To argue the resurrection appearances of Jesus are merely hallucinations, the skeptic must provide examples of group hallucinations. In this episode we look at some of the best examples, and show they cannot work as examples of group hallucinations, and that they are incredibly dissimilar to the resurrection appearances. In other words, even the best examples from skeptics still fail.
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Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the Ultimate Questions Podcast. Lately we’ve been handling the hallucinations counter argument against the resurrection of Jesus Christ. One of the main complaints against the hallucination theory is that there are no good examples of group hallucinations. In order to deal with this problem, skeptics will often try to give examples that show us that group hallucinations are possible. They’ll use examples like UFOs, or Bigfoot, or seeing Mary the mother of Jesus, or sailors seeing a ghost or mermaid, and they’ll point out that many people claim to have witnessed such things, and yet those things don’t exist, therefore, these are cases of large groups of people seeing things that don’t exist. Thus, they feel as though they have given good examples of group hallucinations, which would then give further credibility to their claim that the disciples collectively hallucinated the resurrection appearances of Jesus. As an example of this, we’ve briefly discussed Richard Carrier in past episodes of the podcast. He’s probably the most skeptical historian in the world, to the point that he’s considered on the fringe, holding to ideas that literally no other historian in the world agrees with. That said, the hallucination theory is not fringe, and Carrier is one of the historians that has advocated for it. Carrier argues in favor of the hallucination theory by using the example of lifeboat survivors out at sea, where they will see a non-existent ship on the horizon. All of the sailors will look out at the open waters, and see this ship, because they want, or expect, to see a ship. It is argued, then, that this is an example of a group hallucination, because the whole group of people are all seeing something that doesn’t exist.
We will evaluate these sorts of cases for this episode of the podcast, as well as the next. As we go through these sorts of examples, I’m going to point out two main things. Firstly, most of the examples that are given don’t actually count as hallucinations. In the majority of situations, including the sailor example I just gave, these are cases of misapprehending sense data. In these cases, there is sense data involved that comes from the real-world, and the sense data is being misunderstood. This goes against the definition of what an hallucination is, as we’ll see. Also, many of the examples also seem to be childhood imagination. So, if the examples given aren’t actually hallucinations, then they cannot act as examples for the group hallucination theory. In fact, this actually ends up arguing further in favor of the literal resurrection of Jesus, because it further proves there are no good examples of group hallucinations, no matter how hard the skeptic tries to force their examples into the hallucination category.
Then my second point for these episodes, even if these examples that we’ll go through are classed as hallucinations, they are still incredibly dissimilar to the resurrection appearances. For example, in many of the situations we’ll see, while there are many people making similar claims, the experiences themselves are isolated, and not happening to a group all at the same time. Further, the examples that are given are often vague, where it’s happening far away, or it’s blurry, or dark, et cetera. For the resurrection appearances, there were groups of people all seeing the same thing at the same time. Also, the experiences weren’t vague, because Jesus was appearing often in the middle of the day, right in front of them, in the same room, and having extended conversations with them.
As we go through these bad examples of hallucinations, we’ll see that even the best attempts to give examples similar to the appearances of Jesus end up failing, both because they’re not actually hallucinations, and also because they’re so dissimilar to what the disciples experienced. For today’s episode we’ll look at UFO and Bigfoot claims. Then, next time, we’ll look at Marian apparitions, which is when a person claims to have had an encounter with Mary, the mother of Jesus.
