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E.T.H. -- Extremely Tenuous Hypothesis
by John Rimmer

[from http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk]


Jerome Clark, editor of the influential International UFO 
Reporter, is a strong proponent of the extraterrestrial theory 
of UFO origin.  His recent booklet, _Spacemen, Demons and 
Conspiracies: the evolution of UFO hypotheses_, is critical of 
the psychosocial hypothesis, and takes a sideswipe at Magonia 
and some of our contributors.  Naturally, we were keen to review 
the publication, and the publishers, The Fund for UFO Research 
were kind enough to send us a copy.  As with everything Clark 
writes, it is well worth reading.

The booklet begins with brief summaries of the range of UFO 
hypothesis, including occult theories -- largely Meade Layne, 
early versions of the ETH connected with the turn of the century 
airship waves, and a variety of cranky 'UFOs as living creatures'
theories.  Clark spends a disproportionate amount of space on 
this extremely minor sub-theory.

The major part of the book is an attack on the 'New-Ufology' 
ideas of the sixties and seventies, particularly the works of 
John Keel and Jacques Vallee.  Clark himself, like many Americans
now settled into middle-aged, middle-class conformity, has 
problems about the nineteen-sixties.  Clark's historicist view 
of ufology sees it emerging from the original sightings and 
contacts in the 'forties into two separate strands of thought: 
the 'saucerians' -- pro-contact, space-brothers oriented, and 
the 'ufologists', scientific and sceptical of contact claims.  
There is a great deal of truth in this, although the separation 
between the two streams was never as total as Clark believes, 
and he has rather starry-eyed views on the scientific rigour of 
the 'ufologists'.  At one point he claims: "To [ufologists] the 
ETH was something more to be assumed than to be speculated about 
[true, but hardly scientific].  Ufology's best and brightest had 
more interest in investigating reports and correlating data than 
in wondering about the Greater Meaning of it All".  In your dreams,
Jerry!

In fact it would be hard to find a UFO magazine in the fifties 
and sixties which did not from time to time waste a great deal 
of paper in vague, speculative rambling articles -- what Hilary 
Evans memorably describes as 'deserts of arid speculation' -- 
about life and the universe.  The magazines that didn't, 
presumably Clark's data correlators, were simply listings of 
cases; mostly uninvestigated reports from newspapers.  These 
were, and are still, very useful in their way, but hardly 
represent the 'hard work and shrewd analysis' which Clark claims 
as a hallmark of the scientific 'ufologists'.

This cosy sub-division of the subject came under threat in the 
seventies with the rise of two of Clark's principal betes-noir, 
John Keel and Jacques Vallee.  I agree that Keel was responsible 
for introducing a new element of anti-scientific irrationalism 
into the field of ufology, and in Magonia's '25 Years Ago' 
columns you will have read how Alan Sharp regularly locked horns 
with Keel over his lack of scientific credibility.  In Keel's 
favour it must be said that his investigations (and when all is 
said he probably did more first-hand investigation than most so-
called scientific 'ufologists') opened out the field of ufology, 
and yes, Clark is right, helped undermine the complacent 
acceptance of the ETH amongst most ufologists.

Vallee is a scientist, and his first two books are still held up 
as examples of the kind of 'correlative' work that Clark assumes 
was the standard for ufologists at the time.  The fact that they 
are still worth reading simply serves to demonstrate how little 
of that type of work was actually going on then.  With Passport 
to Magonia Vallee moved into the realm of 'sixties counterculture',
in Clark's view.  I suspect that most of Vallee's interest in 
ufology was fulfilled by the time he published Invisible College
in the late seventies, and his later books are largely re-hashes 
or diaries of his more productive period.

The real problem for Clark's thesis with both these writers is 
that they showed that the UFO phenomenon was not containable in 
a simple ETH pigeonhole.  The problem was one of perception: the 
perception of what constituted a UFO report.  Clark castigates 
FSR for carrying articles by the likes of F.W. Holiday about the 
Loch Ness Monster, and certainly they were tedious enough to 
read at the time.  But at least they were able to demonstrate 
that the ETH was not the only unproven theory that could be hung 
around the phenomenon.

