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.

Jacques Vallee in BoingBoing

Dr. Jacques Vallee is one the finest and most well respected researchers on UFOs, and his body of work is not only prolific but captures the evolution of his thought on the subject quite succinctly. Starting with his early observation of an unidentified object as an astronomer and the cover-up of that sighting by the bureaucrats above him, his viewpoints evolved from a nuts and bolts viewpoint (Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space – A Scientific Appraisa(1965)l and Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma(1966)) through to his exposition of the similarities of the phenomena with other anomalistic phenomena throughout written history in Passport to Magonia: From Foklore to Flying Saucers(1969). His take on the subject is often at variance to that of the general public and usually well ahead of it; hence his books The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influences on the Human Race (1975) and Mesengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (1979). But after a trilogy published from 1988 to 1991 (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Confrontations – A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact and Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception) he published little on UFOs and began to focus more his work as a venture capitalist. He worked with DARA in the early development of what was to become the internet, and recently has begun to reemerge as a iconic figure in the ongoing history of the scientific study of anomalous phenomena.

Crop Circles, Part Deux: Alien Glyphs, Human Myths, Blogging BlissJacques Vallee at 8:47 PM April 8, 2010 http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/08/crop-circles-part-de.html

In Search of Alien Glyphs (or are they microwave blasters?)
Jacques Vallee at 11:12 AM March 23, 2010
http://boingboing.net/2010/03/23/in-search-of-alien-g.html#previouspost


 Of Flattened Flora and Expulsion Cavities: The crop circle controversy continuesJacques Vallee at 11:21 AM April 28, 2010 http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/28/of-flattened-flora-a.html


 Crop circles themes on ufologie.net, with a particularly nice collection of pictures, including obviously fake, poorly executed circles and exquisitely beautiful patterns and links to wide variety of web articles http://www.ufologie.net/htm/cropthemes.htm

Links from comments section are quite interestingSand Art: A New Kind of Land ArtExquisitely beautiful, reminiscent of crop circles and hauntingly ephemeralhttp://theswedishbed.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/sand-art-a-new-kind-of-land-art/

BLT Research Team, Inc.PURPOSE:     The BLT Research Team Inc.'s primary focus is crop circle research - the discovery, scientific documentation and evaluation of physical changes induced in plants, soils and other materials at crop circle sites by the energy (or energy system) responsible for creating them and to determine, if possible, from these data the specific nature and source of these energies. Secondly, our intent is to publish these research results in peer-reviewed scientific journals and to disseminate this information to the general public through lectures, mainstream articles and the internethttp://www.bltresearch.com/

Crop Circles: Artworks or Alien Signs?National Geographic article, unfortunately lacking photographshttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0801_020801_cropcircles.html


 The Field Guide: The Art, History and Philosophy of Crop Circle Making, by Rob Irving and John Lundberg, from the publisher of Strange Attractor Journalhttp://strangeattractor.co.uk/fieldguide/
And the authors website, Circlemakers.orghttp://www.circlemakers.org/index.html

How Crop Circles Work, on HowStuffWorks.com, well researched and pretty well balancedhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/crop-circle.htm

There are two interesting things about crop circles from the viewpoint of The Anomaly Agnostic; the need for people to hoax others, in the sense of making crop circles and crowing about it afterward, and the need of people to believe in other explanations in spite of the clear evidence of hoaxers operating in the field.