The Psychology of ‘UFOs’.© Rae West 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Click for: unedited emails (this page, below) | Click for Index to all my general interest items collected in one file | Click for Home page of entire big-lies.org site |
| At the outset I should say that I accept the conventional view that the distances between stars are so great that space travel by 'aliens', and human beings, over such distances, is virtually impossible. Also that some objects in the sky are unquestionably 'unidentified'—especially if only one person's claim is the entire evidence. Personally, I also accept the view that governments routinely lie—at least about important things—so their claims can't be assumed to be reliable where evidence is missing. So what's going on here? Some notes... |
 This small section added 8th October 2014 There are connections with Jewish media control and lies, and UFOs.
After uploading my youtube Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier: Official Fakers to the Atomic Energy Commission! (8 Oct 2014; click, below, to watch), and thanks to chance Googling, I realised that Jews had several reasons to promote UFOs:1 UFO sensations made it seem that remote galaxy visitors were concerned with the serious threat of 'nukes'! In other words, UFOs could be used to reinforce belief in nuclear weapons and power. 2 UFO claims made increasing security and secrecy and money seem necessary. 3 Given Jewish media control, there was money in publishing books and films by Jews. Spielberg for example has a large output of Jewish lies: why would he be concerned with Close Encounters and ET? 4 Reasoning backwards, Jewish media control is so intense, and censored topics so many, that it may be assumed anything in the Jewish media is there because of some specifically Jewish interest, real or supposed.  Jews and UFOs reflections in nuclear truth site. [NB Googling 'Jews UFOs' found me this First Light Forum but its frantic references to Nazis, scams, UFOs, niggers etc makes it easy to ignore]  No moving parts: when jet engines were invented about the end of the second world war, an air motor with no moving parts—or no visible moving parts—existed for the very first time. Futuristic films made before that war show planes as projections of what then existed—similar, but bigger, and with more and bigger propellers thrashing the air often somewhat like combine harvesters. I'd guess that before the invention of jet aircraft, hardly anyone could have believed in 'flying saucers', because they had no experience of a jet engine. Rockets (I think) were less important, since they were recognised as being difficult to fly inside in a safe routine way—a prejudice, if it is a prejudice, that still exists. Change from 'fast' to 'manoeuvrable': an article in the Skeptic pointed out that, when flying saucers were first seen [term coined June 1947—followed by the Roswell incident in July 47], all the emphasis was on speed: this seemed at the time the important feature. Later—after planes broke the sound barrier, and rockets became better known—this seemed less spectacular, and more emphasis was put on manoeuvring—they were described as being able to hover, for example, although I think probably this wasn't as important as erratic changes in direction, since helicopters and some planes could hover. This still seems to be true: a satisfactory media flying saucer has to shift fast and erratically. Hairless chimp, or genuine spaceman? Animal experiments: it's not very well known, despite the obvious believability, that monkeys were used as 'pilots' in experimental planes and cockpits: for one thing, they're small, and can be used in reduced-scale models; and there's less fuss if they're killed. Since they tend to be hairy, an obvious thing to do is shave them: this makes medical examination of the results easier. My own guess is that some reports of little spacemen are based on this. A hidden bug might present us with this taped conversation: Journalist: "So what did you see, Mr Redneck?" "Why, I saw a li ol' mayun." "Can you describe him?" "Why, just a lil ol' mayun, kinda hunched an wrinkled?" "Thanks. Er, you've been very helpful." "Say, that makes me feel real good." [Well, I thought it was funny. Polyphthongs suggested by Kingsley Amis.]If this seems far-fetched, consider that there was a well-known, presumably true, incident in the Napoleonic wars in which a monkey from a French shipwreck was hanged by seaside villagers who thought it was a French spy. Roswell Bomb? If the Roswell object was just bits of a high-flying weather balloon, how could it be so misidentified at the time? Perhaps the emphasis on flying hid the possibility it might have been a bomb—perhaps a mother bomb casing, or experimental flying bomb. The attraction of this idea is that it would give a powerful motive for lying, since local people mightn't be enthusiastic about loose bombs falling around them. (There was considerable fuss when a hydrogen bomb was supposed to have