it comes to anomalous phenomena...Anyone remember Bridey Murphy? Thought not...

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Some Thoughts on the Etymology and Uses of ‘High Strangeness’

The term ‘high strangeness’ has found widespread acceptance and is currently widely used in ufology and related paranormal fields. But the etymological origins of this phrase are unclear, and not readily discernible through that font of modern wisdom, the internet (at least not with the sort of cursory search that passes for research with persons such as myself). It is often tossed about without much thought given to how it came about in the first place, or what it may mean in relationship to, say, low strangeness, a term which is rarely, if ever used.


The first use of the term that presents itself to this reader is from 38 years ago. Chapter Four in J. Allen Hynek’s The UFO Experience, is entitled On the Strangeness of UFO Reports, and it is here that he mentions the term ‘high strangeness’ some 7 times, primarily in relationship to a “Strangeness Rating” for the “’strangeness-spread’ of UFO sightings.”

“Still, there exist UFO reports that are coherent, sequential narrative accounts of these strange human experiences. Largely because there has been no mechanism for bringing these reports to general attention, they seem to be far too strange to be believed.


They don't fit the established conceptual framework of modern physical science. It is about as difficult to put oneself into a 'belief framework' and accept a host of UFO reports as having described actual events as, for example, it would have been for Newton to have accepted the basic concepts of quantum mechanics.


Yet the strangeness of UFO reports does fall into fairly definite patterns. The 'strangeness-spread' of UFO reports is quite limited. We do not, for instance, receive reports of dinosaurs seen flying upside down, Unidentified Sailing Objects, or strange objects that burrow into the ground…


The Strangeness Rating is, to express it loosely, a measure of how 'odd-ball' a report is within its particular broad classification. More precisely, it can be taken as a measure of the number of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common-sense terms. A light seen in the night sky the trajectory of which, cannot be ascribed to a balloon, aircraft, etc., would nonetheless have a low Strangeness Rating because there is only one strange thing about' the report to explain: its motion. A report of a weird craft that descended to within 100 feet of a car on a lonely road, caused the car's engine to die, its radio to  stop, and its lights to go out, left marks on the nearby ground, and appeared to be under intelligent control receives a high Strangeness Rating because it contains a number of separate very strange items, each of which outrages common sense.”
  This concept of a Strangeness Rating is further expounded on by Jacques Vallee in The Invisible College (1975, also published in England 1977 as UFOs: The Psychic Solution). He acknowledges Hynek’s discussion of the subject, which certainly has received less widespread acceptance as the Close Encounters of the First, Second and Third Kind heuristic model found in the same book.

Vallee also proposes a ranked series of Strangeness Categories that, though useful in grading the phenomena and even helping to understand why, where and to whom they are reported, has generally been overlooked. I quote it at length here because it helps expand on the possible meaning of high strangeness by contrasting it with incidents of lesser strangeness.  It also exhibits the low key humor which makes Vallee such an enjoyable writer.

“A basic characteristic of the confrontation with a UFO is the strangeness of the occurrence. Dr Allen Hynek, in his book The UFO Experience, proposed a study of the strangeness in connection with the reliability of a report Is it necessarily true, he asked, that the strangest reports (such as the landing cases with occupants) always come from the least reliable sources? He found that such was NOT the case, and that many reports existed in his files with both high reliability and high strangeness.


Let us take this idea one step further and discuss the probability that a given witness will report seeing a UFO. Assuming ten people have seen a strange object in the sky, how many of these reports will I be able to obtain? This depends, of course, on how willing each of the witnesses will be to tell anyone about his experience, and also it will depend on the person to whom he relates it. On this basis I have defined seven categories of strangeness and I have constructed for each category an appropriate scenario, as follows:


Strangeness Category 1: You see a flickering light as you come out of the garage. It reminds you of a firefly, but you have never observed fireflies under quite similar conditions. Result: You are unlikely to call the police or the Air Force to report this! If you do tell someone about the sighting, it will probably be a friend or associate: “I didn’t know there were fireflies at this time of the year.”


Strangeness Category 2: As you come out of the garage you see a flaming object that plunges behind the hill. Perhaps you have read somewhere that meteors and fireballs often appeared to be quite close when in fact they were hundreds of miles away. However, you call the police to report it because the summer has been very dry and you are afraid the phenomenon, whatever it is, may cause something to catch fire.


