Embellishments of memory: the unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony

Note: the term UFO in the context of this thread is synonymous with "alien spacecraft unless otherwise noted.

It has been suggested on many occasions in many threads by many posters her in the Pseudoscience sub-forum (as well as in the Parapsychology) that sheer quantity of eyewitness testimony is enough to support a wild claim, such as the notion that extraterrestrial intelligences are responsible for the sightings of UFOs in the world.

Oft mentioned is the so-called Disclosure Project's 400 witnesses of UFOs. These mentions are usually accompanied by citing the "credentials" of the witness (airline pilot, Army general, law enforcement officer, etc.) and making the assumption that these people are somehow more "credible" than the rest of society. Never mind that they are Homo sapiens, constructed of the same materials as the rest of the species.

The UFO believers would have the rest of society believe what they do: that people with a higher station in life do not fall victim to the same fallibilities that the rest of society does and that their memories and observational abilities are somehow more reliable. With regard to observational ability within the scopes of their professions, I've no doubt that experts and professionals can be considered more reliable. I would expect a doctor, for instance, to notice something about health care that I might not. I would expect a law enforcement officer to recognize a crime in progress or suspicious behavior of another person much faster than myself. I would expect an airline pilot to be more observant than myself with regard to atmospheric conditions, the condition of his aircraft, and the behavior of other aircraft than I.

That last example is where the UFO believer hopes to grasp a bit of witness credibility with regard to UFOs. But the third hand accounts of UFO believers re-telling the anecdotes of these pilots has a flawed methodology aside from the fact that the accounts are often not even secondary but tertiary -the UFO believer posts an account of another UFO believer who alleges to have taken an account from the original observer and the primary source of the interview (the full transcript) is often not available. The additional flaws in the methodology include confirmation bias, lack of appropriate contexts, inconsistent and leading interview techniques, etc.

Confirmation bias is when the researcher begins with a desired outcome and organizes all of his questions to support this outcome. UFO believers rarely ask skeptical questions and criticize those that do.

The contexts that are ignored include the environment of the event, the circumstances surrounding the event, sometimes the observations of others regarding the event, the physical condition of the observer(s), etc. There are as many separate contexts as there are events and observers of events.

Ruling out other possibilities is important as well. Ask skeptical questions. In a crime, investigators will develop a list of suspects and people of interest. If there is DNA evidence, DNA samples get collected from anyone connected to the case (including investigators). These samples become the controls and are used to rule out the possibilities –even if there is a primary suspect.

But the thing that I wanted to comment on the most is the fallibility of human memory when a person, regardless of their status or station in life, is faced with an event that is unusual to them, even if it isn't unusual to the universe.

Human memory is fallible. To suggest otherwise is to be ignorant. I had a biology teacher that said once, "everyone has a photographic memory; it's just that most people are out of film." It is this "film" that is the problem, because the film that is our memory isn't the best quality for the majority of the human population. A recent article in Science News (4/19/2003) discusses how researchers have concluded that people recall more of what they hear if the speaker communicates with relevant hand gestures. This is audible observation being coupled with visual signals.

Seeing is believing

... it just isn't necessarily what happened. Scientists researching the fields of criminalistics and cogitative abilities have determined in recent years (Wells & Olson, 2003; Wells, Olson, & Charman, 2003) that eyewitness accounts are far less reliable than many people may think. They also believe that major changes need to be instituted in how law enforcement and criminal investigators do things such as conduct line-ups and obtain testimony. They've discovered that even the most innocuous questions can be leading and influence the witnesses memory of the events.

For example, suppose a woman who observed a fatal traffic accident is rehearsing her testimony with a lawyer. The lawyer says, “How fast was the car going when it went through the red light?” At the time, she didn’t notice the color of the light, but the way the lawyer phrased the question plants the suggestion in mind that the car ran a red light. As a result, the woman may form an image of the traffic light in her mind’s eye—an image she didn’t really see at the actual event.

In investigating UFOs, the UFO "investigator" has a predetermined belief that UFOs are real. In addition, so may the witness. A recent poll conducted by Fox News (2003) shows that 34% of all Americans believe in UFOs. With this large a percentage, it is extremely probable that the majority of the UFO witnesses that go on record are already believers in the phenomenon. They already assume that what they saw was a UFO and not something far more prosaic or mundane. The event was unusual to them, therefore they apply the most unusual explanation they can. It doesn't help if the UFO investigator begins a question, "so when you saw the UFO, was it cigar-shaped or classic saucer-shaped?"

