Brief Introduction to Hypothesis psychosociological
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Intellectual property of the researcher Diego Zuniga.
Hypothesis psychosociological revolutionized the way we see the UFO at the end of 70. No greater impact outside Europe, the followers of the nouvelle vague achieved that at least part of researchers make themselves look back witnesses and consider that sciences social were important for the study of this "mystery".
Michel Monnerie was not an outstanding ufologist. More than a great theoretician, he was characterized as an incessant search of UFOs in the French nights. And like many researchers believed Monnerie. But his eagerness debugger and the relentless pursuit of physical evidence (which, incidentally, never arrived) led him to question some elements of ufology that seemed, at least, incomprehensible. Like, for example, believe that in time something seemed "unscientific".
After much analysis of cases in the field (not to leave with the idiocy that the "researcher cabinet"), Monnerie found that "the observer does not understand the nature of what he saw (...) From the moment the observer accepts the UFO hypothesis, adjusts his vision as to what is called the phenomenon ". And doubts grew to shape a new stance, which was a blow to those who, even in the late 70s, still with the hope of capturing his flying saucer, his alien intergalactic ship captain was germinated. HPS had born.
The works of the French, as we have seen a kind of believer redeemed, were a real blow to the chair, which is evident in the very name of his books: "What if UFOs do not exist" and "The Wreck of the Aliens". The impact of monneriest eyes were not as expected. Virtually ignored on this side of the Atlantic, the "new ufology" -and surrendered- its biggest fruit in the old continent.
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| The Shipwreck of the Aliens |
The central idea of this hypothesis is that the witnesses have a direct impact on what they claim to have seen, because as mediators between the supposed phenomenon and researchers can misrepresent information, but confused with strangers known events, accommodating the vision according to their beliefs or knowledge previous, plan own fears or, failing that, distorting the original sighting when mixed with unrelated event UFO reports. HPS does not rule out the lies and fraud, and gives greater importance to the cultural context of the recipient and the influence of ufological myth.
This was one of the great contributions of the HPS, as it shifted the axis of ufology, by passing the alien spacecraft that can travel through space to the witness. That is, it obviated the most bizarre explanations to accommodate more pedestrian, but in no way less interesting.
He also gave great importance to the role of the media in creating imaginary alien. So, everything would be a myth generated by misinformation, misunderstanding and even misconduct of a journalist. A myth ultimately emerged largely from the press and raised by witnesses that, in turn, give news to the media that distort much of the testimony and even end up changing the same complainants. A vicious circle that has no end ... or it was until the appearance of Monnerie.
A good example of the social origin of UFO waves would be generated by the proliferation of UFO news media. We expand on this later.
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| The UFO Waves |
AN INSIDER ATTACK
One of the things that hurt them followers of the HET was that the UFO matter irrespective of mechanistic components wich had blowed the imagination of believers.
Also it caused some burning this apparent disregard for the testimony, sacred to many traditional ufologists even today. Just to give an example that is at hand, Juan Jose Benitez believes all their witnesses, something that any decent journalist known to be at least unprofessional.
The implicit criticism of the complete history of ufology was all the more annoying than anything else, especially since it came from inside the UFO scene, and an internal attack is always more painful that at least one come from afar to externality. When the attack is internal, it is more difficult to counter because the objector know what he's talking about.
Monnerie was questioned on more than one occasion to speak of social psychology without being a connoisseur of these social sciences. Attacks like this, worthy of spurious feelings rather than reasoned criticism, were not alone. In fact, the HPS had several opponents, as we shall see.
Anyway, Monnerie was not alone. Other researchers, such as Thierry Pinvidic, Jacques Scornaux, Paolo Toselli, Bertrand Méheust, Pierre Lagrange and several others followed the path indicated by the French.
BACKGROUND OF THE JUNG AND DEVELOPMENT OF HPS
Although the milestone was agreed in 1977, the HPS has a direct antecedent in Carl G. Jung. Even before the Swiss psychologist, in the 40s, it was suggested that these strange visions that made headlines for its novelty, were just paranoid delusions of a post-war period.
For the French researcher Claude Maugé, the basics of HPS are based on Jung aforementioned book "On things seen in the sky" and Sigmund Freud "The Interpretation of Dreams" which, in his opinion it was insufficient. To Maugé, that's the only criticism I can make the model proposed by Monnerie.