Strangeness Category 3: You put your car away and come out of the garage in time to see a luminous object giving off a blue glow that plunges behind the hill. It looks like a large, circular aircraft and seems to have some windows but no tail or wings. Could it be that the Russians are up to something? You call the nearest Air Force base to report it, out of a feeling of civic duty.


Strangeness Category 4: You park the old Chevy by the side of the barn and as you walk toward the house you suddenly see a large disk with lighted portholes that comes down with a gentle rocking motion and touches the ground near the pen where the pigs are kept. It makes a humming sound that turns into a high pitch whistle and it takes off again. You think of calling the police, but it occurs to you that the neighbors will be intrigued and the story will be all over the town the next day. You realize that the Air Force might be interest, but you think better of it when you wife tells you she read an article in a magazine explaining how the Air Force paid some big university to study those things and it came out negative. ON the other hand, Joe down the street has lots of books on the subject and gets a little journal from a private UFO group in Indiana. Perhaps he would pass along the information to them. This way you could at least tell someone about it without being ridiculed.


Strangeness Category 5: As you lock the garage to make sure no vandals will scratch the pain on the new Corvette you are suddenly confronted with a dwarf wearing a silvery diving suit. It has no visible arms but its oversized eyes glow with a strange orange light. It turns around and walks stiffly away into the bushes. A moment later a round object takes off from behind the hedge. At first you are too shocked to move, but you come to your senses and go into the house. You tell your wife you don’t feel like going on that camping trip next weekend. She wants to know why and you reluctantly tell her about what you’ve just seen, after she promises not to tell her mother.


Strangeness Category 6: You are lying in bed, wondering whether there is enough gas left in the car to drive to church and back tomorrow, when suddenly a light appears in the backyard. At the same time the baby starts crying in the next room. Your get up in your pajamas to check the screen door and a large blue object comes into view, hovering six feet away. A beam of light appears underneath. It sweeps along the ground with a small white spot and comes toward you. When it hits your face thousands of thoughts come into your mind. You become “locked” within the strange light. A torrent of ideas seems to be transferred into your consciousness at a high rate. It suddenly stops and the blue object vanishes on the spot. You lean against the door wondering whether it was of God or the devil. Your mind is filled with burning questions. Could life exist on other planets? What if what we call God was only one of millions of higher beings who exist throughout the cosmos? You develop a throbbing headache. You take a sleeping pill and go back to bed without awakening your wife. The baby seems to have gone to sleep.


Strangeness Category 7: You are driving a truck at fifty miles an hour around a bend in the road when you become aware of a large, dark object that blocks the whole highway. There seems to be no possibility to avoid a collision but an invisible force appears to take hold of the fifteen-ton rig and bring it to a stop within a few feet of the object. A ring of smoke extends from the base of the dome-shaped craft and you start choking as it reaches the truck. The next thing you remember is that you are driving around another bend in the road fifty miles to the south. You look at your watch and it is an hour later than you thought it was. “


Although as a tool it might not necessarily be picked up, dusted off and used again, but at least because by understanding the proposed use of Strangeness Categories we can gain some insight as to why it was developed in the first place and to what purpose such models can be put in helping to sort out unexplained phenomena.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

How I Almost Became a True Believer

I can’t really remember when I first became fascinated with the concepts of UFOs and flying saucers, but it is firmly embedded with images of the library branch where I read everything I could on the subject. This was back in the early ‘60s so it was almost exclusively nuts and bolts related, though by this time there was also a healthy dose of contactee material sprinkled in. Okay, healthy may not be the right analogy, but it was certainly a heady mix, especially when supplemented by the very real fact that we were also travelling into outer space at the time, reinforced by a steady ongoing diet of rockets and space suits in the press.

This fascination with flying saucers didn’t go unnoticed by my family. My siblings came to me all excited and told me that there was one outside, an excitement which was contagious and sparked me to come running out to finally see the visitors from beyond for myself. What I found there was their hilarious derision and laughter at my credulity, as well as healthy respect for the very real human capacity for deceit in the pursuit of a hoax, as well as an appreciation for a degree of skepticism about the claims of nonbelievers.

I cut my teeth on the Condon Report when it was published, which I took to imply that although there is much going on in the sky which can be misinterpreted, which when sifted through leaves a residual amount of strange phenomena which is still beyond our current understanding. Eric von Daniken was all the rage in high school, but following through in studying the cultural, anthropological and archaeological backdrop he was drawing made clear the height of the conclusions he was jumping to and supplied an Occam’s razor which cut like butter through most of his conclusions.

