Introduction
Despite past and current efforts to explain the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), otherwise known as unidentified flying objects (UFOs), we have had no remarkable success. Maybe this is because the scientific community has rejected with some specific exceptions, e.g. the Hessdalen Project in Norway (Teodorani, Reference Teodorani2004) the study of these phenomena for many years, and only more recently scientists from different disciplines have started to do more scientific research on this topic. However, government agencies have shown greater interest in UAP for decades, initiating official and secret investigation programmes, including Project Sign (1949), Project Grudge – Air Force Declassification Office (1949), Unidentified Flying Objects and Air Force Project Blue Book (1952–1969) and the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Special Application Program (AAWSAP; 2007), even sometimes funding additional private research efforts in this direction. Most efforts by the scientific community nowadays are focused on the physical aspects of UAP, including acceleration, speed, manoeuvrability, etc. Several private initiatives have started systematic observation and analysis procedures and programmes to try to identify the exact physical characteristics of UAP. Notorious effort has been put by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU; https://www.explorescu.org/) into the analysis of results from the alleged US Defence Intelligence Agency-released Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) videos of UAP during the Nimitz encounters in 2004 (Knuth et al., Reference Knuth, Powell and Reali2019), first popularized by The New York Times (Cooper et al., Reference Cooper, Blumenthal and Kean2017). The Galileo Project is another recent initiative by professor of Science Avi Loeb (Harvard University), intended for the scientific study of extraterrestrial technological signatures including UAP using an extensive signal detectors method under the standard physics model interpretation approach (Loeb, Reference Loeb2022). The Galileo Project seems a complementary effort to traditional Search for extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
If scientific studies on the phenomena are not numerous and relatively recent and serious when trying to understand the physics and aerodynamics of UAP, the psychological research on UAP is even more scarce. Regarding psychological aspects, some research has been done in the past, mostly vague studies trying to explain observers’ accounts, or stories alluding to psychology-related issues, such as sleep paralysis, mass hysteria, hallucinations, etc. (Olmos, Reference Olmos1994; Swami et al., Reference Swami, Pietschnig, Stieger and Voracek2010; Dagnall et al., Reference Dagnall, Drinkwater and Parker2011; Escolà-Gascón, Reference Escolà-Gascón2020; Yingling et al., Reference Yingling, Yingling and Bell2023). Some research exists on psychological aspects and witnesses who reported closed encounters with UFOs or their alleged occupants (Jung, Reference Jung1959; Ring, Reference Ring1993; Mack, Reference Mack2000).
UAP phenomena represent a challenge, not only to science but to our own perceptions, reasoning and psyches; they do not fit our system of beliefs, standards or expectations. The ground-breaking nature of UAP is very interesting, indeed, especially in the psychological domain. In many cases, witnesses are left in shock and disbelief, with unsettled feelings, and this may have a life-changing effect on some. In the present study, our goal was to look into these psychological effects of UAP, to analyse and compare the results obtained by means of a Likert scale survey with questions related to UAP and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (EI) in general.
Methods
A sample of 245 participants (68.15% male, 18.15% female) participated in a survey voluntarily and anonymously. Of the sample, 37.10% had completed or reported some college-level education, while 15.73% reported unfinished university studies, and 25.41% had a postgraduate level of education. The survey was available, in English, online distributed and accessible to people interested in the topics of UAP and SETI around the world.
The survey consisted of 72 questions, divided into four sections. The first section contained questions regarding the publicized videos of UAP by the US Pentagon, including the Nimitz encounters. These questions were intended to both assess whether participants were aware of these videos and to gather their opinion on them and potential implications for future research. The second section of the survey contained questions related to participants’ opinions about the scientific research on the search for EI, in general. Here questions pertained to the best instruments or approaches to do this search, the outcomes of search, social implications and the involvement of respondents in these activities or scientific communities. The third section assessed general demographic information and psychological aspects, including cognitive skills and styles, general personality trait, religious beliefs, spirituality, etc. Finally, a fourth section was dedicated to UAP witnesses, and was only available to respondents who also confirmed being direct witnesses of UAP. In this section, we gathered information about the incident and post-incident consequences, both in physiological and psychological domains. Ninety-three (37.5%) of the participants reported being direct witnesses to UAP. Most questions presented a Likert scale form, where participants had to respond using a 1–5 scale of ‘totally disagree’ with the question or statement, or ‘totally agree’ with it. Less frequent were questions that requested ‘yes/no’, short-text, or multiple-choice responses.
While we primarily focused on psychological aspects in this study, it is worth noting some answers from other sections of our survey. For example, 45.56% of participants reported not knowing what the UAP in the Pentagon videos could be. Although participants acknowledged they could not identify or explain what these UAP may be, they mostly agreed that UAP showed non-conventional characteristics in terms of speed, manoeuvrability, and capabilities, and they also considered that the scientific community and governments should conduct more research on UAP to try to clarify their origin (91.90%). Overall, participants’ psychological aspects were measured with several questions that covered cognitive styles (primarily intuitive versus rational), attention and memory skills, sleep quality, perception, personality traits and thoughts.
Results
The UAP psychological effect on witnesses and also in interested people was clearly transformative, based on the results of our survey. It is also interesting to note some specific profiles of witnesses and some psychological aspects, such as a clear engagement behaviour/thinking trend towards the topic. We will now further analyse these results.
