What is it with UFOs?

Call them flying saucers, UFOs or the paranoid imaginings of the impressionable, UFOs have held a fascination for the public for over half a century. Indeed, queries about UFOs are the third most common request under the Freedom of Information Act to be submitted to the Ministry of Defence.

Now a lot of our fascination with the idea comes from popular culture, it’s true. The figures, in Britain at any rate, suggest that the peak of UFO sightings exactly matched the most popular period for the series, The X Files.  Similarly, the particular appearance of our supposed alien visitors that is entrenched in the popular psyche, that of the so-called “grey” is most probably a result of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Before the film there were no descriptions in the reports submitted by those who had apparently met extra-terrestrial visitors to our planet that matched Spielberg’s now iconic aliens.  After the film almost every alien abductor was short, skinny, grey skinned and bald with big slanted almond-shaped eyes.

So this tells us that a lot of eye-witness reports are unreliable.  I’ll not go as far as saying that all such reports are made up by people desperate for some form of attention, though inevitably some of them are.  Some might well be the result of the wholly natural and well understood phenomenon of the subconscious inventing things when one tries to piece together memories of a partially remembered event.

The research of the metropolitan police in this regard, has been quite shocking.  Where in the past, eye-witness testimony has been considered to be the most reliable form of evidence, after hard forensic facts like fingerprints, it has been shown to be dreadfully fallible.  Unconsciously, without intending to, people fill in the blanks in their memories with invention and so will remember inaccurate facts and yet believe these inaccuracies and are astonished when they see film footage. The experiment below shows how easy it is for us to miss quite obvious things, when our attention is diverted.

Now, it’s one thing to miss something, to say that it’s not there but it’s another to add a detail that wasn’t there, isn’t it? Well, let’s think about that, shall we? One of the reasons that so many people miss the detail in the clip above is because that detail does not make sense. There is no logical reason for it to be there, and so our mind invents a reality that does not include it.

It is a facet of the human mind that has been used by illusionists for hundreds of years. In a lot of cases, a simple sleight is not enough to make a memorable trick. A lot of illusionists will also misdirect with suggestions allowing the audience to magnify the trick they’ve witnessed to far greater proportions than what was actually achieved.

I would note, at this point that I’m not one of those sad individuals who watch magic tricks trying to “catch the magician out”. I see little point in wasting my time and money in such a mean-spirited pursuit. The point I’m making is that our memories are not as accurate as we think they are. Indeed, to return to the metropolitan police research, it has been learned that when interviewing witnesses, the interviewer must be remarkably careful not to inadvertently introduce suggestions which the interviewee will subsequently remember.

Simply put, we see something, but often we do not see the whole of it. So our subconscious makes up details to explain what we have seen to match what we believe was going on. Often this interpretation is dependent on suggestion. Thus a farmer, in an out-of-the-way location, might be scared by some unknown apparition one night. As recently as a hundred years ago he might have claimed it was a ghost and have believed he saw particular details of the ghost (such as a severed head held under the arm) even when such details were not actually visible. Nowadays, faced with the same phenomenon, a farmer might see a little grey alien coming from the bright light of “his” space ship. A more rational observer might record seeing St Elmo’s fire or an ignis fatuus and describe the wholly natural phenomena that produce either.

In any case, the whole phenomenon of UFOs is a remarkably enduring one and the recent revelations that Winston Churchill covered up wartime UFO reports will only aid the popular belief in them to continue.  While the rationalist in me must look at the whole UFO phenomenon with sceptical eyes, I should hate to live in a world where there was no possibility that we might be visited by those from another world.  With our current understanding of science, it is entirely likely that life does exist on planets other than Earth.  However, I would bet that it isn’t bipedal, short and grey.

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Tags: "Society", "the Public", air travel chaos, drivel, future, historical perspective, pop-culture, the-way-people-behave, tv, UFO