Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  I felt a bit uncomfortable, in light of this news, but asked anyway, about what I called “The Spider Web Theory.”

  Edwards’s family defended him and his sighting to me. But the truth is, their loved one’s conversion experience has been convincingly undermined. Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist and a longtime supporter of the idea that aliens are visiting Earth, is the one who did the debunking. Maccabee told me he conducted an experiment after Edwards’s story aired. He concluded the visual in Edwards’s famous tape could be produced by a thin film of moisture on a spider web. At the right angle, in the right light, a single, nearby strand of spider silk, stretched taut across the sky, can look like a spaceship, thousands of feet overhead, the refraction of sunlight on water creating the illusion of strobing lights.

  Because human perception can be so easily tricked, skeptics do some of their best work with UFOs. I urge all readers to take a look at the Rendlesham Forest case. It is long, colorful, and complicated. But the gist of it is that a UFO drifted about the forest surrounding a U.S. Air Force base in Britain. At one point, the base commander even lit off into the woods, trying to find the source of the strange light his men reported. He made an audio recording of his hunt, and skeptic Brian Dunning has since synced it, inserting a beep at five-second intervals. Sure enough, every five seconds, during the most dramatic section of the recording, the commander sees the mysterious light again. But as it turns out, five seconds is in fact precisely the time it takes for the nearby Orford Ness Lighthouse to make a complete rotation. The soldiers, Dunning argues, were fooled by light coming through the trees all right—from the Lighthouse.

  Of course, skeptics don’t always make their cases so impressively. In the wake of the Stephenville sightings, for instance, they proposed sundogs, flares, military jets, or even a rare “superior mirage,” even though the sight reported didn’t match up with any of those explanations. At one point in our country’s tortured UFO history, longtime debunker Philip Klass strenuously argued that some form of ball lightning could explain many UFO reports. Which is really funny. Because one of the more interesting corners of current science is the ongoing debate about whether or not ball lightning even exists. And here’s one more for flavor: in the great flap of UFO sightings around Washington, D.C., in 1952, Klass clung to the explanation of a weather inversion, which can produce false radar hits. The problem for Klass was that the reports from D.C. included both radar evidence and multiple eyewitnesses. Worse, believers also trotted out their own equally credited investigators, who pretty convincingly argued that a weather inversion couldn’t account for the radar data.

  Just admitting that there is a kind of standoff in regard to the evidence, however, doesn’t seem permissible for either side. So believers continue to point to D.C., 1952, as an E.T. fly-by. Skeptics call it all explained. And emotions, on that case and others, run hot. There is perhaps more personal enmity in this field than any other within the paranormal. Klass, in fact, left behind a “curse” (long) before his death: “To ufologists who publicly criticize me or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath THE UFO CURSE,” it reads. “No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today… . As you lie on your own deathbed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.”

  In turn, some in the UFO community cursed Klass’s memory: “The world is better off without him,” UFOlogist William Moore was quoted in one pro-saucer newsletter. “My sainted grandmother told me not to say anything about the dead unless I could say something good. He’s dead. Good!”

  These examples are extreme, but indicative. The tenor of the UFO debate is generally embarrassing for everyone, and even the jokes are ugly. The combatants speak in their own language, like members of high school cliques: UFOlogists, as they like to be called, are dubbed “saucertards” practicing “pseudoscience.” And the skeptics are accused of being “in on the alien conspiracy” and denounced as “pseudoskeptics”!

  But what leaps out at me is that the skeptics and the believers share one startling point of agreement: the vast, vast majority of so-called UFO reports can be convincingly identified as something altogether earthly. Of those that remain, there is either too little data to come to any conclusion, or the data are plentiful and the object remains … unknown. The Condon Report. Project Blue Book. MUFON’s own data. They all agree on this.

  In the sturm und drang of debate, however, believers and skeptics just can’t seem to let the unknown stay just and only that. And so, in cases where no clear answer exists, they continue the argument, each fighting for their points of view; and when the rest of us, without the same emotional investment in the debate, turn on the television and see a UFO report, we usually become witnesses, too: to the equivalent of Valium talking to mescaline—two seemingly inebriated factions engaged in a long-term war. My favorite illustration of this is when the skeptic James McGaha asked two UFO witnesses, during a Larry King appearance, “Are you qualified to look at the sky at night?”

  I’m guessing he was wondering if either of them was an astronomer. But do we need an accredited university to qualify us to use our eyes after the sun sets? I believe there is a more profitable way to approach this topic.

  A lot of great thinkers are on the record with the observation that the sudden flash of insight, the gut hunch, and the creative leap are what truly push science, and humanity, forward. Edward de Bono has spent the past twenty-odd years, in fact, traveling to fifty-two different countries and consulting with some of the world’s largest corporations, including IBM and DuPont, teaching his concept of lateral thinking. Perhaps the foremost expert on the topic of creative thought, de Bono makes an argument that sheds an awful lot of light on our collective UFO problem.

