From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!karn
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: Re: Food for thought about ESP and etc
Article-I.D.: eagle.789
Posted: Wed Feb 16 23:45:34 1983
Received: Mon Feb 21 19:46:58 1983
References: csu-cs.2026

Part of the problem with "subjective" evidence is that it is the
observer who judges the validity of his own observations, and no one
else can prove them right or wrong.

Everyone has limits to the reliability of their senses; you certainly
don't have to be on drugs or insane to perceive things incorrectly.
Most people know how their eyes can be fooled with optical illusions,
and most of us are prepared for them since we've seen them before.
However, there are other more subtle situations in which the "sensor parity
error" never gets flagged, and we really believe we have seen something
that isn't really there.

Let me give several examples:

1. An excellent earlier article in this newsgroup described some of the
strange things the human mind often experiences in a semi-conscious state,
e.g., while you're drifting off to sleep or waking up.  I first learned
about this in a psychology course when sleep and dreams were covered.  Shortly
thereafter, I had an experience of my own.  One morning I woke up facing
the wall next to my bed to see a spider apparently crawling across it;
I watched it for what seemed like a few moments. Then the "spider" suddenly
vanished as I came fully awake.  It was only then that I realized that it
wasn't really there, and the image didn't really look like a spider after
all - just a black blob.  This "hallucination" certainly convinced me of
the fallibility of MY senses when half asleep!

2. The wife of a friend of mine once maintained that she had once seen a UFO,
and that no other phenomenon, including meteors, could explain it.
A few summers ago, I mentioned the upcoming Perseid meteor shower, and
they went out to observe it. When she saw one particularly bright meteor,
she realized what it had been that she saw years before.

3. Even some well-known skeptics are willing to admit to being fooled.
In his book "The View From Serendip", Arthur Clarke describes one
evening during the filming of 2001 in which he and Stanly Kubrick saw a
bright object rise into the sky, hover apparently motionless for a
minute or so, then rapidly go back down.  They had been out looking for
the Echo satellite, but this object appeared when the newspaper had
said no Echo pass would occur.  Besides, they thought, a
satellite would appear to move most rapidly when nearly overhead, while
this object appeared to rise, stand still, and set.  They really thought
they had witnessed a UFO. It turns that the newspaper had been in error;
it really WAS Echo, and the apparent hovering was due to the
fact that they had no points of reference to detect motion when the
satellite was overhead.  (This occurred on the balcony of a city
apartment, so the streetlights made most stars invisible.)
I wonder how many "unexplainable" UFOs have been described by people who
weren't as aware of their own susceptibility to illusions.

Phil Karn