Pseudoscience and the Paranormal by Terence Hines

Author:Terence Hines
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction, Psychology, Science
ISBN: 9781573929790
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2002-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

People’s conviction that they have seen a real flying saucer, when in fact they’ve seen nothing of the kind, can be very convincing to others. No one is so likely to be believed as someone who truly believes what he is saying. Such belief sometimes pushes believers to absurd lengths to maintain their beliefs. This effect is seen in the series of UFO sightings in Westchester County, New York, from early 1983 through late 1984. The sighting reports were impressive, as is often the case. People who were pillars of the local communities reported seeing UFOs the size of a football field with multicolored lights. These UFOs could not have been aircraft since, according to the reports of numerous witnesses, they were too big, made no sound, hovered for minutes at a time in one spot, made perfect right-angle turns in the air, and winked in and out of existenceappearing here, then disappearing, only to reappear suddenly, moments later, somewhere else. The late J. Allen Hynek, who was director of the Center for UFO Studies, said in the center’s publication, International UFO Reporter, that these sightings were among the most impressive in the history of UFO reports (Hynek, Imbrogno, and Pratt 1987). He felt there was no possible way to “explain away” these sightings by scores of witnesses. But, in fact, the reports had a prosaic explanation: they were all a hoax. A group of private pilots flying from a small airport in Stormville, New York, had been flying in formation at night. They would fly along with all their lights out and then, on cue, turn on both the red and green wing lights and the bright white landing light. They flew in a boomerang formation, and many of the witnesses reported that the UFO had a boomerang shape. The appearing-disappearing trick was easy to pull off, too. When all the lights were turned out at once, the UFO vanished. Thirty seconds later, after the planes had flown about one mile, the lights were all turned back on at once, so the UFO appeared to have moved from one spot to another in the twinkle of an eye.

The reports of the UFO hovering motionless for minutes were based, as the reader might by now expect, on the lack of cues available to the witnesses to tell them how far away the planes were. All they saw were lights in the night sky. In the absence of any other cues, the brain uses the size of the actual retinal image to judge distance. Small lights on aircraft don’t significantly change retinal image size as the plane moves toward or away from the eye. Thus, the perception is of unchanged distance, even though the planes are moving. As far as the lack of noise is concerned, many modern private aircraft are quiet and are only heard when directly overhead. They may not be heard even when overhead if they are above one thousand feet, depending on the wind conditions and the presence of other noises on the ground.

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