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.

223
(The
biography
of
Dr.
Shepard
follows:)
DR.
ROGER
N.
SHEPARD
Roger
N.
Shepard
is
professor
of
psychology
at
Stanford
University.
Pre-
viously
he
was
professor
and
then
director
of the
psychological laboratories
at
Harvard
and,
for
eight
years
before that,
member
of
technical
staff
and
then
department
head
at
the
Bell
Telephone
Laboratories.
He
obtained his
Ph.D.
in
experimental
psychology
from
Yale (1955),
and
has
published
some
30
tech-
nical
and
scientific
papers
on
human
perception
and
memory
and
on
computer
methods
for
discovering
patterns in
large
arrays
of
data.
Although
he
has
had
a
long-standing
interest
in
the problem
of
UFOs,
this
is
his
first
paper
on
this
particular subject.
PREPARED STATEMENT
BY ROGER
N.
SHEPARD
SOME
PSYCHOLOGICALLY
ORIENTED
TECHNIQUES
FOR
THE
SCIENTIFIC
INVESTIGATION
OF
UNIDENTIFIED
AERIAL
PHENOMENA
ABSTRACT
Even
if
our
interest
is
in
the
study of
UFO's
as
some
sort
of
extraordinary
physical
phenomenon
(whether
of natural
or,
possibly,
of
intelligent,
extra-
terrestrial
origin),
our
study
cannot
ignore
the
inescapable
fact that
nearly
all
of
our
evidence
comes—not
from
physical
measuring instruments—but
from
human
observers.
So
far,
however,
we
have
consistently sold
the
human
observer
short.
Indeed,
in
neglecting
to
make
use
of
psychologically
oriented
techniques
that
would
more
fully
enable
observers to bring to
bear
their
really
rather
re-
markable
powers
of
perception
and
recognition,
we may
have
been
forfeiting
the opportunity of obtaining
evidence
from
independent
observers
that
wouldbe
sufficiently
convergent
and
well-defined
to
clarify
the true
nature of the
phenomena.
The
extent
to
which
the
apparent
unpredictability
of
UFO
Phenomena
Hinders
their
scientific
study
The
scientific
investigation
of
a
set
of
phenomena
becomes
possible
whenever
those
phenomena
exhibit
some
discernible
degree
of
order or
pattern.
Scientific
study
is
of course
greatly
facilitated
when,
as
in
astronomy,
the order
strongly
emerges
in
the
form
of
a
space-time pattern
of the very occurrences themselves.
For,
only then,
can
we
arrange
to
have
suitably
trained observers
suitably "train-
ing" powerful
and, hence
necessarily,
highly
directional
recording
and
measuringinstruments
on
the
right place
at
the
right
time.
•
Indeed,
by
contrast
with
astronomical
-phenomena,
those
loosely
classified
together
as
"Unidentified
Plying Objects"
("UFO's")
or
•
(with
perhaps
some-
what
less
commitment
implied
as
to
their real
nature)
"Unidentified Aerial
Phenomena"
sometimes appear almost
inaccessibleto
scientific
study.
Certainly'
phenomena
that are
rare
and
fleeting
are
difficult
enough
but,
if
in
addition
they are
totally
capricious
and
unpredictable
when
they
do
occur,
then the
sci-
entific
method
is
to
no
avail
and
we
are
reduced
to awaiting each
new
hap-
pening
in
the
same
primitive state
of
uncomprehending
docility.
The
repeated successes
of
science,
however, have
encouraged
us always
to
search for
pattern
and
order
even
when
none
at
first
appears.
And,
although
a
scientific
study does of course
become enormously
more
difficult
when
the
occur-
rences of the
phenomena do
not
fall
into
any
predictable
pattern in space
and
time,
it
remains
a
possibility
so long
as
some
regularity exists
within the
phenomena
themselves
whenever
they
do happen
to occur.
Thus,
in
the
field
of psychopathology,
even
if
it
were
the case that
some
psychological
phenomena(such, say,
as
psychotic episodes) occurred wholly unpredictably—striking
any
person at
any
time, quite
at
random,
we
could
still
study the
internal pat-
terns
of such
episodes
when
they
do
strike.
We
might
for
example
find that.
when symptom
A
appears,
it is
usually
accompanied
by symptom B,
but seldom
by symptom C, and
so on. This,
too, is
a
kind of
predictability
and
can evenlead to
a
degree of understanding
and
perhaps, eventually,
to
a method
of
treatment.