User:Feoffer/sandbox Possible interpretations of UFO reports

Interpretations of UFO reports include possibilities that, like philosophical thought experiments, may violate established knowledge, consensus reality, or even logic itself. Unlike philosophical thought-experiments, mainstream interpretations of UFO reports suggest they are largely a product of optical illusion, human error, and cognitive bias.

Overview

While the term "possibility" normally refers only to things that could actually happen, in philosophy the term can be broadly-construed^[1] to include concepts that seem to violate all mainstream knowledge, the known laws of physics, and even the laws of logic. Famous thought experiments consider such seemingly-absurd possibilities as nothing actually existing, an evil demon capable of complete deception, a disembodied brain spontaneously emerging out of a cloud of particles, and a cat that is neither dead nor alive until observed by a human.^[2]

Some UFO interpretations are consistent with generally-accepted views of reality. The Psychosocial hypothesis is the mainstream interpretation, suggesting UFO reports are largely a result of human perception based on prior expectations. Meanwhile, the Extra-terrestrial hypothesis, an unsubstantiated fringe theory that is nonetheless generally-consistent with mainstream physics and logic, suggests that alien beings use advanced technology to travel interstellar distances to reach Earth.

Many possible interpretations fall outside the real of realistic possibilities. The Crypto-terrestrial hypothesis is one such philosophical thought experiment questioning whether it would be possible for a superior Earth-based civilization to mask its existence from humans; while the idea contradicts mainstream knowledge, it is still consistent with known laws of physics and logic. In contrast, the Time traveler UFO hypothesis, if true, could violate current understanding of the laws of physics and perhaps even the tenets of logic. Other conceptual possibilities outright posit that reality might not even be logically consistent; philosophers have considered the idea that reality is a dream, a simulation, or a manifestation of human thoughts.

UFOs reports as psychogenic

In this mode of thinking, UFO reports are the primarily the result of the human mind, rather than them being objects that exist in reality. Such interpretations range from allegations of simple optical illusions to claims of organized deception campaigns.

Known psychogenic causes

Many UFO reports have been attributed to known psychogenic causes.

Illusions and errors

 

Animation of the parallax effect, where a moving observer perceives differences in velocity between objects at varying distances. An object in the sky directly above the nearest buildings, but mistakenly thought to be above the furthest ones, would be perceived as moving rapidly.

• Optical illusions: optical afterimages, eye floaters, retinal blind spot and filling-in, autokinesis
• Visual processing: parallax, "top-down priming", Observer-expectancy effect pareidolia, apophenia, palinopsia,macropsia,micropsia visual snow syndrome, Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder

 

Satellite photograph of a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars, often called the "Face on Mars" is a famous example of pareidolia.

Stories and tales

Some ancient legends were re-interpreted as UFOs. Ezekiel's Wheel, described in the biblical book of Ezekiel, was alleged to have been an alien spacecraft in books like The Spaceships of Ezekiel. In some cases, works of fiction became divorced from their original context and mistaken as factual. In 1938, War of the Worlds was mistaken as factual by some listeners. The 1977 mockumentary Alternative 3 discussed a secret space program; Despite it's fictional origin, the work became incorporated into UFO conspiracy theories.

Some stories, or tall tales, were intended to deceive. In 1897, a paper in Aurora, Texas claimed a pilot 'not of this world' had crashed in the town. Residents later recalled the story was written "as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying."^[3]

Simple hoaxes and pranks

Main article: List of UFO-related hoaxes

Many UFO reports are revealed to stem from simple hoaxes. In 1947, a hoaxed disc made of cymbals was created by teens in Twin Falls. In 2009, two men perpetrated the Morristown UFO hoax using flares attached to balloons.^[4]

Other simple hoaxes are driven not by recreation but as an attempt to profit. In 1949, con-men perpetrated the Aztec UFO hoax as part of a scheme to sell objects supposedly recovered from a crashed flying saucer.^[5] In the 1950s, "Contactee" George Adamski provided a series of UFO photos which are widely believed to be hoaxed to promote Adamski's movement.^[6] In 1995, a Alien Autopsy film was widely broadcast, with the filmmakers ultimately confessing to the hoax.^[7]

Neuropsychiatric states

Main article: Psychological perspectives on UFO claims

Many suggest neurological or psychological effects play a central role in UFO reports. Some UFO reports may stem from altered states of consciousness.

