By Kimberly S. Engels
A recent volume was released on academia.edu titled The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, edited by V.J. Ballester-Olmos and Richard W. Heiden. As someone who publicly advocates for taking UAP experiencer testimony more seriously, this book of was immediate interest to me.
In its over 700 pages of text, the book combines work from authors primarily (but not exclusively) in the social sciences on the difficulties that come with considering the narratives of individuals who report extraordinary encounters. At its best, the book offers us good reasons to be humble in the face of UFO/UAP testimony and to be rigorous in terms of considering all traditional explanations. It also provides some evidence that some UFO witnesses may have fabricated aspects of their encounters, or may be subject to false memories, confusion, delusion or sleep paralysis. The volume also contains important recommendations from scientists regarding how to make UAP data collection more reliable and scientific. Tim Printy, for example, points out the importance of eliminating encounters witnessed by pilots that have conventional explanations from UAP databases (see “The Weinstein Catalog: Ufological Bullion or Fool’s Gold?”)
The volume as a whole is extremely problematic, however, and ultimately illustrates what happens when we insist on fitting an unconventional phenomenon into a conventional paradigm. In the introduction, the editors make their own position clear by introducing “Alien encounter disorder” as a supposed “cognitive disturbance” and state, “We are confident that the described candid encounters with visiting aliens are delusional” (12). Later, they state, “In our opinion, true research will finally accomplish the net solution that UFOs come from inner space, that they are just visions from within” (13). While this an opinion they are welcome to hold, it is not a position that is by any means proven or supported by what is contained in the book. While some chapters provide evidence that some close encounters can be explained through traditional means, the volume lands quite far from having satisfactorily supported that the contact experience can be reduced to a delusional “alien encounter disorder.” The editors acknowledge that not everyone in the volume agrees with their conclusion that the UFO event is a social cultural phenomenon with no physical reality behind it, however the make-up of contributors was 39 skeptical, denialist stance, 17 neutral or non-committal, and 4 accepting or affirming. The book is too long for me to respond to every point made and I do not attempt to. I do want to highlight some general problematic themes.
Several authors in the volume opine about those who take UAP seriously as doing so out of defense of a “worldview.” James Carlson begins his chapter with the sentence “Never underestimate the need for the validation of one’s world view, particularly when that validation can only succeed with the rejection of known facts” (“Missile Flights and Fantasies,” 45). This implies that the position that the only things that are “true” and “real” are those things that are verified through the scientific method is somehow not a worldview. As Indigenous author Robin Wall Kimmerer states in Braiding Sweetgrass, “We are all the products of our worldviews, even scientists who claim pure objectivity” (163). Reducing an experience as complex, puzzling, and transformative as contact or abduction experiences to “alien encounter disorder” is a good illustration of her point.
In the first and longest section, “Case Studies,” authors go through select UAP cases and identify reasons the witnesses should not be believed. Some of these reasons are stronger than others. Betty Hill is discredited due to comments she made about being able to go outside and see a UFO at any time. While two chapters are dedicated to discrediting Betty Hill, some of the most substantial and credible encounters are not mentioned or seriously discussed. There is either no mention or no in depth discussion of the Ariel School Encounter, which had over 60 witnesses, the Rendleshem Forest encounter, that was witnessed by multiple high ranking military personnel, the Socorro encounter, which was witnessed by a police officer, or the Varginha incident, that included witnesses who were both medical and military personnel. Nor do the Case Studies discuss in depth anywhere the credibility of Whitley Strieber, who underwent extensive psychological testing as well as brain scans in an attempt to find a conventional explanation for his experiences. Nowhere in the volume is there any mention of Dorothy Wilkinsons-Izatt, who was able to successfully take pictures and videos of her UFO encounters for years, films which have been authenticated (See Contact with Beings of Light by Peter Guttilla). The book also does not address abductions with physical evidence to support them. Take for example the Amy Rylance abduction. Amy Rylance was at home with her husband Keith and business partner Petra Heller when they all retired for bed around 9:30pm. Petra then walked in on Amy being levitated through the window into a UFO at 11:15pm. At 11:45pm her distraught husband, not fully believing what Petra had witnessed, phoned the police to report her missing. After the police arrived, they received a phone call that Amy had been found at a gas station an eight hour drive away. She was found in this location only 90 minutes after she was last seen at her home. Even stranger, when Amy was taken to the hospital, medical personnel found that she had not eaten in days, was severely dehydrated, and her usually shaved body hair showed days worth of growth (See Michael Masters, The Extratempestrial Model, “Case Study 14”.) Even if the skeptic argues that Petra must be mistaken about seeing Amy being lifted into a UFO, it does not explain how she was transported an 8 hour drive away only 90 minutes after last being seen at home, or how she could show physical signs of not having eaten or drank for days. While the volume may cast some doubt on select experiencer cases, it fails to address and provide credible explanations for the most difficult and extraordinary cases.