To begin, it’s important to get a good grasp of what hallucinations are. We’ve done this a lot in the past couple of episodes, so I’ll be very brief. We need to get a good understanding of what hallucinations are, in order to show that most of the examples we’ll look at should not be classed as hallucinations. An hallucination is when a person is having a sensory experience by seeing or hearing something, but there is no external source to the sense data from the real world. So, while the brain is feeling as though it is seeing or hearing like it normally does, the eyes and ears are not in fact receiving information from the real world. Additionally, hallucinations usually involve the person being in a dissociative state, which means they’re disconnected from reality, and trapped within their own thoughts and mind. In this dissociated state, the person feels as though the physical world is “less real” than what’s going on in their mind, hence their ability to hallucinate. Hallucinations almost never occur when a person is mentally and physically healthy and not dissociating. There has to be something very wrong within a person’s brain or mind in order for their mind to invent sensory input without any external source, and for those sensations to be understood as real. For example, drugs, extreme stress, mental illness, or similar situations. In order to fix these dissociative moments for the person, a therapist will encourage them to “ground” themselves by connecting to reality through real sense data by touching or tasting things, to concentrating on looking at details of something in the real world. These aspects are important, because as we’ll see in many of our examples, there is in fact sensory data coming in from the external world, there is no dissociation happening in the person, and they seem to have been fully in their right mind. In other words, when we understand the proper way to view hallucinations, the examples the skeptic gives don’t get to count as hallucinations, and thus, their entire point ends up falling apart, and the hallucination theory is left without any examples whatsoever, which further proves the point that group hallucinations do not happen.
Another key component to understanding this issue is when a person misapprehends sense data. In these cases, the person is experiencing the real world in some way, typically through sight or sound, but, the sense data is vague, for example it’s far away, or blurry, or dark, or extremely short, et cetera. In these cases, the person is getting some sense data, but not enough to create a full experience, and not enough to understand what they’re experiencing. So, the brain fills in the missing data by drawing on a previous engram, which is basically just a way that the brain has understood something in the past, like a memory. The brain then takes this previous experience it remembers, and since that previous experience is similar to the one it’s having now, it uses the past experience to fill in the missing details of the current experience. Basically, when your brain doesn’t have enough data, it then creates an expectation of what the missing pieces must be like, based on memories of similar situations. The problem is, the brain might not understand the current situation well enough, so the past experience it applies to fill in the blanks might be inappropriate. This will then lead the person having the experience to understanding their sense data wrongly. For example, if it’s dark and stormy, and sailors are looking out at the water, and they can see something in the water, their fears and expectations might immediately think of ghosts, and since their brains aren’t receiving enough sense data to fully comprehend the scenario due to it being dark and stormy, their brains fill in the gaps with their expectations, as well as their memories of seeing ghosts in picture books. They then end up feeling as though they have seen a ghost, even though it was just a rock, or a piece of driftwood. So, the memories and expectations guide the brain to develop a more robust experience, but, it’s doing so very incorrectly. Thus, the person is misapprehending their actual sense data. This is very different from hallucinations, because there is in fact sensory data coming into the person from the external world, and the person is not dissociating, nor are they compromised in any way. As we’ll see with other examples, many of the cases are simply misapprehensions of sense data, rather than legitimate hallucinations.
As we’ll see, most of these weird cases all have similar qualities. But, before we go into some of the fun examples like Bigfoot and UFOs, I first want to give what is possibly the best case of a “mass hallucination”, because it ends up being a quite different sort of issue. Again, the big problem with the hallucination theory is that people do not share hallucinatory experiences. This is because hallucinations are private experiences, happening completely within the person’s own mind, so it’s not available to other people. Therefore, there cannot, even in theory, be cases of mass hallucination. However, people will at times bring up cases that look like mass hallucinations. One of these cases is the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning. Back in 1951, in the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in France, dozens of people all had hallucinations. At first this sounds like it’s impressive, because you have many people hallucinating at the same time and location. However, there are some very important details to the story that make it a terrible example to compare with the resurrection. You see, the reason people were hallucinating is because this was a case of mass poisoning. There is debate on how exactly it happened, but the main reason given is ergot poisoning in a bad batch a flour. This bad batch of flour was then dispersed in the area, which is why only people in that area were affected. About 250 people were affected, with the worst of the cases involving hallucinations, and apparently seven people even died. In the cases where the poisoned victims hallucinated, they all had drastically different hallucinations. For example, one man thought he was an airplane, and jumped out of a window to his death. A young boy tried to strangle his own mother. Another thought he was being consumed by fire, while others thought they were being eaten by giant plants, others by beasts, and others by snakes. One man thought he watched his heart leave his body… through his feet… and then asked the doctor to put the heart back inside of him. Now, to be fair, these are in fact hallucinations; they fit the definition of it being a true experience the person is having in the part of the brain that deals with sensations, but it doesn’t have any external source for the sense data. The problem here, though, is that all the hallucinations were different. So, while it is a case of mass hallucinations, they weren’t the “same” hallucination, so it doesn’t work at all as an example comparable to the resurrection appearances.
