Part II of my conceptual review of "Anomaly - A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon" by Daniel Coumbe

 Part Two of Anomaly: A Scientific Exploration of the UFO Phenomenon asks three “bigger picture” questions: Where Are All the UFOs? When Are All the UFOs? And finally: What Does It All Mean? The main sections of Part II are concerned with ferreting out important correlations, or at least seeing if those that are frequently claimed or discussed in ufology actually pan out. Are UFOs significantly correlated with miliary bases, bodies of water, earthquakes, the time of the year, or the release of UFO- or alien-themed movies? This would give us a sense of the where and the when. What are they and what do they want? This would give us a sense of what it all means. But what’s most valuable in this section, besides the actual analysis itself, is the primer he gives to the reader who mightn’t be familiar with the basics of prob and stat (as we said above). Let us dive in a bit more.

There’re all sorts of things we think are associated with one another, and in the UFO community there’re all sorts of beliefs or claims about this-or-that being associated with a UFO, or the UFO being associated with this-or-that other phenomenon. Science does start with correlations, but the question is not just whether x is correlated with y—the question is whether the correlation isn’t just a matter of chance, and if not, how strong of a correlation we have, and whether it’s a stable and consistent correlation. Since many things are associated with many other things, we have to precisefy this claim of there being a correlation; thus we have the concepts real vs. spurious correlations, and the all-important notion of statistical significance. Both of which concepts can be quantified based on the data of purported associations between some x and some y. The x’s and y’s of the world are more weakly or more strongly correlated with each other (if there’s a real as opposed to a spurious correlation to begin with). But the stronger it is, the more a clear pattern emerges—and it’s the consistent patterns in nature which science likes to focus on. For the statistical patterns, we want to know: what explains the correlations and their particular structure?

So we have a two-step process here. First we have to demonstrate that the purported correlation actually exists and how strong of a correlation there is; and then we have to show that it isn’t spurious. The first quantity is known as the r-value, which can be positive (one variable increases with another), negative (one variable decreases as the other increases—we might call this “anticorrelation”), or zero (no or negligible correlation). The second quantity is the p-value and this is the probability that the correlation isn’t purely a matter of chance—that it’s not spurious, meaning that as we increase the sample size, the correlation (positive or negative) won’t just evaporate (which would suggest that we just didn’t have enough data to establish that a real correlation actually existed). It can’t be stressed how valuable this primer is, and how important it is in every serious ufological study. Now let’s look at how this plays out in some of this last part of Coumbe’s text.

The one most fundamental problem in any science is data—as in, having good data from which to extract correlations, and upon which to base analyses and subsequent conclusions. It is a zero-level problem. Above, we talked some about the mathematics and analysis of correlations, but the assumption is that there’s a good dataset to work with from the get-go. Statistical analysis—to hazard a trite observation—is only as good as its dataset. And it’s not just about having big data, either. It’s about the methods of collecting the data in the first place (from instruments and sensors, from people and populations, and so on). As Coumbe works out the statistics of UFOs, we must worry about the set of data used to produce the statistics; we can ogle all we want about spurious correlations, or statistical significance, but if the underlying data that produces the correlations we’re ogling over isn’t very good to begin with, well, then we’re just ogling. And in section 6.2 “UFO Database” we have to start worrying right away, since, without much preliminary housekeeping analysis of the dataset, Coumbe helps himself to the massive NUFORC UFO reporting database.

“Some attempts have been made by NUFORC,” Coumbe notes, “to remove obvious hoaxes and corroborate reports; however it is impossible to do so in all cases given such a large database” (p.99)—so, why don’t we make an effort to locate and utilize databases that have in fact produced a reliable set of UFO reports, eliminating not only the “obvious hoaxes” but also those many sky-bound phenomena easily mistaken for truly anomalous (and classic) UFOs? From the fact that NUFORC’s massive (and well-known) database isn’t defragged (as it were), it obviously doesn’t follow that no such database exists. So, do such cleaner databases exist? It is a really important question.