Belief isn't restricted to status or station in society either. President Reagan was said to have consulted an astrologer. I know an airline pilot that considers himself a Wiccan and his wife believes she can conduct "spells" in the "craft." They're strange, but fun folks. Our own President believes he is doing God's work and that God wanted him to be President (Bush was quoted to have said as much, though I forget where).

Belief creates bias right off the bat. Another caveat to eyewitness testimony is that witnesses will very often share information, so that in the final testimony, what they actually observed and what they testify to are different. The perceptions as well as the misperceptions of the other witnesses are used to fill in the gaps of their own observations. When they get information from one another and from investigators, their own memory becomes contaminated.

But just seeing an event that is emotionally arousing can interfere with both memory and attention to detail (Hulse, Memon, & Allan, 2003) due to chemical substances released in the brain during states of arousal and stress. I would suggest that when one sees what one truly believes is an alien spacecraft; one is "aroused and stressed."


References:

B.B. (4/19/2003) Gestures help words become memorable. Science News, Vol. 163 Issue 16, p254

Connell, Mary (2002)The Use of Eyewitness Research in the Courts. presented at training seminars for Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Project

Hulse L, Memon A & Allan K (2003) "Affecting memories: Emotional arousal and eyewitness testimony". Fifth Biennial Meeting of SARMAC, Aberdeen, Scotland

Wells, Gary L. and Olson, Elizabeth A.. (2003). "Eyewitness Testimony," Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 54, pp. 277-295.

Wells, Gary L., Olson, Elizabeth A., and Charman, Steve D. (2003). "Distorted retrospective eyewitness reports as functions of feedback and delay," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 42-52.

 

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yes. you disenfranchize anyone's actual observation and memory. your myth splits even thier perception and memory from themselves, whilst meanwhile implying that
how YOU approach reality 'must' be the actual truth......
"human memory is fallible, to suggest otherwise is ignorant". so......how could anyone come to the like of you with any observational evidence. for ia TRUSt my observational ability. And i am sure that WHEN people do see some event that is completely out of the ordinary, that that memory becomes powerfully recorded. a bit like when we get praised or insulted in uour lives. these events leave a deep memory of the event, rather than mundane events. however, EVERYthing we experience Is recorded, and can be accessed in other states of consciousness.....This has been shown to be so in modern consciousness research ala Stanislav Grof

"Belief creates a bias right off the bat"....and this applies to you too mate. it is clear you do NOT believe. and i see you here constantly reducing ALL accounts from people, reported accounts of strange experiences into a false category. that is YOUR bias. but your bias wont let you ackowledge this irony......such is the comedy of life!

 

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So if your mother, tells you how it was that you were born, you won't believe her?

I guess you would not, for she is only another person in a station of life. In your scenario, no one is credible or believable, not even your mother. How absurd is that?

According to your last statement, you are also, a myth.

 

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I have the benefit of being able to test my existence. Eye witness testimony is valuable and useful when such tests can be applied.

Next criticism.

 

Not so absurd at all. All beings have subjective preception. Interpreting something in other way that another person would have done is only natural.
For example: Moses sees' a burning bush, his preception tells him that it is Jahve speaking to him,
I see a burning bush, I try to estinguish it, because I see it as a threat to environment.

 

LOL, Avatar so how can any testimony in a court of law be admissible?

The court must hold that testimony is upheld as evidence, and therefore considered to be fact.

This would account for the fact when a officer of the law testifies that a person has committed a crime, that testimony is enough to convict and in most cases the person is guilty until proven innocent.

 

Nobody said the law, the system or the situation is perfect.

 

It is not your existence that was questioned. Your existence is evident.

It was your creation that was in question.

By implying that your are a myth, I was referring to your creation or how you came to be. For if your Mother told you that she became pregnant by the usual method you would not believe her and therefore may consider yourself to be of an immaculate birth like Jesus. LOL

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Rather than continue to feed into this ad hominem line of discussion, I'll just assume that since you didn't address the literature I cited, that you have no data that are contrary.

 

Hey Skinwalker, just saying hi.
Haven't been here for awhile.
It's kind of funny how the same old discussions just keeeeeeeep going.

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And I absolutely agree with you.
Just because a million people say and beleive the earth is flat, doesn't it make it so.
Just because a million people say they saw U.F.O.s doesn't make it so either.

However, yes, I have seen them. Them being the typical saucer shape chrome crafts. Plain as day, no if's ands or buts.
Go figure huh.

Take care.