Naturally it is when Clark comes to discuss and dismiss the 
psycho-social hypothesis (PH) that Magonia's collective ears 
prick up.  We really wanted to see the context in which we 
were described as giving aid and succour to a 'walking corpse'.  
Disappointingly there is no context.  Clark simply raises the 
subject then throws it away virtually unexamined.  Its 
proponents are described as 'counterculturalists' (them again, 
Jerome Clark does seem to have a problem with this concept), 
Jungians, English majors (I presume he means 'graduates' in 
British-English, rather than military gentlemen) and librarians. 
OK, I admit it, I'm a librarian, so is Peter Rogerson.  As far 
as I know the only difference this has made to my life as a 
ufologist is that I have been able to order obscure books free 
rather than pay 50p for a reservation card.

His description of the PH is brief: "psycho-social theorists 
held that cultural imagination and altered states of consciousness
caused individuals to undergo visionary experiences which they 
mistook for 'real' (event-level) ones.  Since high-strangeness 
claims were practically never matched with the sort of evidence 
needed to sustain them, this was not, on the surface, an 
unreasonable approach".  This is a very fair summary of the 
psycho-social approach, and I was expecting a counter-argument 
at least as detailed as his partially-successful demolition of 
Keel and Vallee.  But we are simply told that "as eventually 
became all too apparent" the theory was suitable only for the 
dreaded librarians who wrote about ufology as "an exercise in 
literary criticism".

I think part of the reason why Clark has abdicated on his 
attempt to counter the PH is that, despite such writers as 
Martin Kottmeyer and one or two other contributors to Fortean 
rather than ufological literature, it has never really been 
seriously promoted in the USA, and as is becoming clearer and 
clearer, American ufology like much of American society is 
tremendously insular.  This is understandable in a such a huge 
and diverse country, but it does reduce the range of influences 
and ideas which impinge on US ufology.  To read an average 
American UFO magazine it would be hard to discern that anywhere 
else in the world exists which does not have a link with the US: 
Rendlesham only features in American magazines because it was a 
US base; the Berwyn Mountain case has no such transatlantic 
connection so it is largely ignored.  The massive dominance of 
government cover-up and conspiracy theories in American ufology 
can be sustained only by ignoring the fact that there are other 
governments around the world, not all of whom are at the US's 
bidding.  Have the Roswell proponents ever considered what might 
happen if a similar event occured in Libya, Iran or China?

On the last page this book is revealed as a prop for the ETH.  
Clark admits that humans do perceive a remarkable range of 
anomalous experiences: "as ... psychosocial theorist rightly 
remind us ... gods, monsters fairies, even merfolk ... we can 
grant the legitimacy of fantastic experience without taking the 
further step of confusing it with event", except of course for 
UFOs.  The core UFO phenomenon is the "daylight disc, radar/
visual and landing traces (and, perhaps crash/retrieval)".  The 
ETH, in this case has been shown to be "reasonable, testable 
and meaningful.  At the least it has demonstrated the presence 
of a physical phenomenon with a technlogy which interacts with 
its immediate environment."  

Well, Jerome, where are these cases?  You quote Trans-en-
Provence, yet this has already been effectively demolished by 
French ufologist Eric Maillot.  Maillot's original report is 
even more devastating that the edited version published in UFOs 
1947-1997 (Fortean Tomes, 1997).  We are anxious to see those 
cases which show the ETH to be reasonable and testable, and ask 
Jerome Clark, and any other ufologist who claims such evidence 
to send details to us, and maybe we too will be obliged finally 
to give the living corpse of the psycho-social hypothesis a 
decent burial.

Seriously, send details to Magonia at the editorial address: 

http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/index.htm#john
johnr@magonia.demon.co.uk
John Harney
27 Enid Wood House, High Street, 
Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1LN.