There’s another couple of odd cases worth mentioning briefly. One is considered one of the strangest psychological events in history. This is the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, which happened in the village of Kashasha, Tanganyika, which is now referred to as Tanzania. In this case, three girls at a boarding school started to laugh uncontrollably. Soon, the laughter spread to others, to the point where most of the school of 159 students were affected. Some of the cases of laughter lasted a few hours, while others went longer than a week. Some of the students were in pain and crying because of it. Some of them ended up having respiratory problems and even fainting. The situation was so bad that the school ended up closing. When the students went home, the laughter epidemic continued to spread in their families and communities. In the end, thousands were affected. There has been a lot of debate about the origins, such as some kind of unknown pathogen, or psychological issues that got out of hand, like stress, anxiety, or shared cultural beliefs. However, the truth is, no one knows why this happened.
A similar case to this is the dancing plague of 1518, which happened in Strasbourg, in the region of Alsace. A woman named Frau Troffea started to dance in the streets, and within days dozens of others had joined her. The “dancing plague” spread throughout the town. Witnesses said that the people looked like they were in a trancelike state. It ended up with hundreds of people dancing, uncontrollably, for days, to the point of exhaustion, and possibly even death. The reason I only say “possibly” is because it’s hard to tell with the limited historical data available, so the symptoms may have been exaggerated over time. Again, the cause remains uncertain. In both the case of the laughter epidemic and the dancing plague, some people try to use these as examples of mass psychological phenomenon. The argument would go that there can be cases where a large group of people all suffer from the same psychological illness, which brings about a collective experience. However, these are obviously very different from the resurrection appearances, in quite important ways. These cases were all understood to be very negative, the dancing and laughter don’t even involve sense data at all, and aren’t hallucinatory in nature, the poisoning case had people all experiencing different things, and the main cause for all these cases is very likely some kind of illness. So, while we do have cases of large groups collectively having psychological symptoms, this does not then legitimize the idea that a large group of people could collectively experience the same hallucination.
Now, let’s look at some of the more common and fun examples. First, let’s look at Bigfoot, who is also known as the Sasquatch. I listened to many different testimonies from people who claimed to have had an experience with this creature. In one of the stories, a man actually got hit by the creature, and he was injured. However, it was just him and one other person who was there for this, and the creature moved so fast they didn’t get a good up-close view of it. In another story a person saw the creature on the other side of a pond, and it was playing in the water, splashing around. However, this story was told by a man in his 70s, and he was recounting the experience that occurred back when he was seven years old. In another case the person describes what they saw, but the creature was 150 yards away for the most part, and when it was closest it was still 15 yards away, which is 45 feet, and even then it was only that close for a brief moment. In another story, the man left his fish outside for the night, and the next day the fish had been peeled down to the tail, all the meat was gone, and the skeletons were laid side by side, from smallest to largest. Notice in this story, even though it’s odd, they didn’t actually see anything. In another story, the man recounts the testimony of his brother, not himself, that happened 60 years ago, and he’s never spoken to his brother about it since it happened back 60 years ago. In another story, there were dead animals in the area, and his friend saw red eyes in the distance moving through the fog, then heard a loud scream. One of the stories was interesting, because the local community had a village nearby, where they had an aboriginal tradition in the area, where everyone knew not to go into a certain area of the woods, because a creature lived there. Also, when tourists would come to the area, it would stir the creature up. Another interesting feature is that in many of the stories, police would show up after being called, and the person who saw the creature would be told it was just a bear, that they didn’t see anything, and then they would bully the person saying they weren’t allowed to tell anyone about what they saw.
