The most famous cycle theory was a 61-month pattern offered by David Saunders. He claims it led him to predict in advance a 1972 wave in South Africa. (Saunders, 1976) Allan Hendry characterized the South African reports as a minor flurry and not a wave and also questioned the propriety of using Bloecher’s 1947 data in Saunders’ since it was a special delimited study. When removed from consideration, the remaining data show the baseline collection of 1947 reports in Blue Book’s files had only a small swell of numbers inconsonant with a major flap. (Hendry, 1976) There have been a number of efforts to rehabilitate Saunders’ work, but the absence of waves in January 1983 and February 1988 spelled an end to its believability. (Partain, 1985) With such failures, hope has faded for a simple mathematical model of mass UFO appearances.
BEHAVIORIST NOTIONS
Jacques Vallée looked at the pattern of UFO flaps and theorized it was schedule of reinforcement like that used by behaviorists to instill irreversible behavior. The pattern of periodicity and unpredictability would help us learn new concepts. This control system allegedly also explains the absence of contact and why the phenomenon misleads us. That would preclude genuine learning. (Vallée, 1975)
This theory is amazingly perverse at even the simplest level. Within behaviorist theory, to be reinforcing, a stimulus must be of a positive, rewarding character. (Ruch and Zimbardo. 1971) It must induce pleasure instead of pain. The overwhelming majority of UFO cases involve fear. (Vallée, 1977; Swiatek-Hudej, 1981; Moravec, 1987) UFO flaps are usually times of anxiety, confusion, and near-hysteria. During the 1973 wave, mothers kept their children from going to school for fear they might be kidnapped. Clearly, learning in any form is unlikely in such an emotional atmosphere.
The suggestion, usually made in passing, that flaps are a way of desensitizing humanity to their presence, of getting us used to them perhaps in preparation for The Landing, at least gets the emotional valences of UFO experiences right. (Hall, 1988) The manner of presentation, however, is wrong. Desensitization is best accomplished by gradual increases in the intensity of the aversive stimuli. (Skinner, 1974) Appearing in sudden waves and withdrawing for long intervals only favors anxiety and acute fright. (Smelser, 1963)
TOURIST THEORY
A more promising line of speculation in the extraterrestrial mode exists in DeLillo and Marx’s Tourist Theory of UFOs. They offer as a model the whims of earthly tourism. This year we go Europe; next year the fares to South America look inviting. Maybe a few will brave Africa for a safari in between. Unsystematic but curious gatherings might follow news of Earth-Zoo personnel capturing an unusual specimen of wild humanity. Concerted campaigns by this or that agency competing for business might also yield an occasional bustle of traffic. (Marx and DeLillo, 1979) This is quite ingenious and would seem to be virtually untestable and immune to argument with respect to the numbers. There are, however, broader considerations that work against the theory. The most interesting things in a foreign culture tend to be located in urban settings: their museums, architecture, shops, churches, and shrines. UFO experiences tend to be in rural settings and the aliens don’t debark for tour busses. Souvenir hunting is rarely seen. There’s only one or two cases of an alien with a camera.
Gillespie and Prytz (1984) offer a cruder variation in their thoughts about UFO waves. “Flaps stick out like sore thumbs, and can be explained readily by External Intelligence for similar reasons that the Sydney Cricket Ground receives a “flap” of Sydney-siders on Rugby Grand Final Day—it is a unique place for a certain people at a unique time!” So why were UFOs drawn to Earth and the United States in June/July 1947, July/August 1952, November 1957, August 1965, March/April 1966, and so forth? What made these times uniquely interesting for the aliens? Gillespie and Prytz don’t seem ready to say. Instead they complain that those who advocate the idea UFO phenomena are internally-generated haven’t explained why these are unique times either “probably because it is in the ‘too hard’ basket.”
