The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony. Edited by V. J. Ballester-Olmos and Richard W. Heiden

Nova Religio 134 Copyright © 2024 Association for the Academic Study of New Religions, Inc. typographical errors and stylistic inconsistencies or distracting idiosyncrasies . All bibliographic information is located solely in the footnotes of each self-­ contained essay; there is no volume-­ wide or volume-­ specific bibliography or index. Despite these faults, these essays do indeed represent a sampling of the most up-­ to-­ date and cutting-­ edge research, albeit from a single perspective. They also represent some of the most serious attempts to justify psi phenomena in one place. If one wishes to know the contemporary conversation about the paranormal, these volumes are excellent places to start. Researchers and cultural critics can find many points of departure, but use in a classroom should be selective and judicious; not all the essays are equal in critical rigor. Benjamin D. Crace, Tennessee Technological University The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony. Edited by V. J. Ballester-­ Olmos and Richard W. Heiden. Upiar Press, 2023. 711 pages. Free download through Academia​.edu. The existence of this book illustrates why UFOs have been so tantalizing to the general public, but also to academics and other researchers . (Many of those interested in the field now call them UAPs, for "unidentified anomalous phenomena," recognizing that such things are sometimes seen in the water as well as the air.) As the editors note in the introduction, the writers—some fifty-­ six of them, contributing fifty-­ seven essays ranging from four to eighteen pages—span the disciplines. Some are academics, many are not. A plurality are trained in psychology or psychiatry, but many more have backgrounds in the hard sciences or history, education, anthropology, or sociology. A large number of contributors are from the United States, but some come from Europe, South America, and Asia as well. The diversity of disciplines and regions here is appropriate for the subject. The UFO, precisely because it defies easy identification and categorization, blurs the lines between our categories of knowledge . Depending on where you stand, this may be because "UFO" is not a coherent category in the first place. But it might also be because UFOs, whether they be genuine otherworldly craft or simply a series of misidentifications, are genuinely beyond our categories of knowledge . They break out of science into religion; they are experienced psychologically or as technology; they force humans to grapple with the boundaries we invent. The editors of this volume, V. J. Ballester-­ Olmos and Richard W. Heiden—both business professionals with backgrounds in science and UFO investigation—are convinced that UFOs are "psychosocial" in origin, that is, a social construction. This means that whatever strange NR-27-4_Text.indd 134 NR-27-4_Text.indd 134 5/9/24 3:33 PM 5/9/24 3:33 PM Reviews Copyright © 2024 Association for the Academic Study of New Religions, Inc. 135 things people have been seeing in the sky, they have been conditioned (the editors say "overdosed") by media to identify them as UFOs. These phenomena might be anything from misidentified birds to asteroids; the important thing is that they are not readily identifiable, creating thereby an alarming, perhaps extraterrestrial, perhaps interdimensional category with deep and profound meaning for humanity. The editors worry about the damage this construct does to our societies, along with the profound distraction and consequent suspicions it generates. They hope the volume offers a multidisciplinary refutation of the notion that eyewitness reports of UFO sightings are necessarily reliable. In fact, they say, they are not. The editors have divided the contributions into six sections, although the first three constitute three-­ quarters of the total essays in the book—Case Studies, Psychological Perspectives, and On Witness Testimony. The remaining sections cover Empirical Research, Anthropological Approach, Metrics and Scaling, and Epistemological Issues. The Case Studies section includes evaluations of famous UFO cases, like the Cash–Landrum incident, in which the two eponymous witnesses encountered a strange craft that they believed left them with radiation burns; or Claude Vorilhon, whose encounter with a being from another world led him to choose the name "Raël" and found a new religious movement; and the famous Pascagoula abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker in 1973. These seventeen essays approach...