While there were some gaping holes in Ouelett's discussion, as Chris pointed out in ATP, this was still a very important episode in relationship to the past Kirby Surprise episode and the Streiber one to come. Talk about a straight line connecting three disparate psychosocial dots. Aime Michel eat your heart out.
Kirby says we see what we want to see.
Ouelett says we see things because of how we are feeling.
Strieber will say we see things inside our mind's eye.
These three ways of seeing collect together to form some basic building blocks of culture. How we feel, what we want to or expect to see, and how we reflect on these 'visions' are the essential components of UFO culture and paranormality in general. This is the sociological phenomenon that is UFO culture.
However, where Ouelett's argument broke down was on the issue of physical trace evidence, radar reports, table tipping as confirmation of psi phenomenon & the power of belief. At times I could not tell if Ouelett was a critical sociologist or a strong proponent of psi phenomenon. The discussion around Conjuring Philip needed more critical in depth analysis, especially around how it was the group could tip the table collectively using physical prowess and nothing psi at all. Like a morphogenic field, psi was defined as an invented idea to be a placeholder for validation of paranormal occurrences. As stated by him: when believers measure the phenmenon there are strong results, when skeptics show up the phenomenon disappears and those who are neutral get neutral results. Doesn't sound like much of a mystery at all, just people finding exactly what they expected to find.
So when something physical does take place I am less inclined to consider the sociological answer. There are always issues regarding biology and psychology in terms of how we process anomalous, external stimuli and the strange results that follow. There is still the issue of physical objects defying our known laws of physics. Perhaps that's why we keep inventing placeholders in order to talk about UFO's?
But the one thing that rang loud and true in this episode was how we regard witnesses and the need to study them much more closely, as Bruce Duensing advocated. I'm surprised there's not much dialogue about these alternatve ways of thinking about paranormality. Like Jacobs, It seems the definers of UFO culture such as Strieber, will carry more weight.