  De Bono argues that the West’s tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of overreliance on logic. In debate, the best debater wins. In argument, the person whose case best fits the rules of logic and the current evidence wins. And yet, scientists themselves report that their best discoveries often don’t come when they are slumped over a pen and paper, poring over data, thinking oh-so-logically. They come, as neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski put it in chapter 3, when they’re in the shower. Or brushing their teeth. Or sleeping. Biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi said science depends on “seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

  In sum, logic is a partner to freer, associative thinking. Logic can help define the contours of a problem, but sometimes, in order to find a solution, we have to go beyond such strictures to find the unseen path.

  My favorite example of sudden insight is that of the Irish mathematician, William Hamilton, who spent fifteen years on the problem of generalizing the square root of –1. The answer came to him whole and suddenly, as he walked in the street. Lacking a pencil and paper to write the formula down, he took a penknife from his pocket and carved it into the stone of a nearby bridge. “An electric current seemed to close,” he later wrote, “and a spark flashed forth.”

  Dr. David Jones, at Newcastle University, long collected such accounts and gave a series of BBC lectures on the topic of inspiration. He cited the result of a survey of 1,450 American scientists conducted by two research chemists in the 1930s. Their finding, subsequently published in the Journal of Chemical Education, was that “hard, rational thought” traced the contours of the problem to be solved, not its answer. Think about the problem, they advised, then go do something else. Don’t allow worry or anxiety into the brain. And suddenly, while driving a car or sleeping or bathing, the answer will pop, suddenly, and seemingly fully formed, like the mathematician’s formula, into view.

  De Bono’s methods are designed to help people get outside the rigors of the logical thinking we’re usually trained in, to create these flashes of insight and make new conceptual connections on a regular, predictable basis. Logic does have its weaknesses: Logic is bas
ed on society’s current storehouse of accepted knowledge, and as we’ve seen, that storehouse changes all the time. To refer back to the previous chapter, five years ago the average physicist would have been happy to take the position in a debate that quantum effects play no important, measurable role in biological systems. The available evidence would have supported that case, while opponents would have been arguing mostly from possibility. But today, biologists are chasing after quantum effects in plants and animals. The very grounds of the debate have shifted, and in just a few years’ time.

  In his book, Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler describes how the rulers of China’s Shang Dynasty pondered cracks in turtle shells. In the sound of the shells snapping, it was said, they heard the voices of their ancestors offering advice. From our modern perspective, the cracks meant nothing. But through the lens of creative thinking, these cracks gave their interpreters a place to stand outside the rigors of logic, to dream, to allow their minds to associate freely and make new connections. Oracle bones comprised a regular practice of a stable society, a dynasty that lasted hundreds of years.

  In this respect, people who look at that relatively small number of unexplained UFO cases and wonder if aliens are visiting the planet, who carry it along with them as a possibility, are far from stupid. They are merely engaged in some creative thinking. And if, some day, they turn out to be right, their interpretation of the reports they’ve read of unidentified flying objects will have led them to the right conclusion— like cracks in a turtle shell—faster than current evidence alone could have gotten them there.

  The possibility of visitation holds more credibility than skeptics, or the rules of formal debate, might allow. Given the size of the universe, our distance from other potentially habitable planets, the energy sources and the top-end speed of which we’re aware, it seems exceedingly unlikely another civilization could find us and get here. And personally, I’d like to see incontrovertible evidence before I start believing aliens have visited the planet. But I also don’t agree with the skeptics when they ridicule such belief. After all, an alien society would be just that—alien. Debates about their methods of propulsion, and their motivations—Why would they bother with a dairy farming community?—are by definition utterly hopeless. Their supposed inability to find us and get here is a product only of our own current understanding—and might hold absolutely no relationship to reality.

  Of course, none of this means E.T. exists. And when I attended a weekend “UFO Awareness Day” here in Philadelphia, I was stupefied by the level of emotional commitment some attendees had to their far-out concepts: some spoke of a “hidden” planet, Nibiru, that they believe will impact Earth in 2012; some talked about reptilians, an evil race of lizard-looking aliens with forked tongues; and many harped on alien abductions.

  Like the skeptics who argue against them, they take it all so seriously. And in this point of relatedness, I think, the combatants on either side too often fail to acknowledge what the rest of us know about aliens: they’re fun.

  From rock star David Bowie’s androgynous alien creation, Ziggy Stardust, to the identity politics of the recent film District Nine, aliens have provided a creative launching pad for explorations of everything from fashion and human sexuality to issues of race and international relations. Aliens in fiction have allowed us a window through which we get to see ourselves, and they serve as an oracle bone for our culture. That said, some people don’t have the luxury of considering the question of E.T. solely at the multiplex. Some people have the issue thrust upon them. The people of Stephenville, for instance, never asked to play host to a paranormal controversy. The people of Stephenville just looked up.

  IN THE WEEKS AND months after the sighting, it slowly became apparent that the Stephenville Lights were good candidates to stay in that unknown category. The military’s behavior was one reason. After two weeks of maintaining they had no jets in the area, they reversed course, saying ten F-16s had been flying maneuvers outside the nearby Brownwood Military Operations Area. They proclaimed their initial denial “an internal communications problem.”

