There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious. I call it the bandwagon effect. The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."
The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell." It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.
Here are the facts of the case.
On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest. He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it. Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy." One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."
Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle. They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).
Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon. The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."
The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.
There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming." Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse." The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.
In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered. So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.
But what about Halt's testimony?
It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon. He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly. The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits. The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights. The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse. Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.
Brian Dunning, writing about the incident in Skeptoid in 2009, states:
Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken. Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation... All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap." Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him. So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years. When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist. The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest. Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.
Which is it exactly. But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.
As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol. But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me. I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it." "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back. Then we can talk. Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."
But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting. And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to. Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.
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