UFOlogists claim that the psychosocial hypothesis is occasionally confused with aggressive anti-ETH debunking, but that there is an important difference in that the PSH researcher sees UFOs as an interesting subject that is worthy of serious study, even if it is approached in a skeptical (i.e. non-credulous) way.
[2] The psychosocial hypothesis builds on the finding that most ufo reports have mundane explanations like celestial objects, airplane lights, balloons, and a host of other misperceived things seen in the sky which suggests the presence of an unusual emotional climate which distorts perceptions and the perceived significance and anomalousness of merely terrestrial stimuli.
The observed presence of surreal dream-like activity and imagery or themes based in the cultural environment and historically understood sources reinforces the proposition that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is unnecessary and, by Occam's razor, probably incorrect.
[7] Claude Maugé had exposed Magonia readers to a brief outline of "the socio-psychological model" emerging from French studies in 1983, but flipping the syllables made the term more conventional to existing academic vocabulary.
[9] The term marked the embrace of a fully normal system of psychological processes that included dreams, hallucinations, fantasy interpretations of materially real stimuli, distortions of perception, and metachoric experiences.
Since 1968, the circle of writers who wrote for Magonia had been exploring alternatives to the ETH under a general sense that it had failed to account for much of what was being seen in the high strangeness cases.
Roger Sandell spoke of being a nuts and bolts ufologist until he realized that the UFO reports he had gathered from a 1905 Welsh wave made little sense and were part of a larger complex of ghost stories and religious visions.
He notes that ufological thought had once been dominated by theories that Venus and Mars were the source of ufos, but the space program had shown they were in fact quite lifeless.
[10] Peter Rogerson had similarly become convinced we are seeing the rise of a contemporary mythology and advocated for a comprehensive search for historical antecedents of ufo rumors.
[13] Bertrand Méheust, a French sociologist, began a study of the science fiction parallels to ufo mythology when he stumbled upon a copy of the 1908 novel The Lightning Wheel by Jean de la Hire in his family's attic.
He opened it and began reading how the central characters find themselves being lifted up by a ray into a flying disc that hums and glows with a halo of light.
[16] Michel Meurger deserves special mention for expanding Meheust's thesis into an impressive compendium of parallels brimming with nearly 800 footnotes and a set of dozens of illustrations.
[17] One subsequent paper, in English, presents a focused historical study, showing a continuum between the nightmarish medical horrors experienced in modern ufo abduction narratives, back through the mad scientists of pulp science fiction, that built in turn upon anti-vivisection propaganda and rumors circulating in the 19th century.
Completely black eyes and thin pencil necks soon appeared on bald brainy aliens in ufo encounters in mimicry of film imagery.
[31] A number of other pieces in this tradition explore such science fictional saucer esoterica as doorway amnesia,[32] miraculous ascension by lifting light,[33] the physics of travelling through walls,[34] magnetic propulsion,[35] and aliens taking nutrition through the skin[36] along psychosocial and historical lines.
Any doubt about this is eliminated by turning to the first document written by Kenneth Arnold, the report he wrote and sent to Air Force mere days after his sighting nine mystery objects speeding across the face of Mount Rainier.
All those people in 1947 who reported seeing circular, disc-shaped, saucer-shaped crafts (82% of the 853 cases collected by Ted Bloecher)[42] had based their expectations on a mistake, a rumor with journalistic credentials.
[43] It can be found in nearly all the well-known cases: Betty & Barney Hill's interrupted journey, Herb Schirmer, Travis Walton, the Andreasson affair, Whitley Strieber Kottmeyer first reported his discovery in a letter to Saucer Smear published April 25, 1988.
While not uninteresting flourishes to the story, one should not ignore that historical investigation always privileges the earliest documents of a case and those generated by the witness over later and second-hand journalistic quotes.
The principal counterargument advanced to save the ETH is that flying saucers were seen before Kenneth Arnold's story hit the headlines and those could not have been shaped by the rumor.
Even if any are eventually found with a satisfactory pedigree, the argument overlooks that Hynek and Jacobs only offered the questions they did because saucers are the dominant shape of ufos after 1947.
The fallacy of this approach is demonstrated by imagining what a Hynek-like thinker, immersed in the reports of the airship era (1896/7), asked and answered, "Why cigar-shaped and not globes or cubes?"
"[58] Roger Sandell's work on a 1905 outbreak of ufo sighting in Wales had already suggested that these earlier flaps had odd facets, some of the high strangeness material echoed modern cases, but not in the ways might hope if one thought them extraterrestrial.
[63][64][65][66][67] Phantom airship flaps would eventually be catalogued[68] from a diverse set of places like New Zealand in 1909,[69][70] Russia & Poland in 1892, Canada in 1896, Washington state in 1908, Denmark in 1908,[71] South Africa in 1914, and Norway in 1914-16.
The rumors all had idiosyncratic aspects which pointed to a need to interpret them in terms of the contemporary societal backdrop – often tensions about impending war, sometimes political conflicts within the society.
Later phantom flier imagery transmutes into Foo-fighters and ghost rockets, in accordance with new rumors and newer facts of evolving modern technology.
A series of sightings of second suns, second moons, and marching of armies in the sky, it was assumed significantly, preceded the 1662 Act of Uniformity and the revival of the Church of England.
It is necessary to add that researchers in the psychosocial tradition have not held much respect for glib notions of flaps like mass hysteria e.g. as when expressed back in 1954 by the French psychiatrist George Heuyer.
ETH advocates sometimes say that while Jung approached UFOs psychologically because he was a psychologist, he was also on record as stating that some might be true physical objects under intelligent control, citing in particular radar corroboration.
I issued a statement to the United Press and gave a true version of my opinion, but this time the wire went dead: nobody, so far as I know, took any notice of it, except one German newspaper... one must draw the conclusion that news affirming the existence of Ufos is welcome, but that skepticism seems to be undesirable.