Now, while these sorts of stories might perk up our imaginations, there’s different problems with them. In many stories, the people don’t actually observe the creature, and instead, they only observe the aftermath. For example, the fish being peeled, or dead animals in the area, or in other cases trees being broken, or strange footprints where they have a narrow heel and no toes. In other cases, the person only sees something vague moving around, or only the top half, or only the eyes through the fog, or it will be very far away, or they’ll think there was a creature there then it’s suddenly gone. In other words, the sensory experiences they had were vague. In other cases, the stories they describe happened back when they were very young, and it could very easily be the imaginations of a young child. On this note, I had an experience when I was a child, where I was completely convinced that my friend and I had briefly flown after jumping off a chair in my living room. For years after this experience, even into my teenage years, I still personally believed that we had somehow briefly flown, even though it defied everything I knew. And, don’t worry, I have since come to the realization that I did in fact not fly. In other words, depending on the testimonies and experiences of children to verify strange events is not reliable, even if the person is much older now. Another important detail is that in all of the stories I heard, it was either two people, or a single person, having the experience. When it was two people, often times only one person really got a good look, or they both saw it at different times. The important point here is that it’s not a large group, and they’re not all seeing the same thing at the same time. Another important thing I noticed in these stories is that they often contradicted each other quite explicitly. For example, some said the eyes were red, while others said black or brown. Some said it had the face of a man, while others said it had an ape-like face. In some cases the nose was huge, while in others it was very small. Some said it had perfectly straight hair, and even commented on how well groomed it appeared, while others described the hair as being so unkempt and matted that it looked similar to dreadlocks. Some said it was the ugliest and most horrible thing they’d ever seen, while others said it was actually kind of pretty. Many people with these stories tell about an intense odour that would envelope the entire area, to the point it would make them sick, while other people describe seeing the creature very close to them, and never having any sort of smell. Some say it was extremely human looking, while others say there was nothing human about it at all. So, it’s not even true that all of these people are claiming to have observed the same thing.
In one of the more dramatic stories, the person saw the creature a distance away, and the creature let out a terrible scream. The person hearing it said they felt like their entire body was reverberating, and it filled them with intense fear. This is actually similar to what other animals like elephants and whales can do, in an ability called “infrasound”, where their sounds can actually affect the physiology of the listener. In some cases it can stimulate emotions in the person, like fear. In many of these cases the person will say they felt like their insides were shaking. In multiple of the Bigfoot stories, the person recounting their experience said the creature yelled at them, and they felt like they got hit by a shockwave, where their organs were vibrating, and they were filled with fear. This actually pretty well matches what some animals are capable of.
One thing to mention with all of these stories, is that there isn’t anything inherently supernatural, impossible, or even all that weird, about there being a type of primate within North America. I’m not saying I believe in Bigfoot, or anything like that, but in some of the more impressive cases where the person saw the creature close up, or the creature yelled at them, it’s very possible the person did in fact interact with some kind of animal out there, regardless of what the animal was. Either way, the whole point of going into these stories is not to convince you of the existence of the Sasquatch. The point is, people use stories like these in order to say the resurrection appearances could have been hallucinations. How exactly? Well, here we’ve seen many cases of people claiming to have seen Bigfoot, but, it is argued that belief in Bigfoot is considered ridiculous, so, all these people must be collectively wrong about their experiences. The skeptic then argues that the case of Bigfoot is similar to the resurrection appearances, because in both cases we have large groups of people, vehemently claiming to have had dramatic experiences, but they’re all wrong. For our purpose in this debate, remember that I wanted to point out two things. Firstly, these cases do not look like legitimate cases of hallucinatory experiences. For example, the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot did in fact have sensory data coming into their brains by means of their sensory organs. Again, an hallucination is when the origin of the sensory input is not obtained from the external world, but instead, is generated completely by the mind. In these Bigfoot encounters, the person might have seen some shadowy figure in the distance or something, but then their brain tried to fill in the gaps of the vague sensory input. Again, this is called a misapprehension of sense data. In the best of cases, the person had fairly decent sensory input from the external world, like the cases where the creature was very close to them. In these cases, it doesn’t seem like the person was literally hallucinating, because there was no dissociation happening within the person. When the body of evidence is evaluated, these sorts of stories do not look at all like hallucinations, and thus, cannot possibly act as examples to confirm the possibility of the resurrection appearances as being hallucinations.