Difficulty is not disproof. The necessity of a psychological and sociological approach is mandated by the fact that nine out of ten UFO reports involve misinterpreted stimuli. This percentage does not alter significantly during flaps or periods of calm. (Ballester-Olmos, 1987) UFOs never outnumber IFO reports in any period. Take away all the unsolved cases, and the IFOs still display the large changes present in the total report population. If extraterrestrial craft are causing flaps, you still need an explanation for why one true report spawns nine false ones. Copycat behavior would be the first possibility, yet IFO cases do not generally seem to be in the proximity of unsolved cases during major flaps. This is particularly troubling in the 1965 wave that seemed to lack national coverage of a major case off which a rash of copycats could work.
SILLY SEASONS
Sociological explanations of UFO flaps can be divided into two general categories, which for convenience can be termed ‘silly season theories’ and ‘crisis theories.’ Silly season theories build on the premise that news media are a sufficient cause of flaps. The spread of news causes the spread of copycat behavior. The example of the Forkenbrook experiment forms the model of these theories. This hoax for a sociology class demonstrated how a false report could generate so much excitement in a locale that it spawned reports in several neighboring communities, including one from a man who said he had seen the UFO for some two weeks and knew it was going to land. (Klass, 1974)
There is no denying this model has application in certain local flaps. The Socorro case of April 24, 1964 spawned misidentifications of things like aircraft, birds, and a fire in a dump in nearby locales. Yet the Socorro case allegedly got national attention. Why didn’t it spawn a nationwide wave of reports? Why didn’t the Mantell crash spawn a nationwide flap? Why didn’t the Val Johnson case or the Travis Walton (Snowflake, Arizona) case spawn nationwide reactions? These questions are relevant since some silly season theorists put great weight on the assumed effects of single cases that get wide coverage. The Air Force cited the Levelland Whatnik as the primary cause of the November 1957 wave. (Strentz, 1982) This is plausible if one regards the slowly elevating numbers of mid and late October as not a true beginning of the flap, but a more or less irrelevant flurry that would have been disregarded if the post-Levelland spike had not appeared.
Herbert Hackett indicates the week of the 1947 flap was “a slow week from an editor’s viewpoint” and he felt the newspapers milked the story by continually repeating the Kenneth Arnold flying saucer story with different experts consulted for their opinions. Hackett (1948) regarded Air Force denials as a paradoxical reinforcement of the concept. He gives a tally of the amount of space given to the story in the Los Angeles times each day, presumably to offer some measure of the amount of reinforcement they gave. It is curious to note that if one juxtaposes Hackett’s tally to a tally of UFO report numbers from the Los Angeles area the effect of media is not compelling. One half of the reports occur before the story ever reaches Page One, and by July 10th there are no UFOs reported, even though it was still on the front page the day before. (Gross, 1976) This finding parallels remarks by John Keel (1969/89) and Richard Hall (1988) that media coverage often seems to lag behind the increase in UFO numbers rather than precede it.
The reason for this can be discovered in Herbert Strentz’s analysis of UFO journalism. Strentz posits the creating a flap is a “lowering of barriers” that newsmen set up before they will put a UFO report in their paper. Strentz is not clear what creates that drop in standards. But data in questionnaires he gathered provide a rather clear answer. The major reason given for reporting UFOs is an increase in the number of UFO reports! Coverage is obviously going to lag events and not initiate them if this is true. (Strentz, 1982)
The relevance of slow news days to lowering barriers is hard to sustain upon critical reflection. Kenneth Arnold’s report of a new craft travelling at 1200 miles per hour was a sensation for its time and would have merited coverage in any period regardless of its doubtful character and lac
k of corroboration. Flaps have happened in conjunction with major news events like the Sputnik furor in 1957. Philip Klass (1974) has suggested the 1973 wave was, in part, a reaction to a late-summer doldrums following the sordid disclosures of the Watergate affair. The UFO reports were printed to lighten things up for a nation weary of the big news that was dominating the front page. What is troublesome in this characterization of the period is that the 1973 reached its peak simultaneously with the Saturday night Massacre which unleashed a flood of negative sentiment, described by others as a fevered rage that swept the nation. (Lukas, 1976)
Klass devotes a chapter of UFOs Explained (1974) to an extended tracing of the effects of media on UFO numbers. His reconstruction is impressive and seductive, but suffers from many difficulties when subjected to close scrutiny. A modest surge of reports in 1950 is tied to the publication of Donald Keyhoe’s book The Flying Saucers Are Real, but nothing is said of the article in True magazine that spawned it. This was one of the most widely discussed articles of its time. Prominent newsmen like Walter Winchell and Frank Edwards did items on it. The Associated Press carried quotes from it. (Gross, 1983) A look at the daily UFO numbers for late December 1949 and January 1950 are astonishing for their total lack of a reaction.