So I think we’ve located the one—rather major—flaw in the text. After many decades of UFO investigation and research by dozens of well-qualified individuals, going all the way back to the Blue Book years, J. Allen Hynek and even Jacques Vallée (yes, let’s not forget that, if we’re to be honest, while Vallée is probably best understood as a ufological humanist in the great European sense, he’s also a trained scientist and has produced important early “nuts & bolts” ufology), we know that upwards of 95 to 98 percent of all UFO reports can be rather unproblematically explained away using a standard repertoire of categories: birds or sky-bound animals; natural celestial phenomena (planets, stars, meteors); human artifacts and technology (satellites, planes, rockets, drones, glittering space debris); natural terrestrial phenomena (rare, like “ball lightning” or piezoelectricity during earthquakes, or common, like ordinary lightning); and so on. Consequently, over the years many ufologists have labored to produce databases that were suitably “cleaned” of this kind of noise, leaving what we can call the anomalous residual: between 5 to 3 percent of all UFO reports that cannot be conventionally accounted for. But how strong is this “cannot”—I mean, this is where we now begin to really apply those filters. We have to estimate the reliability, credibility and overall soundness of the report of a phenomenon which cannot be accounted for conventionally. In other words, Coumbe’s analysis should start here.

But it turns out that there aren’t many such (cleaned) databases to work with. Some, like a MUFON database that apparently exists, as Mark Rodeghier kindly pointed out to me in email correspondence, aren’t even publicly available; others, like the database produced by Larry Hatch, and mostly rescued from both obscurity and deletion, are mostly out-of-date (according to Rodeghier). So one would have to do a good deal of serious legwork to find and utilize—or to just outright create—the right sort of database in order to run the kind of analysis Coumbe ran with the noisy NUFORC set.

Those four cases examined in Part I should have been indicative for Coumbe: they’re truly anomalous—part of this 5 to 3 percent residuum, the recalcitrant cases. Using these four, and others that are, epistemically at least, in the same league, would establish the threshold of admissibility for this residual category of true unidentifieds—that is: the genuine unidentified aerial phenomena. Our dataset should be constituted by these cases, and supposing our dataset were to include only cases from this genuinely anomalous residuum, we could say that we’re starting with good, clean data. If we were to find correlations of real importance or interest, it would have to be using this kind of a dataset. Consequently, our confidence that Coumbe has managed to produce a sound statistical analysis in his Part II is rather diminished. Bad (i.e., noisy) data in, bad conclusions out.

Indeed, given the noise of the data, we’re forced to look at Coumbe’s analysis as not really dealing with the phenomenon (UAPs) a ufologist is actually interested in; rather it deals only with reports (or even the reporting) of UAP—something much less interesting to the ufologist per se. It’s certainly interesting for someone, but if we want to know about how the phenomenon itself is correlated with other events or locations of interest, and try to draw conclusions from this about UAP themselves, then we don’t want to know about reports of UAP—we want to treat the report as indicative of an actual UFO! If we haven’t filtered the dataset down to that recalcitrant residuum, that’s all we actually have: mere reports of people saying they saw strange things in the sky; we don’t yet have descriptions of the thing itself—the genuine UFO. As Mark Rodeghier said in that email, we have here a “category error”: Coumbe wants to draw conclusions about the statistical correlations between UFOs and other things (military bases or nuclear facilities, bodies of water, and so on … the typical menu of things ufologists are interested in knowing), but he ends up with the wrong category of thing in his correlational analysis: UFO reports, rather than genuinely anomalous aerospace phenomena having been witnessed in association with the places or events of interest. So the best we can say about all of what we find in Part II, therefore, is that the results obtained are just plain inconclusive: maybe they have something to do with actual UFOs, maybe not. Even so, we should in the least lay out what’s going on in this second and final section of Coumbe’s important first book.