In general, participants in the survey included direct witnesses and non-witnesses. The characteristics of the global sample who responded to our general psychological questions are very standard, with only a couple of particularities worth mentioning, such as that most of them described themselves as spiritual, but not religious (Mdn 3, Mode 5, SD 1.44). Also, people reported a mostly intuitive cognitive profile (Mdn 4, Mode 4, SD 0.82), versus rational. Participants reported no sleep problems, no predominance of introversion versus extroversion and good attention skills, in general (Table 1). However, 45.5% of participants reported they had been victims of bullying at school in the past and/or suffered from psychological trauma and similar percentage showed that members of their family were also interested in the topic.
Table 1. Descriptive results for general psychological aspects questions (global sample)
In the general/global sample, for questions related to UAP in general, some results clearly supported arguments such that governments (Mdn 5, Mode 5, SD 0.76) and scientists (Mdn 5, Mode 5, SD 0.70) should pay more attention to the phenomena and study them; also, respondents thought we are being visited by non-terrestrial intelligence (Mdn 4, Mode 5, SD 1.14). However, divided opinions existed regarding the extra-terrestrial origin of UAP and the potential outcomes or risks of contacts with EI (Table 2).
Table 2. Results for general questions about UAP (global sample)
Ninety-three participants reported being direct witnesses to UAP, and they were re-directed to a special section with questions only available to UAP witnesses. These questions were intended to gather information about potential effects, consequences and characteristics of the UAP. It was very interesting to observe some patterns in the responses of participants in this section. The most relevant aspect was what we have identified as the UAP-DPET, where three very interrelated and statistically correlated conditions as Spearman correlation test confirmed, seemed characteristic of UAP witnesses. These three conditions or aspects refer to a particular form of deep psychological engagement or psychological trait, including that the UAP topic is present almost every day in their minds; they recognize being very interested or sometimes obsessed with the topic; and they feel the need to talk about it (Tables 3 and 4).
Table 3. Descriptive data for UAP-DPET (witness sample; n = 80)
Table 4. Correlation matrix of UAP-DPET and spirituality/religion components (witness sample, n = 80)
Note. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
The obtained results from the witness sample did not show changes in other domains evaluated after the UAP event, despite respondents reporting a change in their lives after the incident(s) (Mdn 4, Mode 4, SD 1.35; Table 5).
Table 5. Descriptive results for changes after UAP event (witness sample) n = 80.
Discussion and conclusions
UAP has strong psychological components that have obviously been neglected to this date. While great effort has been made and is currently underway to understand the physics of UAP, very little attention has been paid to witnesses of them, assessing the psychological impact that UAP have on people, and their potential sociological implications. Reality is a construct of our mind; our brains define what we understand as reality and perception is the mechanism for apprehending the physical realm by our mind through transduction processes. However, individual perception and previous sensations are easily misinterpreted and attention – which is the process that directs this knowledge or information processing – is also very limited and gets easily distracted or confused, as magicians know well. The limitations of our attention systems or abilities to detect reality have been studied before by psychologists and it has been compared to artificial intelligence systems and even in regard of the topic of SETI research (Simons and Chabris, Reference Simons and Chabris1999; De la Torre and Garcia, Reference De la Torre and Garcia2018; De la Torre, Reference De la Torre2020). UAP pushes these processes to their limits, to unknown territories, creating cognitive dissonance in witnesses because of their properties; pre-formed perceptions and physical or existential ideas simply do not fit. Cognition is the by-product of top-down and bottom-up processes, while the former are those dominant in new-information processing, whereas the latter are strongly held in our memories, experiences and banks of previous knowledge. UAP can make it impossible to find precedents in personally pre-processed information, which creates strong internal dissonance or a feeling of disbelief that has a strong impact on the observer.
In this research, we studied the psychological impact of UAP, and results showed some interesting trends and characteristics. UAP topic seems to hover in witness's minds after an incident on a daily basis and promote a receptive attitude towards them. This effect can be referred to as ‘transformative’ but specifically focused on the phenomenon itself, since it does not necessarily change other aspects of the daily life of the witness, except for knowledge of the UAP, with a mostly non-terrestrial focus. Witnesses share trends in the specific direction of a kind of non-pathological obsessive thinking about UAP, a deep mental engagement with the phenomena post-event. As we mentioned before, we have called this trend the UAP deep psychological engagement triad (UAP-DPET), per the above, but whether this profile is present before the UAP event or as a consequence of interacting with the phenomena it is something to be elucidated. This UAP-DPET in general does not have a negative effect on the witness's overall life (family, work or friends), although it is clearly something that gets the witness involved in activities related to the topic, and there is a need to talk about it with others.
Whether this triad has an underlying neuroanatomic correlate is currently unknown since no relevant studies exist to this date. In obsessive-compulsive disorder, imbalances and other abnormalities, both neuroanatomic and in connectivity between the putamen and caudate nucleus, have been reported (Nakao et al., Reference Nakao, Okada and Kanba2014; Peng et al., Reference Peng, He, Ren, Jin, Yang, Xu, Wen, Chen, Wei, Verguts and Chen2022). It feels relevant to mention here also that some recent research has also shown involvement of these brain areas in intuition, high cognitive level individuals (Koch, Reference Koch2015; Weerasekera et al., Reference Weerasekera, Ion-Mărgineanu, Green, Mody and Nolan2023), learning and memory (Foerde and Shohamy, Reference Foerde and Shohamy2011). Future research might use a combination of psychological, neuropsychological and potentially physiological assessment measures, if possible, determining whether these trends or psychological profiles pre-exist or are consequences of interacting with UAP, with any resulting physical correlates or entrainment in the human nervous system.
Competing interests
None.
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