Lance Moody’s recent uncovering of extrapolations by Delbert Newhouse in his late accounts of what transpired during and after his filming of “objects” in Utah in 1952 (the Tremonton film) brings to mind that most initial flying saucer and/or UFO sightings end up being elaborated upon by the originators of such sightings/reports.
I’m exempting Lonnie Zamora whose 1964 Socorro sighting remained fixed and steady right up to his death.
But most other UFO incidents are made elaborate, after the fact, and a 2013 account of the December 1980 Rendlesham episode, recently aired by Destination America’s Alien Mysteries program, indicated, for me, that psychological mechanisms are at work in most UFO accounts.
There are a number of psychiatric and psychological designations that can be applied to the structure of the elaborations made by UFO witnesses: secondary elaboration, displacement, et cetera.
But one doesn’t need to resort to psychiatric etiologies to determine that persons build upon their sightings as time goes along.
These aren’t confabulations but, rather, elaborations, that the UFO witness adds, piecemeal, to flesh out what was a semi-traumatic event for them.
In the aired Rendlesham case, Jim Penniston and John Burroughs did the heavy lifting of the British incident, abetted by Nick Pope, for whom the sighting rivals the 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico.
In the broadcast, it becomes clear, in this 2013 rendering, that hypnosis fed and extended the incident from its original telling to what has now become an elaborate tale of time traveling, abduction, and government/military cover-up and meddling.
Burroughs and Penniston have come to believe that what they experienced is now determined to be, at least as far as Penniston is concerned, a possible visitation by our descendants from the future.
(The possibility would explain the vast incursions of UFOs that doom the idea of interplanetary visitations to this speck in the Universe.)
However, once hypnosis is used in the exploration of mental memory, one has to throw out the offerings that come forth: they are beleaguered by disconnected memories and extraneous mental detritus, which is why Freud and Psychoanalysis abandoned the procedure early on for that psychological practice.
In the Newhouse/Tremonton elaborations one can determine that a need to fortify a singular event was endemic to Delbert Newhouse’s desire to provide a strident legacy that didn’t happen once his film was dismissed as probably birds in the sky.
The same kind of need for “fame” and/or a significant legacy seems to have afflicted many of the Roswell citizens, who were or are aging without anything notable to add to their meager lives and Roswell was and is a vehicle which has allowed some notability.
Roswell elaborations are legion, and mostly unraveled or unraveling as time has gone by and UFO investigators actually pursue the “facts” in each teller’s tale.
The first flying disk notable, Kenneth Arnold, himself, resorted to building upon his iconic sighting, he abetted by Ray Palmer and also a need to have a worthwhile legacy.
The Betty Hill and Travis Walton elaborations, whether true or not, came much after the initial accounts and, while not outright lies, like that of George Adamski and others, are accretions that disrupt the original story they provided.
Each UFO case needs a psychological evaluation to determine why the stories have been built upon or elaborated.
Yet, that takes us away from the UFO phenomenon and into the personalities of UFO lore, not addressing the enigma itself – a waste of time and effort if one only wants to know what UFOs are or may be.
Nonetheless, it’s an effort worthy of psychological, neurological, and sociological study should one be so inclined.
I only note it here as the Rendlesham program was so blatantly about elaboration and not UFOs, per se, that it irked to see the phenomenon flummoxed by such a charade.
RR
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