Ignoring this, Maugé was a worthy successor to the monneriest work, and even had the "audacity" to contradict some statistical results by Claude Poher. After this, he concluded that ufology worked as a belief system. Michel Piccin was tougher Poher and GEPAN, noting that the French association in charge of the study of UFOs was "a sacred star panel which must leave to make something useful". The monneriesm, and more broadly the HPS, was slowly laying their bases.
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| UFO and Aliens Culture |
Thierry Pinvidic made a solid contribution in this regard, to demonstrate the cultural influence in the creation of the myth of UFO: He investigated and compared around the world that had not penetrated the UFO psychosis with others where she was positive. The conclusion was clear: in countries where UFOs are not part of the culture, there are no cases. Lighter, pour water.
One of the loudest consequences of monneriest position was also the text of the French Gerard Barthel and Jacques Brucker, who in "La grande peur martienne" (1979), were in the spotlight at the 1954 gala famous wave, performing reinvestigation cases and explaining some of the classics. After the elapsed time, many of the witnesses admitted their fabled, some invented or embellished stories to make them more spectacular. This work showed that the context that generates a surge, as happened in France in 1954, undoubtedly influences the perception people have of the myth of the coming of the aliens.
Despite the understandable criticism deserved this work, we can not ignore its importance in relation to the settlement of the HPS in the UFO community.
One of the toughest challengers of the HPS is the Uruguayan Willy Smith. For the continuation of the work of Joseph Allen Hynek and project manager UNICAT, the methodology of the social psychologists has no scientific foundation. Spares no attacks for followers of the HPS, cataloging of people who failed in obtaining university degrees and end up pouring journalism. He makes it possible to compare the social psychologists with tricksters, among other pearls like that. Attacks on people by refutation of the ideas that deserved immediate replica of Spanish Luis Gonzalez M., in a dispute so tasty that deserves much more space to be addressed. However, Smith overwhelm prejudices, but do not draw attention coming from the gullible ufology.
Usually, and repeat, it is usually to ensure that those who do not believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis (that is, those who say this is unsustainable), have not yet shown the reason for this assertion. As we see, they have no doubt about who has to prove why. Was not "extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence" ...? The burden of proof is on those who maintain that the "Martians" invade us with impunity.
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| Social Dreams of Space Travel Era |
MANY CONTRIBUTIONS
As rightly says Luis Gonzalez in the Web site Anomaly Foundation, ufologist should know that not investigate UFOs, but testimonials from people who claim to have seen UFOs. And as quoted above, the HPS emphasizes the witness as unreliable data source. Remember that memory is not impervious to external stimuli, so that the reliability of our narrator is compromised.
In this sense, Monnerie spoke of "waking dream" which he defined as a moment in which the witness lives a moment of relaxation and is capable of real-believe something that only happens in a near-sleep state: "I only know one situation which objects will allow many liberties with the laws of physics, to transform from one thing to another, to multiply and indulge in all sorts of fantasies: the dream," he wrote.
Our hero (I mean Monnerie) is largely a large disenchanted: "UFOs are merely a social dream embodied in the era of space travel," Agostinelli writes, as a way to graph the thought researcher Gallic. Monnerie adds that "people who are very anxious tend to take refuge in a dream state in which they feel more comfortable," leaving even more clearly the willingness of witnesses to a strange phenomenon.
Another of the "discoveries" made by members of this school is that the psycho-sociological no difference between the explained and unexplained cases, ends up making us infer that UFOs are but lacking IFOs data to be fully recognized. Then, the residue of unexplained cases does not necessarily imply the existence of an original phenomenon.
The HPS has not transcended beyond Europe. That's true. However, its influence is evident when drawing conclusions and making history. One can not ignore the contribution of Monnerie and those who followed him goes beyond mere anecdote UFO. And note that several of the "psycho-social", as he calls Jean Sider, traditional ufologists are converted to psychosocial skepticism.
And after all this time, it is usually discovered that there are more important things that UFOs. Given this reasoning it is impossible not to agree with Monnerie, though many, still not realize so elementary sentence.
Copyright Diego Zúñiga (2000)
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Hypothesis Psychosociological
Copyright Dr. Willy Smith (1992)
Although the name of this hypothesis quite a mouthful, it's ideas are clear. Fundamentally, UFOs do not exist. Everything we read in the thousands of UFO reports that have accumulated through the years is but a distorted version of easily explainable events, hallucinations, erroneous interpretations of natural phenomena, hoaxes perpetrated for profit or for fun, or fantasies of minds you sick. To this sociological pressure on the witness by the culture and environment is added. The real causes are almost always established, and cases where identification has not been possible (the "residue" in the nomenclature favored by this school) A further analysis certainly remedy the situation.