 

Thanks, Moementum7, it's been too long since you've stopped by! It seems that we still agree to a point

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Some of the same discussions do indeed keep popping up, so I try to keep putting a different perspective on them or perhaps new information. With this one, I'm trying to go into more detail than in the past. I have a hypothesis that given an unusual event that is interpreted as a UFO, people will embellish the observations to a point at which things will be included that are simply not there.

I'm very tempted to test this hypothesis using controlled experiment. But I live under the approach vector for D/FW Airport, so if I release any lit balloons, I might cause too much hysteria!

 

O quite contraire, you have gone to great lengths to provide a bias viewpoint about testimonials not being reliable.

You will never believe anything you here.

This is a description of a closed minded individual.

An open minded individual is more likely to give the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

Literature is not the issue in this instance, what it really comes down to is common sense.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." AE

 

So counter the viewpoint with data. I think the data I provided has merit and will hold up, but I am inviting counter-discussion.

I will believe anything that is supported by empirical data. Even if I don't like it.

Which is the arguments I've been making. The ETI-UFO believers are closeminded. The prosaic and mundane explanations are routinely discarded in favor of speculation and unsupported supposition. My argument is that in order to objectively evaluate a phenomenon such as UFOs, one must include the research that suggests that eyewitness account (anecdotes) are inherently unreliable. Exclusion of these out-of-hand will improve the investigative ability of ufologists, whereas inclusion of anecdotes simply because of quantity will impair the investigative process.

The literature I cited bears this hypothesis out unless someone can demonstrate flaws in the research that they are representing. I looked at all of the literature I could find in peer-reviewed journals and texts. None of it ran counter to the hypothesis that eyewitness accounts of observers who were under stress or excited states was unreliable.

And yet common sense very often is wrong in science. It is the scientific method that is important if ufologists are to gain any credibility whatsoever.

Indeed, it occurs to me that ufologists have the least to gain by proving the existance of ETI-UFOs.

 

SkinWalker...this question i'm bout to ask yu is the third, or maybe even 4th time i've asked you but got no reply...s here goes again:

Have you seen th FAMOUS footage taken in Brazil at the time of the eclipse in 1990(?) ...where because many were looking upp and taking video, and photographic coverage there were many varied shots of MANY UFOs...one which seemed to be playing hide and seek behind a cloud

Have you seen this footage?

 

Well I personally have never seen a UFO, and while I can't speak for the many eyewitnesses of other cases since I don't know them or anything, I can believe them, but not as greatly as I would of people I personally know.

With that said, I only two of two close people to me that have seen UFOs, and that's the only eyewitness testimony I can believe better than any other, because these two people are as honest as they come, and they don't have a faulty memory either as they can recall all sorts of mundane past experiences that have involved me, just as a small test in accuracy.

Anyways, my dad's best friend, and probably mine too since I hang around him so much, once saw three UFOs in formation above the CBC Naval Base (down the street from me, 8 miles up the coast of Pt Mugu) during the late 60's. They were simple saucers with an unblinking red light in the center under its belly. And back then, the city wasn't as developed and populated in those parts as it was all open fields and beachy sand dunes so you could see lots of stuff. Well, he saw them hovering at the corner of Channel Islands Blvd and Ventura Road and then all of a sudden slowly making their way towards the ocean and then shoot off instantly out towards the Channel Islands, which are just national parks, except for San Nicolas Naval Island, but that's around 80 miles down the coast. Now-a-days, that's where they test the missle defense system, firing missles from there and intercepting them from Vandenburg AFB which is around 50 miles up the coast, if that has any relevance which I doubt.

The other person is his next door neighbor (different house and different city from when living during the 60's incident) who used to be the head of security at an airbase that stores nuclear weaponry. One night a huge UFO just hovered over the base and made the place go up in arms. Now this guy didn't get to see the UFO himself as he had to run everything so he only saw it on radar, but he got to hear everything from everyone else as it was happening. But this guy, too, is as honest as they come and I have no reason to doubt him, although I don't know him as well as the first person. But I guess you can say he's hallucinating it all too, no surprise.

So those are my two eyewitness stories that I at least believe above all others. I don't know the people of other UFO sightings so I can't validate how reliable they are, but the first person I trust with my life and they both have no memory faults, lie, or anything like that. Go ahead and try to debunk their memory or try and stretch for other explanations.