Part II is divided into three subsections: the first asks where are all the UFOs? (that’s chapter 6); the second asks when are all the UFOs? (that’s chapter 7); and the third asks what it all means (chapter 8). In chapter 6, Coumbe attempts to determine whether statistical correlations of significance exist between sightings of or encounters with UFOs (but now we know it’s just UFO reports) and: miliary activity (sightings near bases, nuclear test sites, and so on); bodies of water (fresh as opposed to seawater, even coastline length); environmental factors (are UFOs visiting us because we’re damaging the planet’s environment?); earthquakes; and even blood type (there is a correlation of significance!)—which is a rather odd discovery he makes (though now that we understand we’re looking at the correlation between UFO reporting and these other factors, the strangeness might be somewhat diminished).

In chapter 7, he’s interested in seeing if UFO sightings are periodic (whether they cluster, say, based on the time of year); whether they are encountered more frequently during certain events of (potentially world-historical) importance (as to why he picks up on this specifically, well, that’s an interesting tale I’ll relate in a moment); and, perhaps more mundanely, whether UFOs are seen more frequently when a big sci-fi flick drops and people are keyed into the idea of ETs, advanced/unconventional craft, and so on—or maybe there’s an uptick when there’s a predictable meteor shower. All interesting questions—but we know it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with UFOs per se, just the reporting on UFOs that gets done (and sent into NUFORC, in particular). A more interesting figure to obtain would be whether reports of genuine UFOs (those that score higher on Coumbe’s own credence scale) are correlated with any of this; indeed, we might ask what happens as the credence score goes up: does that make it more or less likely that a UFO will be reported at all? Or, as the score goes up, does this predict for time of year, sci-fi film releases, or any of the other variables Coumbe takes a look at (or vice versa, of course: does time of year or sci-fi film release predict for the credence measure of a given UFO report)?

Before I move to a quick discussion of Coumbe’s wrap-up chapter 8, I must engage in a bit of (and is this now to be expected from me?) crankiness. So, his chapter on “when are all the UFOs?” starts off—at least in my view—very oddly. It starts off by recounting the Travis Walton abduction story. Though he admits that “it is not known whether this account is true”—and of course the problem is what it would mean to know whether it was true, apart from a single person reporting on a rather extraordinary encounter—what is known is that Walton was actually missing for several days, and that a number of people that went looking for him (firefighters, friends, and police officers—dozens) couldn’t find him. He turns up, dazed and confused, one night days later at a phone booth phoning friends and family to come get him, in a location some thirty miles from where he’d allegedly been abducted. Famously, Walton was able to give a very detailed description of what his alleged abductors looked like, and they weren’t very human—rather, humanoid. And that’s what Coumbe wants to kick off his time chapter with: a description of what the alleged beings looked like so that we might get a sense of who they might be, and where they might be from—or rather, when. Welcome back to the Masters’ thesis: from the Walton descriptions, and the many other descriptions of the so-called “greys”, we get the catalyst for Michael Masters’ thesis that maybe, just maybe, these entities (supposedly abducting unwitting human beings) are us—from the future.

Why am I cranky? Well, I’ve already tried to explain that in a previous post, but I just think the whole idea is rather, well, silly: it is a speculation built on top of conjecture, balanced on scantly-tested hypotheses from evolutionary biology.

I mean, yes, we can fully well grant the point that, perhaps, in the distant future, if we become space-faring beings, our morphology would evolve to become the squishy, diminutive, pallid, large-eyed kind of grey alien thing. But (not dismissing this whole thing out of hand) that assumes the entities spend lots of time in space, whereas the kinematical evidence of UAP (considered as craft) would suggest otherwise: if the UAP (like the JAL 1628 object) we’ve observed can sustain the speeds with which we’ve measured them to move, you can hop from here to another star system, even to another galaxy altogether, in an arbitrarily short amount of onboard ship time. And that’s just according to special relativity, let alone what’s being said about pulling off great feats of interstellar travel using general relativistic effects from things like warp drives or on-demand wormholes. So, ok, let’s just help ourselves to that posit with little evidence to go on. Next, we do some projective modeling from evolutionary biology. Fine. That’s within Masters’ area of specialization, and I won’t try to barge in on his turf.