The second point I wanted to make through these stories is how dissimilar they are from the resurrection appearances. In these cases where people claim to have encountered Bigfoot, they are almost always either completely alone, or with a single other individual. Even though we have many people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot, these people were not all observing the same creature at the same time, in the same place. That’s the dramatic part of the resurrection appearances, and that’s the reason psychologists will say group hallucinations are impossible. Even if every single Bigfoot encounter was an hallucination, the encounters would still be drastically different from the resurrection appearances, because some of the resurrection appearances were to large groups of people all in one moment. Additionally, the Bigfoot stories usually have vague sensory data, where the resurrection had much more obvious sensory data (like hearing a sermon by Jesus, or touching Him, or eating with him). If the Bigfoot stories were like that, where you had dozens or even hundreds of people all experiencing the same thing at the same time, without the sensory data being vague, then I’d probably start to give a lot more credibility to the claim that Bigfoot exists. So, these Bigfoot encounters don’t even count as hallucinations, and even if they did, they’re still not even close to being as impressive as the resurrection appearances.
Another example that’s similar in some ways to the Bigfoot appearances is the cases of Elvis sightings. Now, Elvis was quite a while ago, so our younger listeners might not know about this. Elvis was a massive star during his day, and in his later years he ended up extremely unhealthy, because of his lifestyle and substance abuse. He died at 42, which absolutely shocked the world. People were so obsessed with him, that they couldn’t believe their star had died. Because of this, a conspiracy theory started which said that Elvis wasn’t dead, and had possibly faked his own death to get away from all the attention. There were also many people who claimed to have seen Elvis, after his death. Skeptics could say this sounds very similar to the story of Jesus. In both cases we have a very loved individual, who died young and tragically, and their followers claimed to have seen them alive after their death. In terms of the hallucination theory, you have many people all claiming to have seen the same thing, so the skeptic could try to say this is a case where mass hallucination explains the data.
However, there’s some serious problems here, both in calling these hallucinations, and in comparing them to the resurrection. There are actually not very many “legitimate” cases of Elvis sightings. Most of this issue got blown way out of proportion by the media, at times quite deliberately, but I don’t want to get distracted by all that. One of the main examples that was used to try and say Elvis was still alive was a photo taken outside of his pool house. In the photo you can see the pool house door, and through the screen of the door you can vaguely see the face of a man sitting in a chair, and the man looks kind of like Elvis. This blew up in media circles, and started a lot of the conspiracy theory, but it turns out it was just Elvis’ security guard and close friend, Al Strada. In this case, you’ll notice the actual sense data is very vague. The portion of the picture in question is only about 1% of the entire picture, it’s through a screen door into a dimly lit room, and you can’t even see the majority of the person, so as I said, the actual data is quite vague. Another case is a picture of Muhammad Ali with Jessie Jackson, and in the background you can make out someone who looks like Elvis. As it so happens, Muhammad Ali and Elvis actually were friends, so people claimed it’s possible that, if Elvis was alive, he would spend time with Ali. However, it turns out this was just Ali’s agent, Larry Kolb, or at least, that’s what they want you to believe. Once again, the photo is very blurry, and the portion in question is a very small part of the picture, so the actual data involved is vague.
In these cases, the actual evidence is very minimal, and quite vague. The important things to notice here are that these are absolutely not hallucinations; there is in fact sensory data, and it’s extremely vague, leading people to misapprehend the data, because of their expectations and desires. Secondly, this is not similar to the resurrection appearances at all. In the case of Elvis, we have a couple of very bad photographs, and in the case of Jesus, we have many people who claimed to have met Jesus, face to face, close up, and had full conversations with Him. So, Elvis sightings don’t count as hallucinations, and thus cannot be analogous to Jesus’ resurrection appearances, and even if they were hallucinations, the actual data involved is incredibly inferior to the resurrection appearances, and isn’t really comparable at all.