In principle, there is some truth in what the HPS supporters claim, is that the vast majority of reports of UFO events have no scientific value, and therefore should be removed from the databases. In the experience of UNICAT, the percentage of actual cases of UFOs in catalogs of incidents untreated (raw data), it is of the order of 1 to 2%. This number has been checked more than once using different existing listings in the literature, and for reasons too lengthy to discuss here, I have not the slightest doubt about its validity. That residue is considerable, and reductionist efforts only increase the weight and scientific value of the case. Such were the conclusions of the study commissioned by the US Air Force at the Battelle Institute.
One of the difficulties encountered by this hypothesis is the inability to create a database that supports the conclusions. Because if it is true that a large number of reports of UFOs have a psychological cause, it is also true that such incidents are recognized as such by ufologists, and incorporated into the world of IFOs (Identified Flying Objects).
In these circunstances, the only way is to consider case by case incidents. This has been done by Monnerie, at least in his first book, where by a suitable selection was able to eliminate one reason or another all selected cases. This result was expected, since the unexplained cases exceed high quality cases almost by a factor of 100, and many of the cases in the literature were not properly investigated. But Monnerie erred in taking the step sigulente when he reasons that if the list limited cases have proven to be false, so all cases are false.
More recently (1979), Barthel and Brucker applied the same technique in a little book that I had the opportunity to analyze in detail, where from a group of French cases are undoubtedly false, the authors generalize the dogma of Monnerie, "Les UFOs n'existent pas ", first to all cases in France, and then to all cases in the world !.
Despite this beginning as impoverished, Monnerie ideas have thrived in Europe and South America, but not in the US where HET still prevails. I think there have been two reasons for this acceptance. First, there comes a time when people who study the phenomenon tire of finding a majority of poor and dubious reports, to the point that high-quality cases go unnoticed. This was particularly true before the advent of computers, but even today, because as you can see on the lists that have appeared on the market, catalogs no parameters that determine not only the quality of the cases, but still the same amount of information they contain. It is easy to understand that in these conditions the researchers lose faith in the reality of the phenomenon, simply because they have no access to a database designed properly, or basic literature. And the mental image that have formed their readings only evokes a myriad of false cases.
Looking for a deeper understanding of why a researcher becomes disenchanted with the subject explanation, I made a list of ex-ufologists that have joined the psychosociological Monnerie school friend. Although France was the birthplace of the movement, not all converts are French and so we include: Monnerie, Barthel and Brucker (France), Gonzalez (Spain), Van Utrecht (Belgium), Fuller (England), Toselli (Italy) and Agostinelli (Argentina). In addition to anti-militant stance saucerian, a common feature of these authors is the lack of a scientific background. Therefore, it is impossible to understand the false logic of generalizations that claim. It also explains the almost obsessive insistence that refer to UFO phenomenon as the "myth UFO", establishing as fact what is only an opinion.
And all this, If UFOs do not exist, what is the need to prove? Perhaps the proponents of this theory are not as convinced as we are told, and therefore failed to prove the non-existence of UFOs in a compelling way, in the same way as those who defend the HET they have been unable to obtain incontrovertible proof the mills listed in the atmosphere come from outer space.
For information, analysis of data stored in UNICAT, has not produced evidence to date in favor or against the HET, although negative indications regarding HPS.
Absolute skepticism
The skepticism about UFOs is part of the philosophy of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), a group that harshly attacked all manifestations that are not part of orthodox science. The most famous exponent of the anti-UFO side is Phil Klass, author of several books negative while editor of the prestigious magazine "Aviation Week and Space Technology". The anti-ufologicals of CSICOP ideas can even be characterized as hypotheses. UFOs are not the product of psychological or psychological aberrations do not exist. The witness does not recognize a natural phenomenon, or simply misconstrues what he sees. There is a vague accusation about the health of the observer, as in the case of HPS, but sometimes doubts about their competence or veracity. To discover the reasons behind the whale, all that is needed is a thorough investigation.
Instead of arbitrary generalizations, as in the HPS, CSICOP members conduct their investigations on a case by case basis, selecting them according to the publicity they have received. In some incidents, the result is positive and the explanation is satisfactory. In others, the explanation is contrived and unsatisfying. What, however, stands out is defective methodology: because even if all the cases investigated by CSICOP were explained which they are not always exists the possibility that among the thousands may exist unstudied cases whose validity is indisputable.
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