Some interpretations of UFO reports suggest a connection to sleep. A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily during certain stages of sleep. In some cases, dreams can occur outside of typical sleep, for example in hypnagogic imagery. In sleepwalking, fully-asleep people become mobile and sometimes awake in unusual locations; Conversely, in sleep paralysis, people awake to find themselves unable to move. Reports of alien abduction have been explained as stemming from sleep paralysis.^[8]

A variety of hallucinogens affect perception, belief, and memory in ways potentially relevant to UFO reports. UFO reports have been variously attributed to intoxicants including alcohol, cannabis, ergot, LSD, ketamine, DMT,^[9] and uncountable other substances. Temporal lobe epilepsy, perhaps triggered by artificial magnetic fields, has been cited as a cause of alien encounter reports.^[10]

In the mid-20th century, psychologists studies how false memories are formed through memory contamination. The note that memories obtained thorough so-called hypnotic regression may be the result of confabulation. False memories have been proposed as an explanation for alien abduction claims. ^[11]

• Loss of consciousness, amnesia, derealization, fugue state
• Paranoia,ideas and delusions of reference, Mania, delusions, psychosis, schizophrenia, dementia: Richard Sharpe Shaver

Authors speculate UFO reports might stem from people seeking attention or outright malingering. Some individuals with fantasy-prone personality may have contributed to UFO and alien reports,^[12] while some reports have been attributed to Munchausen's or factitious disorder.^[13]

Group belief

• Psychosocial hypothesis and social contagion
• Mass hysteria
• Faith, Spirituality

Organized deception

Main article: UFO reports and disinformation

• Organized deception: Misinformation, disinformation campaigns, rackets, con-men, etc.
  • Maury Island incident, Morris K. Jessup, Travis Walton incident, Paul Bennewitz, Bill Cooper

Purported psychogenic causes

A number of fringe explanations have been used to suggest UFOs are psychogenic. Believers in reincarnation have claimed that memories from previous lives can be recovered in subsequent lives. Prior to modern understandings of genetics, some people falsely believed memories could be passed on genetically to offspring. Spiritualists claimed the ability to communicate mentally or to perceive things though a "sixth sense". Fringe theories have variously alleged UFO reports might be linked to past-life experience,^[14] race memory,^[15] the collective unconscious,^[16] clairvoyance,^[17] or telepathic contact.^[18]

Some worldviews, such as magical thinking and the so-called Law of Attraction, claim that reality is inherently psychogenic. Tulpas, a supposed paranormal entity created by human thought, have been invoked to explain UFOs.^[19] . Psychogenic reality is an element in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the 1986 Michael Crichton novel Sphere.^[20]

UFOs as extant phenomenon

See also: Identification studies of UFOs

In this mode of thinking, some UFO reports are caused by something outside the human mind. In late 1947, Air Force General Nathan Twinning became one of the early proponents of this view when he signed off on a report which concluded that UFO reports were "not visionary or fictitious".^[21]

Known phenomenon

Natural

• Optical effects: mirages(Fata Morgana), imaging artifacts, bokeh, lens flare^[22]
• Astronomical: Stars, Venus^[23][22] or other planets, the moon,^[22] comets, the milky way, etc;
• Atmospheric: Meteors,^[22] auroras, lightning, st. elmo's fire, Ball lightning,^[22] swamp gas and will-o-the-wisp, sprites, temperature inversions, ice crystals, lenticular clouds,^[22] sun dogs, etc
• Chemical: Radioluminescence
• Biological: Birds, insects, bioluminensce, etc

In 1978, insects were theorized to be a cause of UFO reports, a theory popularized in the X-Files episode War of the Coprophages. ^[24]

Technological

• Light sources: lighthouses and beacons, light pollution, spotlights and searchlights,^[22] projected images, lasers and laser pointers
• Chemicals: radioactive or UV paints, enriched or manufactured radioactive elements
• Aerial objects: fireworks and rockets, balloon and sky lanterns,^[22] aircraft and contrails,^[22] missiles, flares,^[22], chaff, smokescreens, ICBMs, satellites,^[22] space vehicles, rocket exhaust,^[22] the International Space Station, ^[22] space debris,^[22] drones,^[25] stealth aircraft^[26]
• Radar glitches, false blips, thermal inversions, spoofing

Unknown phenomenon

Natural

• Atomic side effect (Unnamed Cal-Tech scientist 1947 ,Hynek 1968)
• Space animal hypothesis
  • Plasma ^[27]
• Cryptid (Supernatural & natural)

Technological

Human

During World War Two, unidentified lights were thought to be secret German aircraft. The Kenneth Arnold sighting that ignited the 1947 flying disc craze, was initially suspected to be a top secret US craft. Other speculation held the craft might be Soviet.

• Private tech
• Breakaway civilization: Atlantis and Lemuria, Hollow Earth, polar or even lunar Nazi bases, "Secret Space Programs"

"Alien"

• Extraterrestrial
• Crypto-terrestrial and Hollow Earth
• Interdimensional
  • Ether Ships (Supernatural and Technological)

Time and Multiverse travel

Main article: Time-traveler UFO hypothesis

Mainstream scholarship devotes serious consideration to interstellar, intergalactic, and potentially even interdimensional travel or "warp drive". In contrast, going "backwards in time" or jumping between "parallel universes" would seem to violate not only known physics, but potentially the laws of logic itself. Backwards time travel is an element in the Michael Criton UFO novel Sphere.

