Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

esearches might have a bearing on a discussion of human reactions to UFOs.)The technological use of schedules of reinforcement is rapidly expanding.... Techniquesinvolving schedules have been adapted to a wide range of species. Surprisingly similarperformances, particularly under complex schedules, have been demonstrated in organismsas diverse as the pigeon, mouse, rat, dog, cat and monkey. At the human level the analysis ofschedules has proved useful in the study of psychotic behavior and in the design ofeducational techniques for normal human subjects.... Other applications to the problem ofthe control of human behavior, as in law and penology, religion, industry, and commerce,offer considerable promise.The above appears in a highly technical volume called Patterns of Reinforcement by Charles Fersterand B. F. Skinner reporting on research sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.Although the design of their experiments is complex, the findings of Ferster and Skinner can besummarized in a few lines. Drastic modification of the behavior of an animal (including man) canbe achieved by selectivly reinforcing certain actions, for instance by giving food to a pigeon onlywhen he presses a certain lever. However, certain ways of reinforcing behavior lead to betterlearning than others. If the training is too even and monotonous, the subject may stop in itsdevelopment or even return to an earlier state. The best schedule of reinforcement is one thatcombines periodicity with unpredictability. Learning is then slow but continuous. It leads to thehighest level of adaption. And it is irreversible. It is interesting to observe that the pattern of UFOwaves has the same structure as a schedule of reinforcement.A newspaper column commented upon the apparent lack of reality of the whole UFO phenomenon:"It does not attack us. It does not affect our daily lives. It does not help us with our many problems.It has brought us nothing of value. It may have scared a few folks here and there, but then so dothunder storms and tornadoes. The whole thing, as a social issue, is of no consequence whatsoever."The journalist who wrote this column was superficially right, of course. But he forgot another fact:human life is not ruled by the juxtaposition of problem-solving exercises. Human life is ruled byimagination and myth; these obey strict laws and they, too, are governed by control systems,although admittedly not of the hardware type. If UFOs are acting at the mythic and spiritual level itwill be almost impossible to detect it by conventional methods.If UFO activity operates in a fashion similar to Skinner's reinforcement, which is the least amenableto extinction, then the learning will take time but it will never be forgotten. And we may never meetour teachers.How can we verify whether such conditioning is in fact operating? We should firmly establish theprimary effects. We should go on analyzing landing traces, interviewing witnesses and "abductees,"feeding computers with sighting details, and scrutinizing the heavens with cameras and radiotelescopes. But this activity will be completely useless if it is not related to an investigation of thesecondary impact, the shift in our worldview that the phenomenon produces. A phenomenon thatdenies itself, that annihilates evidence of itself, cannot be mastered by engineering brute force. Ifthe logic of the UFO phenomenon is a metalogic, it is not useful to gather in the evenings around aspoon a psychic has bent and wait in the dark for cosmic messages. More kitchen utensils willcertainly become useless, and there will be cosmic messages, to be sure! But any expectation ofhigher wisdom will be soon brought to naugh by their insane incoherence or their calculated fallacy.If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve, then it has no choice but to mislead us.When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this isextremely misleading for the rat. But if the rat doesn't depress the correct lever, he becomesextremely hungry. Man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an intelligence behindthe UFOs it must have taken this fact into account. We also tend to forget that we have no choiceeither: we must eventually study UFOs, and that study, unavoidably, will in turn contribute to thereinforcement itself.A civilization such as ours, which is oriented toward what it regards as technical progress, cannot