judge the size of the object. Such size judgments are especially difficult at dawn when the stars are no longer visible. Venus may then be the only object visible in the sky. This situation provides none of the usual cues that permit the brain to calculate how large and how far away an object is. The object could be something the size of an aircraft less than a mile away, or it could be something very large, but much farther away. When the apparent motion of the object following the car is added, the illusion that it is an object the size of an aircraft and that it is deliberately “following” the observer is frequently very powerful.
This is exactly what happened in the case of the two policemen. During the entire hour-long chase, although the officers’ attention was riveted to the sky and the UFO they were chasing, they never once saw Venus. Further, the position of the UFO that they reported is the same as the position Venus occupied that morning. As dawn came on, Venus rose higher in the sky, and the UFO was reported to do the same. Finally, as the sun brightened, Venus faded from view—as did the UFO. A few moments later, the UFO was reported to reappear, but to have dropped about ten degrees in altitude. It then rose slowly. Sheaffer (1981) identifies this second object as a research balloon because the object’s behavior as reported by the officers is just what one would expect of such a balloon.
As the chase progressed, a second police car joined. Now, if two police cars really were chasing a large UFO only hundreds of feet above the road, one might reasonably expect that other independent witnesses would have seen the same object. In fact, the chase was twice slowed by early morning traffic. Yet none of the hundreds of people who saw the speeding police cars reported seeing the UFO they were chasing.
Although it might initially seem ridiculous to claim that an object like Venus could be mistaken for a large spacecraft that chased an automobile, this case clearly shows that such gross misidentification is possible. It also shows that people can and will attribute apparent movement to “intelligent control” when no such control exists.
Hendry (1979) has provided even more examples of the unreliability of witnesses’ reports—witnesses who are sane, sober individuals who have no reason to lie about what they saw—or, to be more precise, what they think they saw. Another source of false, but very impressive, UFO reports is advertising aircraft. These are small, usually single-engine, aircraft that carry beneath them an array of small lights that can spell out an advertising message. For obvious reasons, these aircraft fly only after dusk and at night. If one sees such an aircraft from any vantage point other than directly underneath, it may be very difficult to read the message. On a dark night it may be almost impossible to see the aircraft itself. One is left with an ambiguous visual stimulus—a bunch of disembodied lights in the sky—that is virtually guaranteed to result in UFO reports. Shown in figure 12 are drawings made by people who reported seeing UFOs. All these UFOs have been positively identified as advertising aircraft, yet look at the additions the witnesses have made to the known stimulus of a more or less random set of lights in the sky. All the objects are more or less saucer-shaped, all have some sort of windows, many have some sort of device on top (propellers in one case!). In all cases the perception is vastly more elaborate and detailed than was the actual stimulus. Again, it must be emphasized that these witnesses were not consciously “making up” their reports. Rather, the knowledge they had about what a UFO, or “flying saucer,” ought to look like greatly influenced the way their brains interpreted the ambiguous stimulus of lights seen in the night sky.
Hendry (1979) reports another impressive example of the power of constructive perception. The actual stimulus was the planet Venus. The woman who reported the UFO
described it as a “star,” only much brighter. It was positioned low in the southwest sky, starting around seven o’clock in the evening on January 30, 1976—exactly where Venus was located at that time. She did not see Venus in addition to this “object.” She then watched the light descend gradually to the horizon during an hour’s period of time, which is exactly what Venus would do. This setting motion was perceived by her as being “jerky”; her husband thought that it was only a star, but she encouraged him to perceive the “jerky” descent, too, which got him excited. After staring at it for a sufficiently long time, the woman became convinced that she was looking at the illuminated window of a UFO and that she could see the round heads of the occupants inside, heads with silvery- colored faces. She then proceeded to see this apparition in the same place every night for successive nights. Yes, I told her that it was Venus. Her reply: “You are talking to a woman fifty-four years old. I know what stars look like.” (p. 85)
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.
The pilots at Stormville Airport had a good time with their hoax. It was revealed, however, by the local paper (Walzer 1984) and in a long investigative article in the November 1984 issue of
One final example will show, in an elegant controlled experiment, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in UFO reports. Simpson (1979–80) describes a controlled UFO hoax set up to determine just how distorted witnesses’ reports of a UFO can become. The hoax was carried out on Cradle Hill in Warminster, England, on the night of March 28, 1970. Simpson describes the stimulus for the hoax:
At 11 P.M. a 12-volt high-intensity purple spotlamp was directed from a neighboring hill toward a group of about 30 sky-watchers on Cradle Hill, three-quarters of a mile away. The lamp was switched on for 5, and then 25, seconds, with a 5-second pause between. During the second “on” period, a bogus magnetic field sensor, operated among the sky-watchers by a colleague, sounded its alarm buzzer, apparently indicating the presence of a strong magnetic field. (UFO folklore states that strong magnetic fields are a characteristic of UFOs, so this sensor was not an unusual sight.) In practice, the alarm was simply synchronized to sound while the distant spotlamp was on. The “strangeness” of the purple light was thereby enhanced. (p. 33)
Another important aspect of this hoax was the production of fake photographs of the UFO. Four exposures were produced, but two had been taken months previously and doctored to show UFOs that did not look at all like
