On its publication, I shared news of Ballester-Olmos’ and Heiden’s collection. Now, Nigel Watson has done us all a favour, sureying the volume’s contents in a two-part review. Part one can be read here; two, here.
Nigel Watson reviews The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony
Skunkworks 
Thank you for posting the links to this helpful review, Bryan!
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Thanks to Nigel Watson for doing the hard work!
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The essay collection is impressive overall. In many cases psychological, perceptual, cultural factors–as well as deception, psi-ops, etc.–can account for most UAP sightings as well for claims by many “whistleblowers” about captured alien craft, back-engineered warp drives, dead grays, and the like. The rabbit hole is very deep. Nevertheless, I remain open to the possibility that some small percentage of UAP reports do give an account of encounters with an “entity” that in some sense exists from its own side, and thus cannot be explained away as or reduced to a misperception, wish fulfillment, psychological complex, fantasy proneness, and so on, even though such show that many sightings are not encounters with independently existing objects. I do wish humans were in fact encountering non-human otherness, and I suspect many thoughtful skeptics do as well. They insist, however, that firm conclusions be drawn only after incontrovertible evidence is brought forth. I agree this stance. We are not there, at least not yet, despite all the recent talk of disclosure. I wish it were otherwise. There is more work to be done.
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However much one absolutely cannot resolve the matter a priori, one aspect of entity encounters that suggests they are _not_ enounters with an Other is how human, all-too-human these Others invariably are. That is, any such encounter would be INTERspecies, comparable to that between human beings and any other organism on earth, unlike the interCULTURAL character that almost all such encounter stories report. The case of SETI is analogous: the Other searched for is ourselves that we ourselves have unconsciously disguised. That being said, however, I reiterate: the matter can only be settled a posteriori, but just what might be said to count as a FACT in this matter is itself a problem, and therein lies one necessary research project…
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Bryan, as soon as I posted my reply (above), I realized that what counts as a fact is what’s at stake to begin with! Thirty years ago when John Mack had gone public about the “abduction” phenomenon, he spoke about the matter with a skeptical Boston Glob report whom he had gotten to know over the years. John asked the reporter: “Would you believe 50,000 people who claimed to have witnessed in broad daylight this morning a 300 foot long mother ship landing on Boston Commons?” After hesitating a moment, the report replied: “No.” Even seeing things “with one’s own eyes” is sometimes not enough, given the unreliability of our senses. And when it comes to interpreting data gathered by various kinds of sensors, these too are always contestable in view of one or another possible factors. What is more, as AI (and yes defining “intelligence” is a big issue here, as you noted recently!) really gets going, “deep fakes” are going to become very difficult if not impossible to disprove. It’s as if the whole UAP phenomenon has for decades been a standing wave, seemingly close to breaking but never doing so, which is one reason that even some long-standing UAP researchers finally throw in the towel. Even if there is some “there” there, perhaps UAP are intrinsically elusive phenomena that are unable to be pinned down.
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“It’s as if the whole UAP phenomenon has for decades been a standing wave, seemingly close to breaking but never doing so”: which is why I engage with the phenomenon’s cultural being, rather than its “physical” being. Regardless of its “reality”, its reality is uncontrovertibly sociocultural, a significance that is abyssal and open-ended. The most recent evidence is the seriousness with which U.S. government representatives are taking the matter and more importantly _the ways_ they are taking the matter. The article I remark and share by Harrington in my most recent “Sightings” post is very perceptive in this regard. I will likely have some more to say in this coming Friday’s “Sightings” post, after the House Oversight Committee’s UFO hearing Wednesday…
The question Mack posed to the reporter is interesting in at least two regards, aside from its pertinence to the work collected in the book reviewed by Watson: first, no such event has occurred, and the phenomenon seems to suggest that no such event is forthcoming. Secondly—and this demands a footnote!—I remember reading somewhere that the aboriginal peoples of “America” _could not see_ the ships that brought the Europeans to their shores, so utterly alien was the visual stimulus. There is a “hermeneutic” aspect to the phenomenon that has yet to be dug into with sufficient rigor (despite Kripal’s and Strieber’s raising the issue (in a frustratingly breezy manner) in their co-authored _The Super Natural_)….
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