But it was the whole Bill Moore and Aquarius affair that put the subject to bed for me for almost three decades. With so many conflicting theories and what was clear even then as massive amounts of disinformation the field of ufology was becoming so muddied I put aside the subject. Oddly enough it this same affair which has sparked renewed interest in the whole field of ufoology (thanks to Jim Moseley for that oh so perfect term!) when Greg Bishop’s Project Beta added some much needed perspective on that truly bizarre episode. For me it closed one window but opened up a door onto what the late Robert Anton Wilson called maybe logic, that blessed state of being able to consider everything while believing in nothing.

It was in that same period that another formative event occurred, which has not only helped me understand the nature of becoming a true believer, but the emotional commitment and psychological burden such a belief system entails.

It must have been well over thirty years ago, walking back from a friend’s apartment on a road alongside Saint Edwards in Austin, one with an incredible panoramic overview of the city. It was late at night when I notice a light in the sky approaching from the west. It grew closer and brighter, and as it became clear that it was a series of moving lights. Coming ever closer it began to resolve itself as a series of colored lights that seemed to be moving horizontally beneath a solid surface.

I began to get quite excited about this, visualizing it in my minds eyes as lights rotating around the bottom of a classic disc shaped flying saucer. The implications of this were beginning to reshape my sense of what this implied, that the world would change for me as I went from being someone who had always had an interest in the subject to becoming a full blown believer, one of many of what was sure to be a widely viewed phenomena that would perhaps not only precipitate a major flap but mark the beginning of a mass landing. There was an emotional excitement of anticipation mixed with fear mixed with wonder, a waterfall of feelings running over me, drowning out whatever doubt the inner skeptic could muster because there it was before my very eyes. My whole world view was changing right there and then, some inner element of my psyche welcoming it as a childhood dream finally come true.

And still it grew closer, the lights and their apparent rotation clearer. At one point, however, it became clear to me what was really going on. I could now hear the drone of a small private plane's engine drone, and see that it was pulling behind it a lighted advertising banner with still unclear words scrolling across it.

And so my world changed again. It was, and remains clear to me now, that I have to be careful about allowing my preconceptions and residual belief systems guide my perceptions into seeing what I want to or expect to see. That much is clear, and it applies every bit as much when reading or hearing about the anomalous experiences of others.

But there is another, more frightening aspect to this experience. If that plane had turned sooner, before I'd been able to make out what it really was, I would now be one of those poor fools who run around trying to tell everyone about the UFO I saw, wondering why no else had reported it (or why the sighting was being suppressed) and getting sucked into the bizarrely puzzling world of a true believer in visitors from another world. That is scary.

But it has also helped guide my views on the UFO phenomena. Over the past couple of years I've returned to a fascination with that phenomena, though I feel compelled to say without the true believer's psychological baggage. But high strangeness has an attraction all its own, if for no other reason that as a social and cultural phenomena that may even have distinct applications by the military as a tool of misinformation in psychological operations.

One very clear example of this is covered in Greg Bishop's book, Project Beta, which has implications well beyond Kirkland Air Force Base using intelligence officers to feed a believer’s investigations of covert operations there, leading not only to his mental disintegration but feeding the UFO community a new mythology of underground bases at Dulce Mesa well away from the air base in Albequerque to divert attention. Another recent addition to the field is the fascinating Mirage Men, by Mark Pilkington, which is one of the most delightful, readable, and enjoyable accounts of the military's involvement in attempting to understand as well as manipulate the public's focus on unknown aerial encounters and belief in aliens over the past 63 years. And H.P. Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake, about as well documented a book on MK-ULTRA as can be found, makes clear the degree to which government will go to hide its motives and methods, especially during the early days of the Cold War when its paranoia reached a degree that was not only pathological but bordering on the sociopathic.

But make no mistake about it, there is every bit as much paranoia and as many attempts to guide public opinion by true believers as well. What it is that the true believers believe in spans as wide a gap as the diehard skeptics on one side and the wide-eye New Age Naïf’s, Nazi nut-and-bolters, extraterrestrial exponents, ultraterrestrial underlords, transdimensional time travelers, abduction victimologists and far more evolving even as the anomalies emerge.

There is a cultural meme associated with this phenomena that is continually morphing and endlessly fascinating. The cost of admission to this freak show is minimal, but one must be endlessly cautious once inside the tent to remain part of the audience, for it is not always clear where the sawdust ends and the stage begins.