been dropped in Spain, presumably in error, a couple of decades later). The 'Roswell Record' said Maj Gen Nathan F Twining said "Neither the AAF nor any other component of the armed forces had any plane, guided missle [sic] or other aerial device under development which could possibly be mistaken for a saucer or formation of flying disks." So the bomb theory can't be right, can it? Poverty of language: It's an amusing possibility that the now-standardised 'alien' (bald, big eyes etc) might just reflect the linguistic poverty of over-propagandised and under-educated people. All the short words (face, hands, eyes, nose) have their iconic equivalent in the supposed image, but the more difficult ones (pupils, nostrils, earlobes, eyelashes) have no counterpart. 'Bug-eyed' should mean having compound eyes, not just big ones. Questions such as "Did it have an exoskeleton?" or "How were the mandibles hinged?" or "Did it have adaptations for high-pressure surroundings?" are presumably excluded when 'debriefing'. Lack of appreciation of photography/ videography: most people have little feeling for such things as depth of field and depth of focus, and even of reflection and refraction. There have been photos presented as UFOs which were taken from inside buildings, and show reflections of lights in the windows. There are videos taken in bright daylight, with little insects on the lens (kept relatively sharp by the small aperture) moving in a way suggesting a zig-zagging craft, and others with refracted parts of objects which give erratic visual effects. An interesting case is a report by Patrick Moore (famous in Britain as an astronomer, thanks to the BBC's promotion) who observed strange slowly-moving blurred dots through a telescope. He took a day or so to realise these were pollen grains drifting across the field of view. All this is quite apart from the much greater ease of faking pictures and videos thanks to computer editing. Lack of appreciation of visual perception and optical illusions: the few visual clues in the sky (especially at night) make judgement of size difficult, as anyone can see by looking up at a clear sky, which appears to be dome-shaped, for some complicated perceptual reason. An odd example of this is quoted somewhere, I think in a book by Hynek, in which someone thought the full moon, low over the horizon, was a UFO: the moon near the horizon does seem exceptionally large. My guess is that the cylindrical flying things seen in Mexico at convenient times exploit this, and are a hoax using some ultra-high-powered centrifugally-stable rotating devices, used, as with Filipino healing, in effect, to extract money from US citizens. (What happens to the objects as they lose power seems never to be recorded). How horses were believed to gallop, before photography was invented Lack of appreciation of physical phenomena. Things behave in odd ways (see for example the debunking—if we're right—of 'superfluid helium' by Phil Holland and myself).Another expert error is the case of 'poly-water', starting in the late 1960s, when it wasn't realised that hot glass is reactive in a way cold glass isn't, and hundreds of papers were written on what turned out to be silica solution in water (something like 'waterglass'). Another example, hardly yet known about, is the assumption that clouds are all made of droplets of water. Yet another example is the possibility of rolling waves in Loch Ness caused by wind starting disturbances which are reflected from the very long parallel sides of the loch. Another unexpert example: I recall being assured by a builder that he'd seen concrete burning. It's impossible that people without experience of flying objects could predict their behaviour; and it's very likely that experts will be wrong when faced with new phenomena. I doubt, for example, whether the behaviour of fly-by-wire airplanes, designed to be unstable, could be guessed at by people who'd only seen older machines. 'Abductions': Presumably the psychology here is similar to that of people showing 'stigmata': first there has to be a self-dramatizing (or money-making) impulse, and second there has to be a framework which isn't disprovable too easily. There's a Darwinian process by which disprovable aspects are pruned away: so it happens that people show stigmata rather than (say) attempting to walk on water or see through opaque objects—having first worked out some mechanism for causing wounds in the officially approved places. (I recall a TV presentation showing a woman secretly making a cross on the skin of her arm with bleach put on by her fingers). And similarly to show contact with 'aliens' obviously it's impossible to produce actual evidence (photos, objects) and the event has to be invisible: hence 'abductions' seem to be almost the only available methodology for getting into 'UFOs', perhaps assisted by Star Trek with its low-budget way of moving around, avoiding the tricky business of filming landing/take-off sequences with doors or hatches opening/closing.The 