Similarly, an appendix to the 1968 symposium hearings on UFOs provided a scientific method for assessing the reliability of the perceptions of those who claimed to have seen a UFO. Included as an example of the method’s efficacy was the detailed evaluation of a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried white man who reported a large luminous disk hovering over Tucson at 3:00 A.M., November 17, 1967. “The Applied Assessment of Central Nervous System Integrity: A Method for Establishing the Creditability of Eye Witness and Other Observers” provides a thorough medical history and the results of a physical examination, laboratory studies of the man’s urine and blood, a neurologic evaluation, a qualitative ophthalmologic examination, and a quantitative neuro-ophthalmologic investigation. It concludes that heavy smoking and the early stages of alcoholism damaged the witness’s eyes so as to make his sighting “highly unlikely.”
Results from the physical examination alone were said to indicate the probability of misperception. Nonetheless, the witness was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation, too. Although the report acknowledges the man’s college education, exemplary record as a bank employee, and sense of responsibility, it finds more significance in the fact that “he was breast fed for nearly two years because his mother couldn’t afford to buy store milk”; that he was “more than once called a ‘mamma’s boy’ by his peers”; and that his sexual activity was limited to masturbating once a week to the fantasy of removing the “round, plastic, chartreuse nipple covers” from a belly dancer who performed at a local bar. On the basis of these tests, the probability of the man’s credibility w’as estimated at 5 percent, putting him in the “extremely impaired category.”
Dr. Sydney Walker, the author of the assessment method, observes that without these tests, the witness might have seemed highly credible because of his respectable bank position, general demeanor, and claim to good health. Thanks to the medical evaluation, however, the witness is discredited as a sexually dysfunctional alcoholic and the sighting is explained as “an acute illusory phenomenon in which his regressed oral yearning for his mother was symbolically represented in the ‘light.’ That the object took the color and shape it did (like the nipple covers) further demonstrates [the witness’s] all-pervasive oral fixation.”
This kind of assessment method — and there was at least one resignation from the Colorado research team over the legitimacy of a similar psychologically based witness questionnaire — constructs the UFO witness as an object of medical research. Instead of a participant in discussion with other scientists and citizens, the witness is something to be examined and studied, a lab rat rather than someone to be heard. The discourse of science is a site where the witness is fabricated into a test subject, not a language that the witness can use to describe what he or she has seen. Consequently, the lines in the battle over credibility are drawn. The question is whether witnesses, and UFO researchers, have the right to use these same scientific and legal languages or whether the very rules of their use turn witnesses into objects and researchers into crazies.
Hynek, the Northwestern professor w’ho had worked with the Air Force on Project Blue Book, responded to the House symposium attacks on the character of saucer witnesses. Stressing that fear of ridicule caused most sightings to go unreported, he defended the credibility of witnesses in the same languages that were deployed in the attempt to discredit them. People risked mockery and dismissal for two reasons, Hynek said: “One, is out of a sense of civic duty. Time and again I will get a letter saying, I haven’t said this to anybody, but I feel it is my civic duty as a citizen to report this. … The second reason is that their curiosity finally bugs them, They have been thinking about it and they want to know what it was they saw.” Like McDonald’s testimony in the same symposium, Hynek’s tries to reinsert witnesses into a public of credible citizens, into a discussion carried out among Americans who respect one another, who take one another seriously.
What this meant, though, was that McDonald’s and Hynek’s efforts to support witnesses actually served to consolidate the terms in which this respect could be given. Ufology so affirmed the standards and practices of science and government that it simultaneously challenged and reinscribed their authority. Those who counted as “reliable” occupied a legitimate subject position as citizens or scientists, those whose moral standing could go without question or whose professional credentials made perceptual errors unlikely.
Other ufologists contributed to this consolidation of the conditions of credibility. Many called attention to sightings from pilots, astronauts, professors, and military men. In one chapter alone of Flying Saucers: Top Secret, Donald Kevhoe identifies as UFO witnesses (whose signed reports are in NICAP files) the following: three pilots; “a well-known Baltimore astronomer, Dr. James C. Bartlett, Jr., author of numerous scientific articles in astronautical journals”; and a Lutheran minister, the Rev. Kenneth R. Hoffman, and his wife (who remains unnamed). Similarly, Gerald Ford’s letter refers to sightings by a retired Air Force colonel, a scientist from MIT, an aeronautical engineer, and twelve policemen, asking: “Are we to assume that everyone who says he has seen a UFO’s an unreliable witness?”
The early struggles of the ufologists can be read in terms of their reinscription of conventional ideas as to who counts, who is trustworthy, who is actually and above all a citizen. Such an interpretation, however, needs to be supplemented by attention to the battle around the very nature of truth out of which modern saucer stories emerge. The early ufologists fought against essentialist understandings of truth that would inscribe truth in objects (and relations between objects) in the world. Rejecting this idea, they relied on an understanding of truth as consensual. If our living in the world is an outcome of a consensus on reality, they would explain, then stop and notice that not everyone is consenting to the view of reality espoused by science and government. For this so-called consensus reality is exclusionary; it is based on the silencing and discrediting of real, everyday people, people who want to be heard. If truth is truly consensual, then other voices — those of the UFO witnesses — have to be included. As long as they are dismissed and objectified, as long as they don’t count as citizens whose voices and opinions are worth taking seriously, then truth will be only a play of power.
– Aliens in America (1998), pp. 43-5