Klass observes that UFO reports skyrocketed the same month that Life featured a major story titled “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” More articles in Look and Life were published in June 1952 and yielded a ten-fold increase for that month. Years earlier, Blue Book investigators looked at the daily tallies, however, and were not convinced there was relationship. A brief increase was noted after the April 4 release of Life, but numbers seemed basically the same before as after. (Jacobs, 1975) The tally dropped to zero on the 8th and the bulk of the reports pop up two weeks after the article. The June 17, 1952, Look article was a debunking piece by Donald Menzel who wrote off the phenomenon as a bunch of mirages. Shouldn’t this have decreased numbers?
Klass skips lightly over the 1957 wave and ignores the July/August 1965 wave entirely because the media did not show much interest in UFOs until the swamp gas flap of 1966. This flap is not tackled either, but it set in motion Congressional action and led to six books being published in 1966 and ten books in 1967. The Invaders TV series also appears in January 1967. This increased media attention is held to account for a high total of 937 UFO reports in 1967. What is left unsaid is that this represents a decrease from the 1966 total of 1060 reports. Peak media coverage once again lags behind peak UFO numbers.
Hans van Kampen offers a subtle variant of the silly season theory in a 1978 article that relates the story of people seeing a panda that the media said had wandered out of zoo. Unbeknownst to everyone, the panda was found dead just as the story went out. Van Kampen felt this flap of panda sightings indicated that human curiosity and sympathetic sharing of feelings was involved. (van Kampen, 1979) Do such factors underlie UFO flaps?
Curiosity about UFOs fortunately has a way of being measured. For a period in 1965 and 1966 there exists a tally of letters to the Pentagon by people making queries about UFOs. Often they are youngsters writing public school essays. (Lear, 1966) Overlap this tally of queries on a chart of UFO numbers and one quickly sees they do not match to a significant degree. Interestingly the queries do peak the same month that Life, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report did stories on the swamp gas debacle, but UFO numbers were already falling. The factor of sympathetic feelings is potentially correct, but not as easy to test or verify. Given the failure of so many seemingly common sense notions about UFOs, however, it is perhaps best to suspend judgement about that factor.
Menzel (1963) has suggested the 1952 wave was nurtured in part by the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still playing in theaters all spring. He points out that the spaceship in the movie reappeared in many reports during the wave. The movie’s initial release actually took place in September 1951. UFO numbers from August to November run 18-16-24-16, which minimally proves any reaction was neither immediate nor sharply forceful. It is unsurprising in this context that a prediction that Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind would spawn a major flap failed. (Klass, 1977; Hendry, n.d.) A chart of monthly report totals perversely shows a lull throughout the period it was generating major box-office figures. When it leaves the theaters, the numbers start upward in a manner that begs the suggestion the movie somehow suppressed UFO reporting. (Hendry, 1981) It is relevant to add that none of the major UFO flaps coincide with the release of major films of alien invasion genre. This may not forbid the possibility that lesser effects on UFO numbers exist. A look at UFO numbers before and after the release of twenty popular alien invasion films turns up minor increases for fourteen of them. Even if the effect is real, we can still doubt whether this is due to enhanced interest in or attention to aliens, or if the malevolence of movie aliens adds a darker tone to the UFO mythos and increases numbers by increasing fear. (Lucaniao, 1988)
We can also add that Paul Ferrughelli did a correlation study of Prime-Time Television events and the frequency of UFO reports in a 36-month period from 1987 to 1989 involving 683 sightings reports. The correlation coefficient calculated from the data was +.086, which was effectively indistinguishable from no causal relationship whatsoever. (Ferrughelli, 1991)
There is another problem with silly season theory. J. Allen Hynek raised it in a memoir of the swamp gas debacle. Why was there so much excitement and hysteria over the incredibly trivial Dexter sightings? The media circus makes no sense from the perspective of newsworthiness. Strentz’s news judgement barriers had tumbled in a collective mania of the period. They were clamoring for an authoritative statement from the Air Force on what amounted to some faint lights and a glow in a swamp. They posed no danger. There were no aliens seen. It was less dramatic than dozens of cases seen over the years. Why should this be? Hynek had not a clue and pleaded for sociologists to take a crack at the problem. (Hynek, 1976)
It would be an exaggeration to regard silly season theories as refuted by all the above considerations. It may be a more detailed study or some novel perspective might yield more convincing results. According to the Condon report, however, there have other attempts to correlate UFO maxima with waves of press publicity without compelling evidence of a real association. It is hard to escape the sense that there is some missing factor or factors.
