The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony ed. by V. J. Ballester-Olmos and Richard W. Heiden (review)

Reviewed by: The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimonyed. by V. J. Ballester-Olmos and Richard W. Heiden Matthew Bowman The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony. Edited by V. J. Ballester-Olmos and Richard W. Heiden. Upiar Press, 2023. 711pages. 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 [End Page 134]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 their subjects in different ways, but each argues, using a different methodology, that these witnesses are not simply transparent reporters of the phenomena they encounter, but rather creators of meaningful narratives. Susan J. Palmer, a scholar of new religious movements, claims that Vorilhon's testimony bears the marks of many other belief systems, from the Bible to science fiction. The medical doctor Gary P. Posner contends that the wounds in the Cash–Landrum case were not caused by radiation. The essays in this first section vary greatly in approach and content. The journalist Peter Huston, for instance, discusses his personal encounters with several claimed alien abductees. He observes that one of whom—the famous Betty Hill, who with her husband was the first American to claim abduction by a UFO—"contradicted herself in several ways and made statements that were clearly illogical and not believable" (65). His approach is anecdotal, based on personal...