Next, let’s look at the one I found the most fun; UFOs. Now, as with the previous examples, I’m not here to convince you of the reality of this phenomenon, or the existence of aliens. I’m only here to show some of the evidence, evaluate whether it works as an example of group hallucinations, and see whether it’s comparable to the resurrection appearances. For our first case of a UFO sighting, we have a recording of the radio transmission from a pilot to air traffic control, as well as the radar data. In 1986, a pilot of Japan Airlines saw an object on his radar, which was following his plane. He was told to make extreme maneuvers in order to see whether the object would continue to follow him, and it did, and we have the radar data that shows this. Captain Terauchi, the pilot of the plane, also described it as being able to change position extremely quickly. The object followed his plane for about a half an hour, and when he finally went in for a landing at his destination, the object disappeared. Terauchi spoke to Western media about the event, and he ended up being removed from his position for about a year, likely as punishment. John Callahan, who was the head of accidents and investigations at the FAA during this time, personally gave his testimony about his investigation into this incident. After hearing about the object following the Japan Airlines plane, he ordered that all the data be sent over to him so he could look it over. At this point, Callahan did not think it was a UFO, and instead, he thought it was likely a stealth bomber. He was then called to a meeting at the Washington headquarters, which included representatives from the White House and the CIA. After going over the material, the people were generally excited about the data. Then, one of the people said to him, “we were never here, we’re confiscating all the data, and you’re all sworn to secrecy.” Callahan, with his presumption it’s probably a stealth bomber, asked the man, “what do you think it is?” And the man responded, “well it’s a UFO”.
There was another case in 1976 where an Iranian air force pilot, Parvis Jafari, saw something flying around up there with him. He said the object would move from one location in the sky, and almost instantaneously be at another point in the sky, miles away. At one point he felt threatened by it, so he shot at it. After shooting at it, his entire control panel froze up, he lost radio contact, and the situation was so dire that he thought he was going to have to eject from his plane. However, the object left, and right after it was gone, he gained radio contact again.
A similar case happened to a Peruvian pilot in the air force, Oscar Santa Maria. There was an unidentified object flying over an air base in Peru, and he was told to fly up there and shoot it down. So, he flew up, shot his entire arsenal at the object, with a direct hit, and the object just absorbed everything, with zero effect. He said the cone shaped wall of fire that he sent out would normally obliterate anything in its path, but it did nothing to this object. You’ll notice that in all of the cases I’ve mentioned so far, the people had real sense data coming in from the external world, so these cannot be considered hallucinations. In some cases it’s even verified by others at the base, or in the one case even the radar data. Therefore, they cannot be used as evidence to justify a belief in group hallucinations, because they aren’t even hallucinations at all. However, you’ll also notice that the data is vague, where no one is getting an up close and personal view of whatever the object was. So, these cases are also not comparable to the resurrection appearances which did not have vague sense data.
There’s another category of UFO experience that has very different properties from the previous stories. The best example of this is probably what has come to be called the “Phoenix Lights” of 1997. On March 13th, 1997, around 8:30pm, there was a strange light phenomenon in the sky above Phoenix. This was not some isolated incident where one or two people saw it. There were literally hundreds, if not thousands of eyewitnesses, all seeing the same thing, at the same time, and even discussing it with each other. Eyewitnesses say it had a boomerang shape to it, and it was about a mile long from wingtip to wingtip. One of the eyewitnesses said something interesting, where he could see the stars beyond the object, and as the object moved, it would block and unblock the stars that were past it, which showed him there was an actual large shape up there. This event likely has the most eyewitnesses of any other UFO event in history. So many people saw it that the city was demanding that the government respond. The governor of Arizona then held a press conference to provide answers. You can watch his speech on YouTube. He got up in front of everyone, started talking about the seriousness of this event, then said they had apprehended the guilty party, and then when he asked for the guilty party to be brought out, a man in a comical alien costume was paraded out, and the governor said, “this just goes to show you guys are entirely too serious”. Now, to be fair to him, he has since said that the reason he made a joke out of it was because he was scared the public would panic. Years after the incident, he has done interviews where he admits that even he saw the lights in the sky. As it turns out, he was actually a pilot in the military, where he saw many different types of aircraft that the government owns. He said that this was nothing even close to any other type of aircraft he’s ever seen. He said it was completely silent, with lights embedded into it, and it was massive, roughly the size of an aircraft carrier, which corresponds with how other people have described it. He also said it was absolutely a UFO. He has even said that he personally believes we’re not alone in the universe, and that this was likely a legitimate experience with aliens.