The book is clearly angled at discrediting the extraterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation for UAP events and encounters. This, however, employs a false dichotomy, as it assumes that either the UAP are alien spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrials, or they are nothing at all and must be entirely explainable in conventional terms. This completely ignores other possible explanations for the phenomenon, such as the Extratempestrial Model advanced by Michael Masters. Multiple authors throughout the volume argue that the alien visitors reported by witnesses are “too humanlike” to be extraterrestrials. Michael Masters’ thesis that UAP are piloted by our distant human descendants from the future responds to this objection. Other possibilities include that the UAP are of ultraterrestrial or interdimensional origin. These other possibilities are briefly mentioned in the passing in the volume, but they are not given any serious attention. In John Mack’s exploration of the abduction phenomenon, he concluded that there were many elements of encounter experiences that would simply never be explainable through the current scientific paradigm.
More concerningly, some chapters in the book perpetuate the epistemic injustice that I have called attention to in past posts. Assuming that witness reports are less reliable because they have “stressors” in their lives, for example, essentially discounts all abductee accounts, as having an abduction experience is quite stressful and traumatic. It has also been shown that abductees do suffer from higher rates of childhood trauma and abuse than the general population (See Kenneth Ring, The Omega Project). Further, assuming that conforming to the standards of scientific discourse is the only way for the experiences to be taken seriously constitutes hermeneutical injustice—when scientific discourse possesses a monopoly on truth, we exclude and marginalize other ways of knowing. In the Introduction, Leanord Newman makes the argument that abductees have constructed false memories of abductions due to masochistic fantasies. This claim is not only empirically unsupported but frankly highly offensive to abductees. Peter Huston uses the observation of the behavior of select UAP abductees at public events as justification for considering these individuals as mentally ill (See “Meeting the Abductees: Betty Hill, Richard Price, and Others”). Even though the interactions described were not enough to warrant any pronouncement or official diagnosis, the paper does describe some behavior that could indicate a person may have mental health issues when discussing abductee Richard Price. It is worth mentioning that it is perfectly possible for someone to have a diagnosable mental health condition and for that person to also have had a close encounter experience. Huston also completely dismisses the possibility that having an encounter that violates the existing social ontology and your entire conception of reality could lead a person to develop mental health conditions, and instead assumes the only possibility is that the mental health condition caused the individual to believe they were abducted. The word “anecdotal” gets thrown around a lot in order to dismiss experiencer testimony— but here we have a reverse situation. It is unclear what the anecdote of one experiencer displaying behavior that may be indicative of mental health issues is intended to prove. Surveys of experiencers have shown they are no more likely to suffer from psychopathology than the general population. Even if it could be shown with certainty that mental health issues did cause Richard Price to believe he had an abduction encounter when he actually did not, there are many other abductees who were vetted by John Mack who did not have any diagnosable mental health condition. José Ruesga Montiel discredits Prospera Munoz because of inconsistencies in her story as well as supposed family problems and low self-esteem at the time that she was discussing her story (See “The Changing Case of Prospera Munoz: An Abduction Remembered over 41 years?”). I wager that more people than not have dealt with family problems and low self-esteem at some point in their lives— this does not discredit her as a witness nor does it explain away her encounter. One of the supposed inconsistencies is that sometimes the beings she witnesses wear diving suits and during other encounters they do not— this is consistent with other witness reports that sometimes report the beings in black, white or silver diving suits and other times report them wearing no clothes. This is not significant enough of an “inconsistency,” if we could even call it that, to discredit her narrative.
Jorge Conesa-Sevilla’s chapter “Close Encounters of the ‘Other’ Kind: On the Psychology of ‘Alien Abductions’ opines about too many professional psychologists finishing their training while holding onto “anti-science” “pro-UFO” and “pro-spirit” “biases” (262). It’s telling that “anti-science” is seen as equivalent to “pro-UFO,” and even more telling that “pro-UFO” and “pro-spirit’ are identified as “biases” while presumably being “anti-UFO” and “ant-spirit” are somehow not biases. When the dominant discourse in society lacks the language and conceptual frameworks to make sense of a group’s experiences in a meaningful way, this constitutes hermeneutical injustice. The only “official” language of supposed “pro-science” psychology is required to be anti-UFO and anti-spirit, meaning that pathologizing is the only acceptable way for a practitioner to interact with an experiencer. The domination of medicalized discourse as the only institutionally sanctioned way to speak about extraordinary experiences is a serious moral harm. Being a “pro-UFO’ and “pro-spirit’ practitioner apparently leads to “misguided guidance,” according to Conesa-Sevilla (262). But guidance that reinforces the materialist/naturalist worldview and tells all experiencers of the extraordinary that their experiences are explainable through sleep paralysis or psychosis is apparently not “misguided.” Conesa-Sevilla later refers to “spiritual evolution” as an “absurd idea” (263). This is certainly a position that many academics hold. It is not, however, a position that is “value free” or objective. It is seeing through a lens. It is a worldview.