It's amusing to hear some of the stuff that comes up to discredit people like them. It's no different than a corrupt lawyer trying to character assassinate a person's claims who's testifying against a guilty person they're defending. Debunkers do the same thing. They go out of their way to make people look bad, stretching as far as they can with their excuses. And the amusing part is that they claim the eyewitnesses and whatnot are making things up, yet they're basically doing the exact same thing with the debunking excuses they use. No different. Those that do nothing but call others fakes and the like tend to be the demon they're talking about. They usually tend to be the fake one, and this applies to all sorts of scenarios even if excluding this UFO discussion. It's the easy way to spot liars and bullshitters. They do nothing but one thing rather than mixing it up a little. Am I the only one who notices that?

- N

 

Right. You've established that you believe the anecdotes of others without having any supporting evidence, but do you have data that runs counter to the literature I cited?

And its not so much a matter of discrediting the characters of witnesses as it is a matter of establishing whether they have credibility at all. The point of the research was to note that people aren't credible when faced with stressful or unusual events when it comes to recording their observations. The research wasn't interested in character assassination. The character was already flawed.

As it undoubtedly was with your friends' eyewitness accounts of UFOs. You believe them because you like them, not because they were capable observers or observed events that weren't simply misunderstood.

 

Yeah, every single person that sees an unsual event aren't able to record their observations clearly. Mmmhmm, uh, okay. Complete and total BS, lol. By applying such an ungodly BROAD reason to every single person automatically throws out any validity one can have, as good and as true a reason as it may be. I can totally agree that lots of people cannot accurately observe things when under pressure, but not every single person in every situation, but debunkers seem to like to apply it to everything.

In that second UFO story told to me, am I to believe the whole base full of military personnel was hallucinating? No wait, let's just go with Occam's Razor and say it was just that head of security guy that was hallucinating the whole thing and the base was never in a frenzy. :eyeroll:

I don't believe them because I like them, I believe them because they are highly credible. If there were strangers that saw UFOs and I happened to know a lot about them, if I viewed them as credible, I would believe them, but since I know nothing of them, I can't say they're credible or not so their sighting goes in the "maybe" catagory. I have friends I like that if they claimed to have seen a UFO, I would be highly doubtful of their testimony because I know they aren't credible. It has nothing to do with liking a person or not, but actually knowing if they're credible or not. If these two people weren't my friends and I was just doing some credibility test as a scientist or someone else, would you then use the same excuse of me liking them? And just as an FYI, the second incident involving the UFO at the military installation, while I believe it, the person isn't as credible as the first person because I don't know him as well. The first person though, 100% credible without a doubt.

It's funny, no matter WHAT the situation, you ALWAYS have the answer to prove me, or someone else wrong, lol. So much for being open-minded. It's cool to be skeptical, but when you come up with an excuse for every single incident to prove something wrong, most of the time a far-fetched one, you just look like a fool. This is the problem with most debunkers. They find nothing but faults and never anything actually credible, regardless of what it has to do with, UFO or not. Heck, even with normal science type things, they'll argue till they're blue in the face. Those types of people are no different than the UFO nuts that link all sorts of stuff like the Face on Mars or simple rocks on other planets/moon to ETI and well, neither of those types are credible. They have an answer to everything linking any whack thing to ETI and the other has a whacky answer to everything to disprove it. One side always picks ETI, the other always picks hallucinations.

Before one can question the credibility of an eyewitness, they first have to question the credibility of THEMSELVES. Unfortunately most aren't open minded and are just a zealot on either side of the spectrum and therefore have no credibility at all.

- N

 

First, we're not talking about "every single person." We're talking about people who misidentify unusual events, perhaps because of stress or excitement. There are certainly those that see things that simply cannot be "identified," regardless of the amount of objective observation, because the amount of data isn't enough to make an accurate identification.

Perhaps this is what your friends experienced. Perhaps not. Perhaps a base "full of military personnel" (hyperbole in itself) witnessed a UAV being tested. I was unclear in my last post. I should have said they probably misunderstood if they believed that what they witnessed was an alien spacecraft.

That's not to say that alien spacecraft cannot exist or that they cannot be visiting our planet. What I'm saying is that the eye witness accounts of people who say that what they saw in the sky was an alien spacecraft must be suspect, mostly because of the unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony -particularly when the observer is under stressful or exciting conditions.

Blindly accepting the anecdotes of others to support the notion that UFOs are alien spacecraft is foolish and close-minded. It assumes a result before the cause is even examined. It is confirmation bias. It isn't science.

I didn't mean disrespect to you or your friends. But I do mean to point out that evidence cannot be relative to gut feeling and character. Without context, such evidence is suspect and it has to be regardless of your opinion of the observer. Even for the ones you would consider less reliable, there are likely to be those that know them who would consider them as reliable as your most reliable friends.