A less dramatic but quite similar case happened in Hudson Valley, New York. Nearly the whole town saw lights floating in the sky at night. People described the event by saying that the night became day, because there was just so much light from these things. It also made zero noise, which is common in UFO sightings. Some people say it came so close that they thought it was going to land on the ground. Again, there were many eyewitnesses, all seeing the same thing, at the same time. Around this same time, there was actually a group of pilots that wanted to take advantage of all the attention UFOs were getting, so they deliberately flew around in formation with bright lights, during the nighttime, in order to mimic a UFO sighting. Some people would speculate that this seems like the type of thing the government might put people up to, in order to make a joke out of it, similar to how the governor or Arizona did with the alien costume.
All of these sorts of events have changed their title from being “UFO” sightings, to “UAPs”. UAP means “unidentified anomalous phenomenon”, which is more vague than “unidentified flying object”. This is partly to avoid the stigma attached to UFOs, and also so that it includes all these other types of phenomena. If someone just sees lights in the sky, it’s not technically a “UFO”, so they have created this new designation.
When looking at the sorts of cases like the Phoenix Lights and the lights over Hudson Valley, you’ll notice, once again, it seems like there is legitimate sensory data coming from the external world, so they cannot be considered hallucinations, and thus cannot be used to justify group hallucinations. Also, the sensory data is vague, with no one really getting a good look at whatever was in the air, so they cannot be said to be comparable to the resurrection appearances.
While there are many people that treat these situations as alien encounters, there are also many people out there, like Leslie Kean, who aren’t really concerned with extraterrestrials, and are more concerned with this from an air traffic safety situation. In other countries these sorts of cases are treated with more transparency and respect, because they are a danger to pilots and their passengers. There have even been times where pilots have had to do intense maneuvers for the sake of avoiding “something” up in the sky with them, and this has even resulted in minor injuries at times. The fact that the American government, specifically, not only refuses to comment on it, or open up their data, but that they also seem to deliberately shut down and cover up any investigations, only adds to the paranoia effect that many people have surrounding this issue. It’s created many conspiracy theories, to the point there’s countless movies and television shows on the topic.
With these sorts of situations in mind, we then ask ourselves, do these sound like hallucinations? Now, recognize what I’m asking here. I don’t care if you think aliens exist, or whether these were legitimate UFOs, or whether the American government is covering something up. All of that is interesting, but quite irrelevant to our current discussion. When we evaluate these testimonies and scenarios, do they look like cases where the people are hallucinating? Absolutely not! In all of these cases there is a lot of real sense data from the external world, rather than it being completely invented in the person’s own mind. Because of this, these cases, by the definition of the word, cannot be considered hallucinations. Additionally, these people are often regular folk, and at times even highly trained individuals, going about their routine life. They show no signs whatsoever of being in a dissociative state, which further gives us good reason to think they can’t be hallucinations. One of the major reasons why we cannot call these situations hallucinations is because of the number of people collectively witnessing the same phenomenon at the same time. For example, when we look at the Phoenix Lights situation, there is no way that hundreds, and even thousands of people could all see the exact same thing, in the same location, at the same time, and have there be absolutely zero real-world sensory data. There may be isolated incidents of people claiming to be abducted by a UFO, where they’re the only one that witnessed it, and in those cases perhaps we could claim it to be an hallucination, but the fact that in these cases I’ve described there are so many witnesses, it makes hallucinations not a possibility. This is the same reason that the resurrection appearances cannot be considered hallucinations. We have accounts where there were many people present, all seeing and hearing the same thing, for an extended period of time. That’s just not how hallucinations work. The important thing to note here is, the skeptic wants to compare the resurrection to UFO sightings, and they say that lots of people have these experiences when they’re not real, so they must be a hallucinations. In order to make this claim, the skeptic then gives very weak examples that are not nearly as strong as the resurrection appearances. If they give the stronger cases, like the ones we’ve looked at today, then these examples being hallucinations no longer works as a viable explanation.