Now we have the time travel bit. Again: purely speculative. Sure, it’s perfectly legal in physics for there to be some form of time travel—but the only time travel we have anything like evidence for is future-directed time travel, not time travel to the past: particles showering down from the cosmos experience extended lifetimes, hitting ground-based detectors on Earth when they should have long since expired, proving relativistic time-dilation (the expansion or contraction of time-keeping relative to another frame of reference). In special relativity, it is a comparatively easy thing to move rather quickly into the future: you just have to move fast enough relative to a well-chosen frame of reference. (If you want to go into Earth’s future, you just have to move really fast relative to everyone on Earth, and in a short amount of time for you, the traveler, you can return with history having advanced many centuries or millennia.) Going back in time to the past requires far curvier distortions of our spacetime, and that means it will require much more exotic states of matter-energy to pull the trick off—exotica we have scant evidence even exists, or exists in anything like the right quantities (I mean except for blackholes, but then again, when things get that exotic, we technically don’t even know what’s going on inside, since it’s singular inside: Einstein’s GR blows up into a mathematical singularity and we can’t really say for sure how things are behaving within the singularity itself). Backwards time travel is, to repeat, totally legal and permissible according to relativity (and even according to some versions of quantum mechanics, we should note: there is something called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics first put forward by theorist J. Cramer in the 1980s, which has backwardly-causal, time-reflected quantum influences). But it’s not entirely clear whether there would have to be serious physical constraints in place highly limiting what one can actually do (like making it so that you can’t kill your own grandfather), or how far back in time one can go (for example as Matt Szydagis recently pointed out to me at a post-Thanksgiving brunch: you won’t be able to go further back in time than when the machine itself, used for the travel, was created—maybe that’s a no-duh kind of moment we should have here…). We just don’t know much here (besides the theory), and certainly not enough to base a whole ufological thesis on, and then expect to be taken very seriously. But yet that’s how Masters’ thesis is taken—and by Coumbe. I respectfully demur…

In chapter 8, finally, Coumbe tries to tie everything together: so what does it all mean—are we dealing with advanced nonhuman craft, or what? Well, he inches towards a conclusion like this step-by-step. Let’s see where we end up.

To begin with, what the evidence shows so far is sufficient to answer much skepticism about the so-called “reality” of the phenomenon itself. Referencing Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, many skeptics, Coumbe suggests, have to wonder whether there’s a there there to UFOs. Sagan:

Now what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention [that such a dragon exists], no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? (p. 154)

In the scheme of things, this is a pretty low bar to meet, but UFOs as evidenced in Coumbe’s text (and in countless other texts over the decades) definitely pass muster on at least the existence question: there’re there, and there is a there to study. That’s what the whole point of Part I of his text was: it was meant to establish that there is a real phenomenon to be studied, and it was meant to answer any remaining skepticism about that basic reality (rationally, we must hasten to add). Coumbe (and we quote him at length, p. 154):

A claim is made that UFOs exist in our skies. And so, we play the part of the skeptical rational-minded friend and try to test this claim. The first question we might ask is: can we see them? This corresponds to our eyewitness testimony category of the evidence. Quickly followed by: can our instruments see them? This equates to our evaluation of single and multiple sensor data. To eliminate the possibility of some kind of optical illusion, we also ask: do they leave behind physical evidence? This equates to the physical evidence category. Can we prove or disprove the contention that UFOs exist in our skies? If they do exist, what are they? do any of their characteristics imply a nonhuman origin? We must carefully review all the evidence we have collected over the course of part one of this book and try to reach a rational and balanced conclusion.

