Nov 15 2007
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Poll: What Causes UFO Reports?
Egged on by Paul Kimball’s Zorgy Awards (remember to vote for ufomystic!) here is our first effort. I can already guess what the winning answers will be, based on our readership. This one will be left up indefinitely, since it will be interesting to see what sort of numbers we get over a few weeks or months.
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November 15th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Hello Greg,
I’ve been meaning to do some research on collective hallucinations. I get in an argument from time to time with a friend who’s a Jungian & makes an appeal to the concept of collective hallucination as an explanation for UFO’s. I can’t remember where I read it in Encounters at Indian Head, but on of the contributors stated that there was no empirical evidence for collective hallucination. & it occurred to me that collective hallucination was just being accepted without checking into it. What do you know of collective hallucination? What’s the evidence for it?
November 15th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Is there any very good evidence for “mass hallucination?” To me it smacks of explaining away.
Otherwise I suspect the phenomenon has a variety of origins, and I’m open to the others you list.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
So–’reports’ is not literal, correct? It means UFO phenomena in general?
November 15th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Okay,
Another comment…what the heck, & it’s probably an obvious observation. I would bet that our govt’s armed forces & intelligence services actually feed UFO belief systems & use the UFO belief system as a cover story for covert operations.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Hey Greg,
You should have had another box, for example: witnessing phenomena out of the ordinary. One of the reasons people even in groups don’t report ufo’s could be the mocking from media and people who explain these experiances as hallucinations, drugs or drunkeredness. The military, nasa and the covert groups are not to be trusted due to their continual misrepresentation of this subject. This may be open for debate for those that explain things away with BS.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
misteranderson:
The only mass hallucinations that I know of is St. Anthony’s Fire, but what I think you are really looking for are collective mass delusions. For an example of that, read WHAT COLUMBUS ‘SAW’ IN 1492, by Bernard Cohen, Sci American, Dec 1992.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Sage, I have scimaerican digital, but it only goes back as far as 1993. What doe Bernard Cohen say?
November 16th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
misteranderson,
I have read of many cases where groups of people reinforce each other’s misperception of hard-to-identify events. It’s easy to give into the group mind where certainty is needed. I don’t think people just make things up based on hysteria, there has to be a triggering stimulus.
As for citing specific cases, I’d have to go into my library!
November 16th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Victor,
The “mass hallucination” category was included for the reasons I mentioned to misteranderson.
I should also have included hoaxes, fantasy-prone personalities, and attention-seekers. Seriously.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Richelle,
Originally, I was going to call the poll “What Are UFOs?” but since this is an interaction between the people and the phenomenon, I wanted to include witnesses in the equation. You could almost as easily use the list for some other categories of paranormal events.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
sasdave,
Unfortunately, the nature of the poll structure forces us to pick between alternate, sometimes mutually exclusive categories. That’s why “some” and “all” was included. Various cases would likely be a combination of some of the items on the list.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Columbus and his crew witnessed strange lights on their first voyage to North America (the Carribean islands actually.) I’d be interested to see what Cohen had to say, based on the testimony.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
misteranderson:
The second best thing to reading the actual article for yourself, is to go to http://members.cox.net/the.sage/UFO.htm#syndrome and read what little of the article is referenced there. If you need more exact details, I can look them up for you, since I still have a copy.
Greg:
Bernard only commented on what was documented to have occurred, not what was rumored to have occurred.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Greg;
I just had too mention it as personally when me and 4 others witnessed a huge black slowly moving triangle, it was real. How would we honestly know if it was alien, government,etc and for one I would be lying to think it was a hallucination. We all never reported it; yet, there was a triangle siting mentioned in the paper next day two towns away. By the way a few fishermen friends of mine witnessed strange lights racing back and forth over their boat from one horizon and back many times. I feel sorry for those that have to explain things away using the excuse it was a group hallucination. Regarding another ball of light siting one was seen in my town ripping through the air hitting the middle of a lake with a loud bang, witnesses were amazed that there were no waves or visible movement in the water. A few of them were drinking; yet, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real and it could be explained away as a group hallucination.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
dave,
I thought I should include the “hallucination” category, as it comes up in assessments of UFO reports, whether it’s valid or not.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Sage,
How does “based on witness testimony” equate with “rumors”? Applying one’s own interpretation of someone else’s fairly clear comments in order to create errors in their reasoning is not helpful.
“Witness testimony” should include written accounts, ship’s logs, etc. which is all we have over 500 years after the fact.
What did Cohen say it was?