'medical experimentation' fear seems to be a semi-permanent modern neurosis. Cf. for example the X Files film, which has antiquated material on AIDS despite this having been exposed years ago. However, possibly this just reflects the strength of the medical/pharmaceutical lobbies and the desire to evade other possibilities. Influence of films/ books/ comics: A caption under a reproduced cover of Astounding Stories comic (1935) in John Spencer's UFO Encyclopedia says: 'Those who believe that stories of abduction reported by witnesses must be literally true because there is no cultural image from which to draw the story should consider some of the early science fiction. This illustration, has all the main features of the abductions reported in the 1960s and beyond.' [Picture shows 'bug-eyed' man-like thing with pale female body on an operating table, admittedly in a stone building, while another man-like thing grips the half-dressed hero trying to save the woman.] Another caption states '.. modern day stories.. are remarkably similar to the fairy abduction stories of Celtic myth' although the text only lists 'reality distortion', time lapses, and 'changelings' as similarities. What's the impulse behind the belief? Is there a need to believe in superior beings, or a hope that there are such beings who might perhaps save the world? Is it a similar feeling to the belief in 'God', a transfer of parental feeling elsewhere, when parents are found to be sadly lacking in omnipotence? Maybe.Even your doctor doesn't have all the answers is supposed to contain pearls of US wisdom. Perhaps UFOs are an unofficial subject, in a world where knowledge is parcelled up between countless experts, or supposed experts. The now-discredited Cyril Burt quoted, somewhere, a schoolboy whose main interest in life was ghost stories. When he was asked why, the boy said "because I know more about them than the school inspector". Fear: The site http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/ethbull/mms28.html had Phantom Airship Scares 1909-1918, the title of a book by Nigel Watson and others. Click for the review (it opens in a new window; you must scroll down past other items). Invasion scares, war fears, foreign threats, rumours of terror weapons have played their parts in impairing sense and humanity. Problems with Witnesses: and with their presentation. Typical (but this example was accessible only to UK people) was a 4 November 1999 BBC1 TV programme, Mysteries. This was a New Zealand case, with the unusual feature that a UFO was filmed by a 'genuine film team'. The genuine film in fact showed just a detail-less dot, which the camera operator had had difficulty focussing on; the clip only lasted a few seconds. The cameraman was not interviewed, so it was impossible even to tell whether the camera was pointing up, down, or across. And yet the eye witnesses, or actors playing them (it wasn't clear which), said for example that there was a 'large light' and that it moved up and down 'thousands of feet'. Purpose of blurred distinction between 'UFOs' and 'Extra-terrestrials': these things are often blurred together; many people speak of them in the same breath. And there seems to be an official movement to legitimise both (for example, Yahoo!'s site on the subject has at least nine out of ten sites in favour, in a section linking 'extraterrestrial life'—for which there's minimal evidence—with 'UFOs'. Just one example.) But, obviously, it's possible that there may be true UFOs, unidentified flying objects, piloted by people (or unpiloted), with absolutely no 'alien' connection.The best explanation I have is that it's a cover for testing experimental aircraft, in slightly the same way that English smugglers used to spread stories that the countryside they operated in was haunted. Thus (e.g.) Concorde and other supersonic planes have engines developed in the 1950s. You might view this as showing how slow progress has been since then—or how large progress under secrecy might be. The SR71 'Blackbird' Mach III spyplane, designed after the U2 incident, was designed to be so fast it couldn't be shot down. An observer interviewed on a TV program recently identified a modified refuelling tanker he'd seen, and added behind it was a black triangular craft the like of which he'd never seen. Other technologies presumably must have been tried. What new designs of flying objects may have been developed? And what for? (Since writing this I found a remaindered book, Projekt UFO, by W A Harbinson, first published in 1994, which is subtitled The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers. It appears to be entirely based on other books, which are listed as Sources but appear not to have been very reliably checked. Unusually, Ernst Zündel of the Zundelsite is described and quoted—and misspelt.) |
| HTML Rae West. First uploaded 98-10-06. Revd 99-02-27, 99-06-18, 99-09-13, 99-09-23, 99-10-30, 99-11-10. Cosmetics 2000-04-12. Magonia link, Harbinson 2000-11-01. Patrick Moore 2001-03-31. |