Symposium on unidentified flying objects: hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, second session, July 29, 1968.

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Second, what are the probable consequences from the point of view
of a sociologist or social psychologist of each of the major
explanations?
And third,I would like to comment quite explicitly on the hypothe-
sis that mass hysteria and hysterical contagion is common in many of
the cases.
I believe I should start with the mass hysteria hypothesis. To begin
with, I think there is very strong evidence that some of the cases do
result from hysterical contagion in the sense that this has often been
used by social psychologists. Once people are sensitized to the exist-
ence of some kind of a phenomenon (whether indeed it really exists
or not), when there is an ambiguous situation requiring explanation,
when there is emotion or anxiety associated with this, resulting from
the uncertainty, there are precisely the conditions that have been
observed repeatedly as resulting in what I shall call "improvised
news." Lacking well-verified facts and explanations, people always
seem to generate the news and the explanations that will reduce the
ambiguity, thereby reduce the anxiety they have about uncertain
situations.
There are many well-documented cases of this kind of mass hysteria
and hysterical contagion. I believe it will be out of place for me to
go into lengthy discussions of these episodes, but I shall comment on
a few ways in which we can examine the observations of unidentified
flying objects to assess whether this is a reasonable hypothesis for the
hard-core cases.
One of the first of these is one thoroughly familiar to attorneys,
;social psychlogists having no monopoly on an interest in the credibility
of testimony, but this is one of the principal means obviously of
establishing whether we should reasonably believe certain explanations.
The criteria, as most of you know, involve such things as the
established reputation of the witnesses, the quality and details of the
report, whether there are apparent motives for distortion or prevari-
cation, whether there was preexisting knowledge of the thing being
reported, whether there were multiple witnesses and whether there
was contact among these multiple witnesses, whether observation was
through more than one medium (for example, direct visual observation
confirmed by radar) whether there were verifiable effects that could
be observed after the reporting by witnesses, recently of the events
being reported, the duration of the period in which the witness was
able to observe the phenomenon how the witnesses reacted, whether
they had intense anxiety and emotion themselves, which might inter-
fere with their observation, and so forth.
These are some of the major factors, and a closely related factor in
assessing the credibility of the testimony is of course an assessment
of the care in gathering the testimony by interviewers themselves.
How does the testimony on hard-core UFO cases look with reference
to these criteria? I should say that there is a substantial subset of cases
which look very good on these criteria, which make it very difficult to
say that the witnesses involved were victims of hysterical contagion,
grossly misinterpreting familiar things.
For example, there is the Red Bluff, Calif., case in 1960, where two
policemen observed for 2 hours and 15 minutes constantly, apparently