Based on the evidence adduced for each of the four cases Coumbe examined in Part I, “the only objective and balanced conclusion is that UFOs probably are real physical objects.” Not a stunning conclusion, and certainly not new, for even “the Pentagon admitted the same thing,” Coumbe reminds us, “in its June 2021 document entitled ‘Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’” (p. 155). This only leaves “the real question,” which “is, What are they?”. Here is where Coumbe is rather unsurprisingly (and mundanely) honest—for it’s perfectly possible in some wide sense that the objects, as documented in his text and in many other places for decades, displaying all manner of anomalous flight characteristics and capabilities, are simply human-made but highly advanced (and highly secret) craft in possession by some one or more governmental agencies of some nation(s) on the planet Earth. It is, in all fairness, possible. Coumbe again:

Based on [the evidence examined in Part I], it is very tempting to conclude that these objects are not made by any government or private enterprise on Earth. However, I cannot conclusively exclude the possibility that these objects are highly advanced unmanned aircraft of some kind manufactured here on Earth. However, if this is the case, these advanced craft would represent a quantum leap in technology and material science, the magnitude of which is without precedent. It would also imply an unparalleled catastrophic failure in US National Security that would surpass the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 by several orders of magnitude.

Possible, yes. Likely: well, much less so. Perhaps we can argue that the possibility is vanishingly small: I mean, if we have reports going back many decades—think of what McDonald recounts in his famous lecture—of objects with the kinds of flight characteristics as what Coumbe documents for the more recent UFO encounters he examines, like the Japan Airlines case of 1986, then this means there have been human-made craft capable of pulling thousands of g’s, doing speeds in excess of Mach 30, since the 1950s?! Does not really sound all that plausible.

This, then, leaves one other category of prosaic explanation to be examined—natural phenomena.

Nature is vast, our knowledge vanishingly uninteresting in comparison (at least from Nature’s point of view). But we do know something about Nature and her workings—at least enough to know (if only intuitively) when we’re likely dealing with something that, as it were, acts without the kind of specific, deliberate intelligence with which we (as beings or creatures of Nature) act. That is, even if only intuitively, we can tell when a phenomenon is “natural” or when it’s deliberate, intentional, intelligent. But we must, for the sake of absolute fidelity to the depth of the ideas involved, note that this very dichotomy is interpretation-dependent: I mean, perhaps one takes the view that all of Nature is in some sense intelligent, so that it’s possible we’re dealing with a spectrum—gradations of intelligent behavior where the luminous orbs or discs sometimes accounted as UFOs are in some sense the manifestation not of a simple technological craft manufactured (in the sense familiar to us) by some nonhuman intelligence, but itself a new form of intelligent life … for completeness we mustn’t completely ignore this possibility. However, Coumbe isn’t interested in a potential nuance here; rather, he wants to insist on a simple, rather ordinary dichotomy—which is fine as far as it goes: a “purely natural phenomenon” is one that is decidedly not under “intelligent control”. And we can test for this, too, Coumbe thinks:

for example, you might encounter a river that flows between two almost perfectly straight banks for several kilometers before making a series of sharp thirty degree turns on its way toward a city. Such a river would imply its flow was under intelligent control since the river has a clear purpose and direction. Natural rivers are not perfect … Nature abhors straight lines.

And so on. Except that it’s clear for those phenomena thoroughly within what phenomenologists in philosophy would call our “lifeworld”. But the UFO presents to us (continuing the philosophical jargon) a kind of radical alterity—an “otherness” that often violates our expectations or the familiar categories of how things are supposed to behave in our estimation, relative to our (admittedly limited) set of experiences with Nature. Just take the Aguadilla object Coumbe examined in Part I. He sees that there is enough evidence in terms of its observed behavior to license his doubting that the UFO in this case “can be explained via natural phenomena alone,” since it seems to “display at least some degree of intelligent control”—after which he then mentions the more well-known “tic-tac” encounter Cmdr. David Fravor had, where the object was observed to have moved into position at a precise location in space designated as the pilots’ “CAP” rendezvous point. But the possibility—indeed, rather unconventional and perhaps too fringy even for Coumbe—that’s being overlooked is that some of these objects, like the Aguadilla spheroid—might simply be an intelligent form of life manifesting as structured objects. Yes it’s crazy to suggest it, but especially in the Aguadilla case, we didn’t get a very clear image in the optical range to be able to get a sense of its morphology, so we have to go on the thermal imagery. And what that shows in the end is something remarkable: the object splitting, which Coumbe likens to cellular mitosis. So, maybe in this case, we have reason to either nuance or collapse the dichotomy between natural vs. made. Nature is perhaps a good deal stranger than we might like to think—or allow ourselves to think.

