Weird Shit and Its Discontents. And UFOs.

At her blog The Orange Orb, Regan Lee makes an interesting critique of one of the elements in psychosocial explanations of anomalous events.  The element in question, the extent to which expectations affect perception, is part of both strong psychosocial theories (which hold that there is no such thing as intrinsically weird shit) and weak psychosocialism (which holds that some truly weird shit does at times happen, even if all we really know about it are some stories we make up).

Lee argues that there is a certain limit to how much expectations can actually shape perception, and she gives a great example complete with photo to show exactly what she means.   Driving down a foggy road she saw something that in certain respects looked like one thing but also had aspects that ruled it out from being that thing, or at least made it an extremely weird instance of that thing.  In other words, she went through a series of perceptual decision points based on the expectations of what was likely under those circumstances, only the answers weren’t adding up to anything that made sense.  Then Lee shows a photo of what she was looking at, and you can see exactly why the image was hard to resolve into something normal.

http://orangeorb.blogspot.com/2015/07/seeing-animals-in-hopes-of.html

Saying our expectations shape what we see is stating a bland truism that has little if any explanatory power.  Lee concludes by pointing out some complexities of the relationship between expectation and perception: sometimes we expect to see something, but quickly realize that’s not what we’re seeing; other times we don’t know what we’re seeing, but know what we’re NOT seeing.  These are the kind of perceptual dynamics people who bird become very familiar with as they hone their skills in the field, making many mistakes while developing their knowledge base and improving their ability to ID avian UFOs.

If you look at the tradition of ghost-story telling, you see that much the same level of detail is required to convey the sense of the ghost experience.  The story teller often states how hard-nosed they were until their experience, or describes the layout of a location in great detail in order to support how impossible and strange their experience in that location was.   For some reason, the majority of UFO stories and experiencer accounts (in the US, at least) seem to seek to derive their legitimacy from the realm of grand cultural narrative and eschew the kind of individual-level details that could root such encounters more firmly in shared human experiences.

To me, not being particularly credulous about or interested in non-avian UFOs, the interesting part of the UFO sighting story has never been the “I saw a structured craft with little men waving out of windows” but rather the minutiae of how a series of perceptual decision points not only failed to culminate into an acceptable explanation but moved over into the land of the truly weird.  That is where the experience is most real; at any rate, it is the level at which the experiencer most effectively conveys the nature of their experience to me.  I have to hear and understand how they applied their perceptual decision-making process and why and where it broke down for them in order to understand the experience.  What finally got me interested in paying attention to UFO phenomena was when I finally did stumble across people who were thinking, talking and writing at this level of self-reflective, analytic detail.

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/07/lake-area-paragon-conference-and-little.html

Which brings me to Jerome Clark’s 2008 paper in Fortean Times entitled “Experience Anomalies.” (Thank you, Kevin Randle’s blog, for bringing this to light for me.)   Clark would, I believe, fall into the category of weak psychosocial theorists.  He had previously differentiated between external event and the individual experience of an event.   In Experience Anomalies, he defines a core anomalous event as one that “takes place in the world and can be empirically demonstrated, or potentially demonstrated” while the individual experiential correlate to such an event “borrow[s] its imagery from the anomalous event but is ontologically unrelated to it.”

In other words, weird shit happens (WS1, the core phenomenon) and then people make up weird shit about the weird shit they saw happen (WS2, experience anomalies) for all the same reasons people tell stories to themselves and others about anything.  With WS2, we are in the realm of Regan Lee’s example of the fawns and the turkeys, but, critically, this time the perceptual experience refuses to resolve into reason or continually self-negates.  There is no explanation, but it’s still baldly real to lived experience.  Clark describes WS2 (experience anomalies) as “not hallucinations as hallucinations are ordinarily defined.  These encounters, which at times occur collectively, are profoundly mysterious and their cause or stimulus is unknown."

I would like to clarify the levels of ontology implicit in Clark’s model, which I think is a useful one.   On the one hand WS1, the core anomaly, is a real event that is really happening and cannot be explained away.  On another hand WS2, experience anomalies, occur mostly on an individual level basis (although they may also occur collectively); they might involve a range of known, unknown but potentially knowable, or sometimes downright mystical psychological processes that are just really hard to sort out from one another and so knot up into another anomaly in themselves.

What is the difference between the two?  Well, according to Clark, WS1 can be empirically demonstrated, or potentially demonstrated [? which means exactly WHAT?] and IS real, whereas for experiencers WS2 FEELS real, i.e., “earnest witnesses and clear viewing conditions that enhance confidence in the anomalousness of the observation do not translate into anything that transcends memory and testimony.  We lack a vocabulary with which to conduct a useful discussion of such matters.”

For Clark, WS1 is somehow more real than WS2 because even if it can't be empirically demonstrated it potentially could be an explanation.  WS2, on the other hand, has only memory and testimony to prove it was real.  Somehow, being able to imagine a way WS1 could have happened exerts a more powerful claim on reality that some poor sucker's claim that what happened to them actually happened to them.  In other words, hard science - even hard science of the imaginary variety - tends to prevail, in ufology, over any informed application of human and social scientific data gathering and analysis. 

Indeed, we do not in fact lack a vocabulary or ability to understand human psychological and social behavior even (gasp!) when it comes to anomalies.  There is this thing called social science.  Somehow ufology, along with the rest of the sciences in America, got fixated in the 50’s that the best science was rocket science.  Ufology has pretty much stayed there while scientific progress outside of ufology has, well, progressed.  Social science theory and methodology has continued to grow and develop since the ideologically benighted 50s; the old tropes of why so-and-so is an excellent observer because they are in the military or a police officer are a joke nowadays.  The government is not keeping these research methods secret in a high-security vault; they are easily accessible for a low price at your local community college, where professors will probably be delighted to encounter a student with any actual interest in doing research.

What is lacking is ufology's ability to step up to the plate by making any serious (or if not serious, at least informed) contributions, in whatever form, to contemporary knowledge about weird shit.  What's up with that? Maybe that's just not what ufology is about; maybe, for all its desperate claims and adjurations otherwise, ufology is just another style of religion mongering in a secular age.  I'm only sure about one thing: there exist rigorous methods for doing qualitative research in the human and social sciences.   Whether it's better for ufology to remain ignorant of them or exhibit its delusionality for all to see in something like FREE is question I'll leave open for extra credit.