November 17th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
“What did Cohen say it was?”
Cohen did not say it was anything since it was not based on documented witness testimony. What you are referring to is a rumor, not reality.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Sage,
I suppose that I could have saved some time if I had originally written “ALLEGEDLY witnessed strange lights.” In anomalies, we are talking about strange events, no matter what the source, and most people acknowledge this while looking for viable evidence. It would be nice to see the original Cohen article and how he settled on “mass delusion,” even though I don’t have any problem with that conclusion.
Some varieties of minutiae, especially those rooted in insignificant semantics, are just not worth the effort. Eventually, you cease to react to them.
November 18th, 2007 at 10:36 am
“Some varieties of minutiae, especially those rooted in insignificant semantics, are just not worth the effort. Eventually, you cease to react to them”
Why is it that you will blindly accept a storytale, so long as it is a storytale that is about something paranormal, and run with it ’till the cows come home? You need to start learning to do some homework, before parroting any ol’ tall tale that comes along your way…
Columbus wrote a diary of his voyage to the New World, and presented it to Queen Elizabeth upon his return. All traces of this diary disappeared in 1545. What took its place was a thirdhand retelling (read, “a friend of a friend of a friend told me”) by Bartolomé de las Casas. This document, aside from being hearsay, was filled with spelling errors, illegible sentences, and reworked passages. It is bad enough translating one language into another, so imagine the magnitude of the problem that would be had in translating that nonsense, and a translation of this document did not take place until 1989 — which was too late for Cohen to include in his work.
That document is the ONLY thing that mentions the lights incident. Maybe that document would be enough evidence for a UFO researcher to make a case, but scientists — heck, even a person with common logical sense — would find such tripe questionable.
So what about the lights incident? In that questionable hearsay diary of Columbus, it rumors that he and his crew experienced three strange events: some lights on bobbing on the horizon, a fireball crash into the sea, and a “compass problem”. The lights were on the horizon not flying in the sky and lights are not objects — nothing paranormal about that. The fireball incident was not elaborated upon other then to say they saw a fireball fall into the sea, so there is nothing paranormal there. The compass problem was that at night the compass would not point at the North Star like it should and that “the North Star must have moved to a new location” — which makes it sound like they were disoriented, since they only mention one North Star and not two, and the North Star can be located via all the other stars around it.
If this entire thing were not hearsay, all it would mean is that Columbus and his crew did not have enough intelligence or data to explain what they experienced, and if they did not have enough data to make any claims about it one way or the other, then you do not have enough data to make any claims about it, one way or the other, either…yet despite the complete lack of evidence, you still believe it must be something paranormal that needs explaining.
And that my friend is an example of how to do your homework.
November 18th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Sage,
I read much of the available online literature on Columbus months ago. I did not have access to the Cohen article as you do. My original statement said “strange lights,” not “mysterious UFO-like lights.” What I was looking for was more data, which I had to ask for twice. How is that “blindly accepting a storytale?” You are essentially asking us to take your word for it until you reveal your sources and data, which is what you accuse others of doing.
If you’d explained the issue throughly in the first place (which is what a sage would do) instead of making glib statements about “reality,” and others’ ignorance of it, we would all have saved a lot of time and typing. I certainly appreciate the illumination, but not the effort required to receive it.
November 18th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
I do not know how to tell you this Greg, but let me try…
Cohen said nothing about any “lights” that Columbus allegedly saw. Cohen only talked about the various humanoid monsters that Columbus constantly inquired the American natives about. This information was taken from letters that Columbus wrote. What those letters (help) prove is that most people can be deluded into believing in things that do not exist anywhere except in their imagination. The alleged lights incident would not change anything in that regard.
November 19th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Mercy, You’d think that Columbus hadn’t
discovered a new world at all…
While I remain skeptical of any number of the odder claims that pop up in UFOlogy, I can’t quite bring myself to the level of enlightenment that this
“Sage” displays. I come here on a regular basis because it treats UFOs as
a phenomena worthy of discussion. I also
enjoy the fact that while Greg and Nick
both have their ’spheres of belief’ if
you will, I have never seen them condescending, patronizing, or deliberately belittling the opinions of
their peers and guests. A civil question was asked-a simple request for
more information…
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:49 am
Has anyone ever thought that the so called new world Columbus mentioned may have been the same one Admiral Bryd came across. I guess many have a hard enough time believing in ufos’ let alone that the earth may be a giant cell. As is above is below. Many ufo’s have been spotted in the northern and southern gateways or should I say poles. Now comes the rath of the…