Supernatural and folklore

• Fantastical: Pixies, fairies, sprites, elves, gnomes, brownies, little people^[28]
• Religious: Angels, demons, God(s), Devil(s), saints^[29] In the 2002 film Signs, green alien invaders may actually be demonic. ^[30]
• Spectral: Ghosts, spirits, phantoms, shades,

• Etherial
• Ultra-terrestrials

References

1. Norman Swartz and Raymond Bradley, Possible Worlds — An Introduction to logic and its philosophy, 1979, Hackett Publishing company, inc., ISBN 0-631-16130-9. pp. 329–330
2. Schrödinger, Erwin (November 1935). "Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics)". Naturwissenschaften. 23 (48): 807–812. Bibcode:1935NW.....23..807S. doi:10.1007/BF01491891. S2CID 206795705. Man kann auch ganz burleske Fälle konstruieren. Eine Katze wird in eine Stahlkammer gesperrt, zusammen mit folgender Höllenmaschine (die man gegen den direkten Zugriff der Katze sichern muß): in einem Geigerschen Zählrohr befindet sich eine winzige Menge radioaktiver Substanz, so wenig, daß im Laufe einer Stunde vielleicht eines von den Atomen zerfällt, ebenso wahrscheinlich aber auch keines; geschieht es, so spricht das Zählrohr an und betätigt über ein Relais ein Hämmerchen, das ein Kölbchen mit Blausäure zertrümmert. Hat man dieses ganze System eine Stunde lang sich selbst überlassen, so wird man sich sagen, daß die Katze noch lebt, wenn inzwischen kein Atom zerfallen ist. Der erste Atomzerfall würde sie vergiftet haben. Die Psi-Funktion des ganzen Systems würde das so zum Ausdruck bringen, daß in ihr die lebende und die tote Katze (s.v.v.) [sit venia verbo] zu gleichen Teilen gemischt oder verschmiert sind. Das Typische an solchen Fällen ist, daß eine ursprünglich auf den Atombereich beschränkte Unbestimmtheit sich in grobsinnliche Unbestimmtheit umsetzt, die sich dann durch direkte Beobachtung entscheiden läßt. Das hindert uns, in so naiver Weise ein „verwaschenes Modell" als Abbild der Wirklichkeit gelten zu lassen. An sich enthielte es nichts Unklares oder Widerspruchsvolles. Es ist ein Unterschied zwischen einer verwackelten oder unscharf eingestellten Photographie und einer Aufnahme von Wolken und Nebelschwaden.
3. "Close Encounters of a Kind". Time. 1979-03-12. Archived from the original on 2012-09-14. Retrieved 2007-04-12.
4. "How We Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax". eSkeptic. Skeptics Society. April 1, 2009. Retrieved April 16, 2009.
5. Cahn, J. P. Cahn (September 1952). "The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men" (PDF). True. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 22, 2023. Retrieved June 22, 2023.
6. "The Queen & the Saucers". Time. 1 June 1959. Archived from the original on 13 July 2007. Retrieved 27 April 2007.
7. Levy, Michael M; Mendlesohn, Farah (2019). Aliens in Popular Culture. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781440838330.
8. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/06/science/alien-abduction-science-calls-it-sleep-paralysis.html
9. https://www.newsweek.com/taking-dmt-can-lead-experiences-similar-those-reported-people-who-claim-have-been-abducted-1504750
10. https://www.wired.com/1999/11/persinger/
11. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2003/02/alien-abduction-claims-examined-2/
12. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/06/18/Fantasy-prone-psyche-may-lie-behind-strange-abductions/1437582609600/
13. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/268df944-835f-48c7-b4c0-ee4d944452c6/content
14. https://books.google.com/books?id=tkswEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA397
15. https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/files/3221216/Hall_Karen_Peta_2008.pdf
16. https://jungiancenter.org/jung-on-signs-in-the-skies-a-jungian-perspective-on-ufos/
17. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/resurfaced-secret-cia-documents-reveal-134851675.html
18. https://books.google.com/books?id=lteid47_0-kC&pg=PA26
19. https://daily.jstor.org/where-tulpas-come-from/
20. https://books.google.com/books?id=B8UcAQAAIAAJ
21. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2020/03/general-nathan-f-twining-and-the-flying-disc-problem-of-1947/
22. https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/things-mistaken-for-ufos
23. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/ufo-no-its-venus
24. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20203984/
25. https://theweek.com/world-news/the-new-jersey-ufo-drone-scare
26. Viswanatha, Joel Schectman and Aruna. "The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology". WSJ.
27. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/02/harvard-reveals-what-ww2-foo-fighter-ufos-were/
28. https://books.google.com/books?id=Ib3OEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA121
29. Miracle of the Sun, 1917
30. https://www.somethingawful.com/news/wrestling-twister-an/

External links

• "The Origins of UAP" chart