David V. Forrest includes in his chapter the false claim that abduction accounts only happen in Western cultures familiar with aliens—this is not the case, which is even acknowledged by the editors in the introduction. John Mack included in his exploration of abduction claims the contact experiences of multiple shamans or healers in Indigenous/tribal societies (see Passport to the Cosmos). Ardy Sixkiller Clarke and Nancy Red Star have contributed important volumes on ET contact in the Native American tradition. (See Encounters with Star People and Extraterrestrial Contact in the Native American Tradition, Saethre, Eirik. “Close Encounters: UFO Beliefs in a Remote Australian Aboriginal Community.”) Forrest then makes the claim that alien abductees are really remembering waking up during anesthesia during surgery and the gray aliens with big black eyes are really doctors in surgical masks (I have to admit this was my personal favorite. Never underestimate the need for the validation of one’s worldview, indeed.)
The book also fails to acknowledge a key aspect of the phenomenon I have mentioned before: we are potentially interacting with an intelligence that will not necessarily conform to being studied through the scientific method in the way that purely natural phenomena will. The UAP intelligence has the ability to cover its tracks, hide in plain sight, and interacts with us on its own terms. In The Extratempestrial Model, Michael Masters makes the strong case that UAP appear to have the ability to manipulate spacetime in the vicinity of the craft. UAP may be able to create areas of spacetime where time moves slower or faster than what is around them. If he is correct, this has substantial implications for what kind of physical evidence these objects leave behind. Peter Huston is troubled that the UAP intelligence never leaves any garbage behind— if the UAP intelligence is able to travel at warp speeds and alter the conditions of spacetime I’m confident in their ability to clean up garbage.
Several authors in the volume in the Case Analysis section use their observations or conversations with abductees to discredit and devalue them. I had the pleasure of interviewing 15 experiencers this summer who I was connected with through the John E. Mack Institute, and my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Experiencers worked jobs as librarians, therapists, acupuncturists and social workers. They did not show any signs of fantasy proneness or unprofessional or problematic behavior, nor was there any indication of “masochistic fantasies.” They were coherent and persuasive when discussing their experiences. Most importantly, they were capable of distinguishing the experiences they had from other types of altered conscious states. Three of them had experienced sleep paralysis in the past and forcefully emphasized that
these were not sleep paralysis states. Others had lucid dreaming episodes but were able to clearly differentiate their encounter from a lucid dream. Some described episodes that they were awake for but felt like they took place in an “altered sense of reality” while others had experiences that they were confident were in normal waking consciousness and in literal physical reality. Some had encounters in dreams with the visitors that they could distinguish from other encounters when they were confident they were awake. They were most certainly competent and capable of distinguishing what they experienced from waking up from anesthesia during surgery. While some do now talk openly and publicly about their experiences, more than half said they never mention these experiences to anyone, because they know they risk being pathologized and discredited by those around them, including by medical practitioners.
Ultimately The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony represents what I hope will become an outdated worldview: one that cannot account for a wide range of experiences and phenomena on the table that fall outside the boundaries of conventional and narrowly defined “physical reality.” It is a worldview in which the only response to impossible and, as Jeffrey Kripal would call them, “superhuman” things is to pathologize or ignore them (see The Superhumanities). Its fixation on discrediting the traditional ET hypothesis is also a serious shortcoming as this false dichotomy simply ignores many paranormal aspects of the phenomenon that will require a shift in metaphysical paradigm and expanded possibilities for thinking about where/when the visitors may ultimately come from. It also completely discredits what I think is one of if not the most important aspect of the phenomenon itself: the profound physical changes and changes in worldview that experiencers go through in the aftermath of their encounters. All 15 of the experiencers I interviewed over the past two months have gone through profound shifts in values, beliefs, and worldview following their extraordinary encounters. More than half also reported physical changes in their bodies, especially their nervous systems, in the aftermath of their contact experience.
The book attempts to reduce extraordinary encounters to the traditional, mundane, or pathological, overlooking or ignoring the most profound and transformative dimensions of the phenomenon. Vallee stated in 1975 in The Invisible College that we cannot understand UFOs without understanding their effects—the effects on the people who encounter them. The UAP mystery has profound implications for our understandings of time, consciousness, ethics, and reality itself. Taking it seriously, taking in all that appears, requires as Jeffrey Kripal says, “decolonizing reality itself” (The Superhumanities, 209) and opening ourselves up to the possibility of an intelligent Other that continuously and unapologetically violates all of our traditionally held boundaries. As long as medicalized discourse remains the only “academically acceptable” and supposedly “objective” means of speaking about extraordinary encounters, we close ourselves off from the most important and transformative aspects of the phenomenon.
Experiencers find themselves physically confronted with beings that seem to emerge from another reality or another part of reality —humanoids with big black eyes, the capacity for telepathic communication, in possession of vastly superior technology, and who respect none of our social norms nor our scientific laws: they walk through walls and into bedrooms, living rooms, cars, and control the terms of the encounter from start to finish. The book insists on thinking about the phenomenon without any shift in paradigm, when the phenomenon has shown us it has no plans to be understood in conventional human terms. It is offering us something that
is wholly and truly Other. It is an invitation to expand our conceptions of the possible and impossible. It is up to us to accept.