REACTIONS TO SCIENCE
The problem that presents itself is figuring out which of the myriad changing aspects of the human environment it is that UFO numbers are responding to. Is it political climates (liberal vs. conservative, individualism vs. collectivism, democratic vs. totalitarian)? Is it war and peace? Is it economic climates? Is it changing styles in the exercise of power? Is it changes in collective perceptions of powerlessness? Is it a response to fluctuating religious-secularist fashions of living? Is it a response to different educational fashions? Are there changes in skepticism and gullibility, cynicism and trust? Are people more sky-oriented and filled with wanderlust in some times more than others?
One interesting stab in the dark was John A Rimmer’s guess that for every scientific advance is an equal and opposite mystical reaction. The ghost rockets of 1946 and the saucers of 1947 would thus be a reaction to the introduction of nuclear weapons in 1945. The 1957 Levelland wave would be the obvious reaction of the introduction of space travel represented by the Sputniks the same month. Did the other flaps follow major scientific advances? Was there a reaction associated with the Moonlanding? (Rimmer, 1969) The depressing answers are no and no, despite the poetry of the idea.
CRISIS THEORIES
One of the venerable mainstays of sociological thought is the concept of crisis as an agent of social change. There is a sizeable literature devoted to crisis cults and how stressful events prompt new interpretations of religious doctrines, visions, and myths. (LaBarre, 1972) Among the axioms of crisis theory is the proposition that crises create wishes for supernatural solutions. (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987) UFOs ca
n be regarded as supernatural in the official sense that they are forces outside of nature that suspend, alter, and ignore physical forces. Are UFOs a magical reaction to crises? Otto Billig has offered the most extended argument that they are. His application of crisis theory to the data of the UFO phenomenon is probably as close to textbook as can be expected and one cannot deny there are facets to his thesis that work. In the specific realm of UFO flaps, however, difficulties are clearly evident. In his usage, the concept of crisis embodies such a wide range of events one is left wondering why we do not see a steady stream of reports instead of the widely separated peaks of activity that are actually present. This is vividly exemplified by Billig’s annotations on a chart of Air Force compiled monthly UFO tallies. Periods of crisis cover roughly 67 percent of the time interval from 1947 and 1969 by his own illustration. Yet only eight percent of this interval shows numbers that could be reasonably termed flaps. (Billig, 1982) Even if we regard crisis not as a primary causal agent, but as a necessary catalytic factor, there is no way to discount the plausibility that these flaps overlap the 67 percent regions of crisis simply by chance.
Lloyd de Mause’s psychohistorical investigations of the fantasy-life of American politics provide a more useful definition of crisis. Utilizing a protocol called fantasy analysis on a mass of historical documents and news stories, de Mause charted a regular sequential change of the perception of the strength and impotence of American leadership. For our purposes we will only look at one of the recurring stages that is specifically perceived as a phase of crisis and collapse. It is identified by a proliferation of emotional metaphors involving fantasies of death and dying. Unnamed poisonous enemies multiply as the group displaces rage outwards. Apocalyptic and millennial overtones are generally present. De Mause’s group fantasy definition allows a restriction and demarcation between crises that are merely annoyances and crises that are felt with intense emotion. It has the added virtue of having been constructed independent of any interest in UFOs. There would be no question of crises being selected in a manner to skew acceptance of the crisis theory. (De Mause, 1982)
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 118