  After spending about a week in Stephenville, I left believing that the military was either directly involved or had some interest in whatever flew over this small Texas town in January 2008. Again and again, locals told me that the days after the sighting were filled with flyovers by military jets and helicopters. “I had a lot of media who were in town covering the story, asking me,” says Angelia Joiner, the reporter from the EmpireTribune, “ ‘Does this happen every day?’ ”

  “I’ve lived here my whole life,” says Matt Copeland, one of the owners of Barefoot Athletics, “and I had never seen anything like it. There were jets flying overhead, sometimes really low, all the time.”

  The military denied they were doing anything unusual. “I think they were trying to discredit the witnesses to the national media,” says Joiner. “Because if there is all this stuff flying over here, then maybe people just got confused.”

  Believers tend to think of military conspiracies to cover up the existence of aliens. But I wonder if the military was covering something up, whether that something was some secret military craft. If so, this would not be the first time witnesses saw a paradigm-busting technology and thought it extraterrestrial. UFOlogists concede the U2 spy plane and the sleek, black, triangular stealth bomber were likely responsible for waves of UFO sightings. The object in the Stephenville sightings had flown outside the military operating zone, but who knows? Maybe Stephenville, on January 8, 2008, had in fact been the site of a test run for a new military project?

  I bring this up because a military craft is one of those more logical possibilities (and one that fits the reported facts better than flares or some odd weather phenomenon). But I also mention it for another reason: if something radically new was flying through the Stephenville area that night, I’d argue for the overall accuracy of the town’s eyewitnesses. Certainly, if there was some sort of advanced military technology tooling around, their testimony that they saw something they couldn’t explain would seem to me completely correct—and no laughing matter at all.

  In this sense, I see the people of Stephenville as standing in for all eyewitnesses to the paranormal—ordinary people who didn’t ask for weirdness, or to be seen as somehow strange themselves, yet had this cartoonish mantle thrust upon them. In the early days after the sighting, they weren’t out there telling the assembled media they saw craft from another civilization—just that they saw something that outstripped any technology they know about. I’d argue that in this claim, the evidence suggests they were correct. And yet, given our nation’s UFO problem, they found their own credibility undermined in subtle ways.

  Allen, Sorrells, and Joiner note that the national press chose to report the same culturally coded details, again and again: Sorrells was deer hunting when he had his sighting; Allen claimed the UFO was “as big as a WalMart.”

  As a journalist, I can tell you: I’d use the WalMart line, too. It’s colorful and evocative. It’s a great quote. But it is also true that, like Sorrells’s hunting, the WalMart reference seems to peg Allen in a specific socioeconomic and cultural place. “I regret saying that now,” Allen told me.

  At the time the media glare got hottest, Pam Kinsel, a member of the high school science club, spoke to a reporter and gave voice to the community’s worst fear: “[The sighting] makes us look like we’re a bunch of retarded hicks,” she said.

  At the time, in early 2008, the depths of this country’s UFO problem had recently been revealed in dramatic fashion: Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was running for president of the United States during an October 2007 Democratic primary debate when a UFO shot him down. It was the usually sober-minded political journalist Tim Russert who pushed Kucinich under the equivalent of a paranormal bus: “This is a serious question,” he began, lest anyone think he was joking. “The godmother of your daughter, Shirley MacLaine, writes in her new book that you sighted a UFO over her home in Washin
gton State.”

  The crowd can be heard at this point, laughing and gasping as Russert continues, “[She writes] that you found the encounter extremely moving, that it was a triangular craft, silent and hovering, that you felt a connection to your heart and heard directions in your mind. Now, did you see a UFO?”

  “I did,” said Kucinich, “and the rest of the account—”

  The crowd started groaning and gasping again, and Kucinich reminded the crowd what UFO really means: “It was an unidentified flying object,” he said. “Okay? It’s unidentified. And I saw something… .”

  The crowd buzzed with laughter, the point made: Woe be unto you, who admits to seeing something you can’t identify.

  The elfin-looking, pointy-eared Kucinich was a marginal candidate. He was never going to win the primary, anyway. But his run was effectively ended by Russert’s question.

  He had been wise enough, over the years, never to bring up the sighting himself. But MacLaine had ended his hiding for good, with her book, Sageing While Age-ing, which described a twenty-five-year-old sighting at her home. Intriguingly, they were near a military base, and military helicopters were spotted trailing after the object there, too.

  In the wake of Russert’s “serious question,” The Wall Street Journal published a front-page story portraying Kucinich as silly. And the rest of the media piled on—the twenty-five-year-old sighting he had never discussed now serving as a metaphor for his frivolous candidacy.

  This all went down just a couple of months before the people of Stephenville had their sighting and rendered them keenly aware that the Stephenville Lights marked them, in many minds, as an unsophisticated tribe. But the people I found were smarter than all that. They understood how deer hunting and WalMart had been used as emblems of the lower class, to be slapped on their foreheads by a media eager to play into cultural stereotypes. And over the course of my time in Stephenville, I encountered several locals who sized me up on the Internet and told me all about it in a manner that was at once straightforward cow-town Texas and utterly contemporary America.