If we look at these cases and ask whether they’re misapprehension of sense data, that doesn’t really seem to fit either. In these cases, the people are just describing the sense data that came to them, and they’re not really going too much further than that. A person can then speculate, saying they think it was aliens, or experimental planes, or whatever, but for the most part they’re just describing the vague lights or shapes they saw. And on that note, the fact that these experiences were vague is another element that needs to be considered. The actual data here is lights in the sky, a seemingly boomerang shape, blips on a radar, or “something” moving quickly for a moment. In none of these cases do we find detailed encounters that were up close and personal. When we compare this to the resurrection appearances, they’re very different in terms of quality. These weren’t cases where someone thought they saw Jesus over that hill on the horizon, or for a brief moment in a crowd. The resurrection appearances involve seeing Jesus face-to-face, and having conversations with Him, for extended periods of time. So, these UFO experiences don’t count as hallucinations, they don’t even really count as misapprehension of sense data, and they’re quite dissimilar to the resurrection appearances, so they cannot possibly work as an example for the skeptic in favor of mass hallucinations.
If we look at the weaker stories of alien encounters, where some random person will say they were abducted in the night and aliens did experiments on them, then this gets treated differently. In these sorts of cases, it’s similar to the Bigfoot stories. The person is almost always alone in their experience, so it could be an hallucination. If, however, the person is not alone, and instead there’s a dozen other people experiencing the abduction with them, and all the people give the same testimony of the same event, then that stops looking like an hallucination, because hallucinations are not shared experiences. We would then have to evaluate the actual testimonies, and see whether it’s a legitimate case of something happening, or a misapprehension of sensory data. However, these sorts of cases don’t really exist; like I said, these sorts of stories are almost always a singular person having an experience. But notice here, if we have many people all experiencing the same thing, hallucination stops being a good explanation. This is because, if many people are experiencing the event, then there must be “something” in the real world causing the sensation, since they all experience it collectively, which means it’s not an hallucination. We all naturally understand that a group of people cannot collectively invent the same experience, because that’s not how hallucinations work.
We’ve looked at many examples today of strange phenomena that some might say are comparable to the resurrection appearances, and which might legitimize group hallucinations. As I’ve shown, these stories all fall prey to quite serious flaws. Bigfoot sightings are almost always a single person, or two people, so they can’t be used as evidence for group hallucinations. Also, they involve vague sense data, so it’s more of a misapprehension of sensory data, rather than actual hallucinations. The Elvis sightings are also quite vague in their data, and cannot be considered hallucinations. UFO sightings are also quite vague in the sense data. In all of these cases we find people experiencing something, where there is sense data coming in from the real world. These are not cases where the person’s own mind is conjuring up sense data from nothing, so they cannot be considered hallucinations. Also, all of these cases fall extremely short from being similar to the resurrection appearances. For the resurrection, we have many people all seeing and hearing the same thing, at the same time. The sense data was also not vague, but instead, these experiences of Jesus were up close and personal, and for long periods of time. For these reasons, examples like Bigfoot, Elvis sightings, and UFOs, cannot possibly be considered as good examples to support the group hallucination theory for the resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ. To go even further, the fact that these are some of the best examples the skeptic can use only proves to strengthen the reality that Jesus really did appear to His followers after His death. This is because even the best cases the skeptic can come up with end up being abysmally bad examples, and don’t at all legitimize their argument. What it shows is that the skeptic wants the hallucination theory to be true, and they will grab at any evidence they possibly can to justify their theory, even if it fails miserably.
However, there’s still another big example that skeptics use to try and legitimize the hallucination theory. These are the cases of Marian apparitions, which is when people claim to have met Mary, the mother of Jesus. The skeptic will say that this is obviously not true, so they must be hallucinating, and since these apparitions appear to groups of people, then these must be legitimate cases of group hallucinations, which would then set a precedent for the resurrection appearances to also be group hallucinations. We’ll be dealing with this in the next episode, so I hope you’ll join me next time for the bad examples of hallucinations, Marian apparitions, on the Ultimate Questions podcast, with Jon Topping.
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