We must gesture again to the brilliant film Nope. Maybe what we’re dealing with—at least in some cases, for we can’t lump all UFOs together—is a “natural” form of life, an “object”, capable of manipulating its own atomic and nuclear structure in such a way that incredible feats of kinematic maneuverability are possible. If the animals, fish and insects of our planet can work with the air and water in the beautiful and often incredible ways that they do, then why not with matter itself—even spacetime? Yes, very crazy; yes, very speculative, but we are most likely at the very earliest “Aristotelian” stage of our science of the UFO phenomenon, where we are confined to pure observation and must deduce our categories of existential-ontological description purely from the manner in which the phenomena present themselves to us, relative to what we think we already know about the ontological structure of Nature (which isn’t much, and is likely already very rough and naïve).

Well, so much for the meaty question “what are they?”—Coumbe’s analysis here suffers because it’s so strictly within the realm of the physics and the statistics, and not enough grounded in a richer humanistic tradition capable of handling the subtleties of the nature/manufacture, nature/human divide. Not that philosophers or your run-of-the-mill humanist would fare terribly much better. What we need is some kind of systematic analysis of how various UFOs present themselves to us, sufficient to be able to produce an accurate and detailed descriptive taxonomy and nomenclature (and I would argue for marshalling the resources of the rich tradition of philosophical phenomenology for this purpose). Maybe we are, in some cases, dealing quite directly with a new form of life that can work with matter itself like a fish can work with (and within) water. I can already control the matter of my body by just having certain intentions; how far can this ability go? And in general what is the nature of this psychophysical relation (which is also a very tight correlation!), and can we extend this analysis to encompass the UFO phenomenon in some sense? Perhaps as life evolves, the psychophysical (co)relation (that between “body” and “mind”) we’re already rather intimately familiar with expands and deepens; maybe the Aguadilla object discloses what is possible here. Or maybe not: maybe these objects, if they’re not human-made advanced craft, are a kind of probe—as many have speculated—built with a knowledge of nature we don’t quite yet have ourselves. Who knows. The fundamental problem is that we don’t interact with these phenomena very directly or very frequently; they are just not part of our lifeworld. They are therefore incapable of teaching us very much about the ontological structure of reality. But that’s not to say we can’t learn something here. Surely we can. But we have to eek out a framework, just like Aristotle did. And get a lot of stuff wrong…

So Coumbe’s text closes with these “bigger” questions, but, as the evidence is slim to begin with, we can’t expect much in the way of big answers to these bigger questions. We have to perhaps settle for much smaller questions and correspondingly smaller answers to them. We can’t really much answer the question “what do they want?” or come to some grand answer to the question “now what?”. In all honesty we must simply continue to build the right (civilian) research assets and deploy them smartly; gather good data with that well-built instrumentation; study the observations and eyewitness testimony in the context of our developing and evolving ecosystem of research and instrumentation; and ponder the “meaning of it all” dialogically, where the sciences work with (and maybe sometimes against—it’s ok!) the humanities. It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of a thing. But we need sound, clear, consistent, and honest work of the sort Coumbe is trying to do. His work—and I will repeat myself—stands before us in UAP studies as a model of how to write and how to think through the issues, despite the various shortcomings we’ve observed in the course of our conceptual review of his book. If we can improve upon Coumbe’s impressive first crack at the enigma, we will have gone pretty far to improve on UAP studies itself (if only stylistically, and in terms of our exposition of the various problems we must or wish to address). Now we have a kind of standard by which to measure ufological work going forward. And now we hopefully have a better sense of what we need and what we have to do in order to make the work better. One. Book. And. One. Paper. At. A. Time.