Psychosocial UFO hypothesis

In ufology, the psychosocial hypothesis, abbreviated PSH, argues that at least some UFO reports are best explained by psychological or social means. It is often contrasted with the better-known extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), and is particularly popular among UFO researchers in the United Kingdom, such as David Clarke, Hilary Evans, the editors of Magonia magazine, and many of the contributors to Fortean Times magazine. It has also been popular in France since the publication in 1977 of a book written by Michel Monnerie, Et si les ovnis n'existaient pas? (What if UFOs do not exist?).

UFOlogists claim that the psychosocial hypothesis is occasionally confused with aggressive anti-ETH debunking, but that there is an important difference in that the PSH researcher sees UFOs as an interesting subject that is worthy of serious study, even if it is approached in a skeptical (i.e. non-credulous) way.

The psychosocial hypothesis builds on the finding that most ufo reports have mundane explanations like celestial objects, airplane lights, balloons, and a host of other misperceived things seen in the sky which suggests the presence of an unusual emotional climate which distorts perceptions and the perceived significance and anomalousness of merely terrestrial stimuli. In the more exotic situation where people claim direct contact with extraterrestrials, the need for a psychosocial approach seems obligated by the presence of at least 70 claims of people meeting Venusians and at least 50 claims of meeting Martians; both worlds now known to be uninhabitable and devoid of any advanced civilization. Hoaxing seems to explain some of these contactees claims, but visionary dreams, hallucinations, and other mental processes are clearly implicated in such myth-based material. By generalization, the other material suggesting the presence of extraterrestrial entities from elsewhere is hypothesized to be explainable by similar means. The observed presence of surreal dream-like activity and imagery or themes based in the cultural environment and historically understood sources reinforces the proposition that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is unnecessary and, by Occam's razor, probably incorrect.

In the English UFO literature, the term psycho-social hypothesis first achieved prominence in April 1984 when the cover of Magonia featured "The Rise of the Psycho-social hypothesis" by Jacques Scornaux and Peter Rogerson. Scornaux's use of the term traces back to French UFO controversies spawned by Michel Monnerie whose book Le Naufrage des Extra-terrestres (1979) presented "le modèle socio-psychologique" as a direct challenge to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Claude Maugé had exposed Magonia readers to a brief outline of "the socio-psychological model" emerging from French studies in 1983, but flipping the syllables made the term more conventional to existing academic vocabulary. Rogerson's adopting the term represented to him an evolution and de-escalation of exotic hypotheses he had been entertaining that originally included paranormal notions like psi, collective hallucinations, and the collective unconscious. The term marked the embrace of a fully normal system of psychological processes that included dreams, hallucinations, fantasy interpretations of materially real stimuli, distortions of perception, and metachoric experiences. These were things influenced by cultural myths, social conditioning, and historical context. Since 1968, the circle of writers who wrote for Magonia had been exploring alternatives to the ETH under a general sense that it had failed to account for much of what was being seen in the high strangeness cases. Roger Sandell spoke of being a nuts and bolts ufologist until he realized that the UFO reports he had gathered from a 1905 Welsh wave made little sense and were part of a larger complex of ghost stories and religious visions. He notes that ufological thought had once been dominated by theories that Venus and Mars were the source of ufos, but the space program had shown they were in fact quite lifeless. Add in the apocalyptic and demonological material of then contemporary ufo thinking and the need for a major re-think seemed obliged. Could it all be mundane products of the human mind such as dreams, rumors and hoaxes? Peter Rogerson had similarly become convinced we are seeing the rise of a contemporary mythology and advocated for a comprehensive search for historical antecedents of ufo rumors. He began the search for the social factors driving ufo flaps and social panics. Magonia writers would point to "a relationship between ufo waves and times of radical social change" with Rogerson offering that the 1954 French flap had occurred at "a time of national defeat and government crisis." In one striking piece, he offered a lengthy meditation on the social resonances and ideological influences shaping the varying beliefs found among ufo writers over the course of ufo history.

Bertrand Méheust, a French sociologist, began a study of the science fiction parallels to ufo mythology when he stumbled upon a copy of the 1908 novel The Lightning Wheel by Jean de la Hire in his family's attic. He opened it and began reading how the central characters find themselves being lifted up by a ray into a flying disc that hums and glows with a halo of light. The discovery stimulated a search for parallels between ufo experience narratives and pre-1947 science fiction literature. Meheust found dozens of them, many of the more impressive including such wondrous effects as invisible force-fields, mesmeric mental effects, materializations and dematerializations, teleportation, traveling through walls, levitating entities, and engine-stopping rays. One could also find humanoids visiting earth for a range of motives that parallel later UFO thought: wanting to spy on humans, experiment on us, breed with us, create a multi-generational program to shape humanity, deal with their dying world, invade our world, and teach us lessons about cosmic history and the need for peace. While some of this can be relegated to coincidences driven by similar reasoning and expectations about the future, often these wonders are more reminiscent of supernatural and old occult mythology than what is really reasonably expected to be created using future technology. Michel Monnerie wove Meheust's study into his larger historical critique of what shaped ufo mythology. Michel Meurger deserves special mention for expanding Meheust's thesis into an impressive compendium of parallels brimming with nearly 800 footnotes and a set of dozens of illustrations. One subsequent paper, in English, presents a focused historical study, showing a continuum between the nightmarish medical horrors experienced in modern ufo abduction narratives, back through the mad scientists of pulp science fiction, that built in turn upon anti-vivisection propaganda and rumors circulating in the 19th century.

Jacques Vallee was among the first ufologists to note that electromagnetic effects associated with ufos could be found in earlier fiction such as a play written by Arthur Koestler and the first flying saucer novel – Bernard Newman's The Flying Saucer (1948). This observation has been expanded in one study published in Magonia that traces a continuum of anti-machine machines back through wartime rumors about Marconi developing engine-stopping rays and a sizeable culture backdrop of films, film serials, and pulp stories imagining future wars and the superweapons that would fight them.

Meheust saw early on that the more common species of aliens in ufo experiences were well represented in the Hugo Gernsback era (1926–1936) pulps. This insight has been followed up in increasing detail by subsequent researchers. Grays, in particular, are now well understood as having been a stereotype in large part because Gernsback specifically asked his writers to do stories where future evolution caused beings to develop large brains but atrophied bodies caused by technology making muscles irrelevant to survival. Gernsback loved H.G. Wells's writings, reprinted his work, and it was Wells who first developed the logic of such degenerative evolution which he inserted into his masterwork War of the Worlds (1898). Important modifications to the stereotype were introduced by the creative team that built the aliens appearing at the climax of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Completely black eyes and thin pencil necks soon appeared on bald brainy aliens in ufo encounters in mimicry of film imagery. While the public was given the impression that the aliens would be based on those found in ufo investigations; the CE3K alien design team had never been given drawings to base their work on. They were only given a brief verbal directive that they should be large-headed and short.

Some work has also been done on the cultural back-stories to insectoids, reptoids, and some lesser horror clichés. Even precursors to alien fashions have been looked into in a light-spirited manner.