 

No, we ARE talking about every single person. Can you name one UFO case where if the object hasn't been dismissed as being swamp gas, a star, a plane, a flare, or some other object, the last resort to explain it away was the person hallucinating? That's the trump card that ALWAYS gets played. I don't know of one single case where a debunker hasn't used that sa a last resort. Every single UFO incident is always somehow explained away, even if we don't know what the object is. Just like with religious people always claiming something unknown being God or a UFO nut always resorting to ETI, debunkers resort to a person's feeble mind. All those groups are the same. No better or worse than the next.

Fanatics don't deserve to have an opinion on any matters because they just pollute everything they comment on. As I said earlier, before one can question the credibility of someone else, they first have to question the credibility of themselves.

Oh I know there's some crazy stuff out there. I've seen some cool prototype aircraft before and they made me question what I was seeing more than once, and this isn't counting natural phenomena. However, I do believe some of the stuff people see are UFO's in the ETI sense, no doubt about it. I don't need any proof of it either for the simple fact that it's quite possible of it happening. I don't find anything hard to believe, far-fetched, or improbable of an ETI visiting Earth. Some consider that to be a huge claim that requires huge evidence, but I don't. It's pretty simple to me, really. No different than the Europeans first setting foot on the Americas. The only difficult part is knowing which sightings actually are ETI, but I don't need that as I have nothing to proof. I'm quite content just knowing without having to have one land on my front yard as confirmation. I've never been to Japan and don't care to, and I won't lose sleeping over not ever having seen it to confirm it's existance.

Well obviously "full of personnel" is an exaggeration. You know what I meant. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything so I'm not going to word everything perfectly as if writing some term paper. But tons (ooo another exaggeration

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) of people saw the craft so I doubt it was a mass hallucination, not to mention it wasn't flying about but rather hovering in place real low directly over the base kind of Close Encounters of the Third Kind style so there's no mistake about it, unless that's some pretty impressive new top secret stuff the government is working on.

Again, this guy has a credible military background, runs the security there and ran the show as it happened, so I would say he's trained pretty well to operation under stress, so what more of a requirement should there be? Now I don't know this guy as well as the previous person so while I believe it happened, I have slight doubt just for the simple common sense of it. But what it all basically comes down to is no different than any other UFO story. Since I didn't personally experience it, I can't say if it's true or not, regardless of how much proof there may actually be because proof is subjective. All the best proof in the world one can think of still cannot 100% confirm a claim, and this applies to anything.


Scientists require the most demanding of proof, but even the proof they demand still won't be able to 100% confirm what they want so they'll still probably still reject it all because it boils down to the simple yes or no in wanting to believe. An alien could be standing in front of them and they could still choose not to believe it, heh. You can't prove anything to someone who just flat out doesn't want to believe and dismisses everything outright. That's a fanatic and most debunkers are fanatics as well as most UFO nuts and well, they should automatically be barred from the discussion. You call me knowing those two people a bias in my opinion? It's not. Nor is the simple fact of me believing in UFOs mean I'm not open minded. Being a fanatic is one hell of a bias though. One can choose to believe or not to believe in UFOs and still be open minded. Heck, I'm religiously agnostic yet believe in a "higher power" and it basically applies to UFOs too. I simply believe, yet have no proof. Does that mean I think every case is genuine or every case is fake? Nope. And that's open mindedness without bias.

Oh, no disrspect done, and I know gut feeling and knowing the character of a person isn't complete proof, but that's basically the best and only reliable type of judgement that can be done. What other ways are there to judge one's reliability? We hear military personnel, police officers, and other types of people who are trained to work under stressful situations as well as being trained to recognize various types of crafts (pilots, etc) always being discredited for the same excuses used against common people. I mean if THEY can't be credible, then exactly who can? The requirements needed by certain groups of people are just obscene in that it's impossible. That excuse gets put to every single person when the incident cannot be explained by any other means. If we don't know what the object may have been then the person MUST have been hallucinating and well, that's pure cop-out (no pun intended) BS.

- N

 

With fundamentalist debunkrs like SkinWalker, it makes me curious to wonder where such fanaticism to reduce and explain away COMES from. mainly because their arguments to disprove go into the realms of irrationality...
i am assuming that his/you world view skinWalker would be seriously fuked with IF you did open yourself to the idea of UFOs and ETS being real....
and for the millionth time--why do you avoid answering this quesy of mine, dude?--HAVE you seen the 1990 coverage of the mass UFO sightings in Brazil at the time of the eclipse?