Psychology and the Flying Saucer People

The Flying Saucer People are coming, and they have a new acronym.

UAP—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon—is apparently now preferred over UFO, or unidentified flying object. Assertions have been made that people associate "UFO" with alien visitors, whereas the new "UAP" terminology can be more readily associated with additional phenomena, perhaps swamp gas.

Some government officials are taking these issues quite seriously. There are currently some less-than-credible "images" of UAPs floating around, apparently provided by high-level sources (and, to be fair, some images that are more credible, or at least more credible to some individuals and organizations; the eye of the beholder, and all that). These widely disseminated images seem to have created some demand for more official attention, on the part of governments, to the saucers, the space aliens, and perhaps to the swamp gas than has hitherto generally been the case.

For most people, these space alien issues perhaps serve as a distraction from ordinary woes, as Orson Welles infamously discovered in his War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938; but NASA, at least, has stepped up with a new investigative body, which will "lay the groundwork for future study" in this area (nasa.gov, 2022, October). Members of this body have impressive credentials in areas of study as diverse as astrophysics, aviation, computer science, biological oceanography, policy studies, journalism, and of course many, many areas of administration.

But as of the present moment, as far as I can tell from the available information, there isn't a psychologist in sight.

This is a significant pity, especially in view of the recent publication of The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony (Editors: V.J. Ballester-Olmos and R.W. Heiden, 2023). Chapter authors of this massive volume (57 chapters in over 700 pages) hold expertise in a wide variety of fields of study, ranging from the social sciences to physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science to journalism and religion. However, psychologists and psychiatrists outnumber authors from each of the other fields, with 25 authors represented in the behavioral sciences camp alone.

For full transparency, it should also be noted that nonbelieving authors in the concept of UAP-as-spaceship ("real entity unknown to present science") outnumber those who are noncommittal (17) or positive about the concept (4); there are 39 nonbelievers, including the present author. Additional transparency: I contributed a chapter to this volume, despite a complete lack of personal experience with UFOs, UAPs, or the Klingons. But why would I, a forensic cognitive psychologist, be working in this area?

In a number of articles (briefly summarized in Sharps, 2022), my research students and I have demonstrated psychological determinants of eyewitness cognition and performance, not only in the realm of criminal justice, but also in the realm of UAP/UFO "observations." It has been shown, for example, that dissociative tendencies enhance a person's ability to interpret everyday objects as UFOs (and for that matter, as Bigfoot), whereas point-by-point, feature-intensive analysis is associated with a reduction of this tendency, with more accurate and reality-based assessments of the world around us.

We have identified the importance of other important eyewitness processes and dynamics in the UAP/UFO realm as well, extrapolating, essentially seamlessly, from the realm of criminal justice to the realm of the flying saucer people. The immediate applicability of what we've learned in criminal justice research to UAP/UFO issues demonstrates that, among many other productive scholarly approaches to UAP/UFO issues, the utility of forensic psychology and forensic cognitive science should not be underestimated.

The subject matter experts who contributed to the Ballester-Olmos & Heiden volume tend to concur. Not necessarily with all my own specific findings, of course; there are many questions that will require further objective research. However, most of us go along rather strongly with the demonstrable fact that perception and interpretation of UAPs, UFOs, or for that matter of the Klingons, is rooted in identifiable psychological processes, many of which have already been characterized to a significant degree.

A few important examples, chosen for the notoriety of their subject matter and referenced here by the chapter author's names, may serve to illustrate this point. V.J. Ballester-Olmos demonstrates the importance of false recall and memory reconfiguration in an important UAP case in Spain, principles observed ubiquitously in the eyewitness realm in criminal justice. T. Callahan demonstrates similar principles with regard to perception and memory in the famous Phoenix Lights affair, and J. Oberg illustrates the importance of interpretive processes in the repeated misidentification of satellite reentry phenomena as evidence of something like alien starships.

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The hazards of incomplete investigation and reportage are illustrated by the work of J. Nickell on the famous Pascagoula alien abduction, during the entirety of which it turns out that one of the two abductees was allegedly drunk and the other allegedly completely unconscious; and J.T. Carlson, in an analysis of one of the most famous incidents of alleged UFO interference with military operations, suggests and implicates a critical factor in some UAP/UFO accounts, a factor irritatingly familiar to every forensic psychologist in every subspecialty: simple, straightforward lying.

Necessary space limitations preclude more substantial coverage here, but at least one additional critical point deserves immediate attention: the fact, pointed out by Ballester-Olmos (pg. 15), that of all the fieldwork-based case studies included in the volume, not a single one produced positive evidence of physical UFOs or the aliens who drive them.

Not a single one.

To contradict Agent Mulder of X-Files fame, the truth may not be out there; it may be in here, in the dynamics of the human brain, in human perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes. Everything we currently know about the UAP/UFO phenomenon indicates that those officials responsible for assessing the whole business would do well to incorporate the extensive findings of relevant psychological research into their considerations. The rest of us might also benefit from similar considerations: as Macbeth might conceivably have said, sometimes a Klingon is but a Klingon of the mind.