“We’re not into the paranormal crap,” they say. Yet, their descriptions are not of normal natural events. “We hear voices, stuff that says our name. They hear us talk. It’s mimicry.” Mark says he saw a shimmering figure like from the movie Predator in the swamp as well. “I didn’t see it again, but I know what I saw. I definitely know what I saw.”
Both Chris and Mark think humans are arrogant in our knowledge. They relish the mystery and admit they maybe don’t want the skunk ape (or whatever is out there) to be discovered.
Chris and Mark are not unique. They are two of thousands of seekers out there looking to find personal meaning within this effort. It’s not about facts that you or I can check and agree upon. When emotions and strong beliefs rule the heart and mind, a scientific process doesn’t work. There is nothing I can say to Chris and Mark that would sway their worldview that relies on the belief that the Green Swamp is genuinely mysterious and contains a skunk ape or two.
Dr. Bryan Sykes concluded after spending time with cryptid enthusiasts who really believe the truth is out there, that one can get swept away in the dream that something big is just out of reach, ready to be revealed (Sykes 2016).4 People can make the turn away from nonsense and towards a more solid worldview built on evidence instead of TV pseudo-reality. The story of Bobby and Jason illustrates this. It certainly doesn’t mean giving up your interests, but it does require revising your worldview.
Inside-Outside
My study of ARIGs across the Internet and in real life revealed a worldview very different from my own, but shared by a community of thousands and many more thousands around the world.
Paranormal beliefs are embraced by many and dismissed as nonsense by others. Paranormal believers’ worldview is that of an alternative reality—one that includes other senses and dimensions besides the ones we know and rely upon. It is unrestrained by borders of facts, proof, science, or reason. Loxton and Prothero (2013) discuss this in their last chapter, “Why Do People Believe in Monsters?” (The same reasons apply to ghosts and UFOs and other paranormal concepts.) People believe in what seems unbelievable because it provides value to them regardless of the possibility of being seen as unsuitable. Those that embrace the paranormal can achieve a sense of control and importance over their lives and feel less threatened by the chaos, fear, and sadness. This alternative worldview provides them a meaningful benefit.
Even the unbeliever can come to adopt these ideas via small steps and eventually hold a supernatural worldview. Belief in one fringe idea leads to exposure and acceptance of other similar beliefs. Fortunately, the same small steps can also go the opposite direction towards critical evaluation and acceptance of science and reason.
One might adopt cultural beliefs in order to belong to a particular social group and experience a thrill. If the paranormal belief is enforced by a group or tribe that the individual identifies with, it will be exceedingly difficult to give up that belief.
Bader, Mencken and Baker (2010) make clear that it’s a mistake to cite sweeping generalizations to describe the current paranormal culture and the people who subscribe to it. There are complex sociological and psychological reasons why a person will accept a paranormal explanation. Television, movies and the Internet have made gigantic impacts in our culture. Portrayal of paranormal belief is mainstream and generally acceptable. People now have easy access to learn about a subject, plan for experiences, and become involve with others that encourage belief.
Complex stories don’t make for good media content (Bader et al. 2010: 75). Therefore, the audience misses the nuance, the backstory, and the necessary foundation and support needed for full understanding of research, events, and conclusions. It is easy in our society to claim the role of expert when expertise is fundamentally lacking, to be a teacher when experience is shallow, and to portray a scientist without substantial education in any sciences. This social loophole allows for deception and possible harm; when critical thinking and earned expertise is not assigned high value, actors and pretenders will lead us by the nose.
My goal in counting and describing ARIGs was meant to illustrate how passionate, dedicated, determined, and creative they are. I needed to show that ARIG participants are not marginal or stupid. They reflect our own culture that values authoritativeness, scientificity, and a sense of wonder and mystery. The paranormal community has embraced individualism as well as finding stability and usefulness in shared ideas. They have created their own sub-communities, argot, and special knowledge. They have their own sacred places to visit and individuals to venerate. The influx of participants throughout the 2000s signaled a collective desire to find meaning and have experiences beyond everyday life. Performance and participation became essential components of ARIGs (A. Hill 2013) With ARIGs, paranormal culture became domesticated and democratized. It’s everywhere and for everyone (Jenzen & Munt 2013). It still remains a source of mystery and general interest for the public and is a means by which some people create meaning in their lives and undergo personal transformation (A. Hill 2010). People who participate in group activities or TV shows create their own narrative in what might be analogous to live-action role playing (LARPing), transcending their day-to-day persona and boosting their self-esteem and sense of worth. They see themselves as “monster hunters,” “ghost busters,” “afterlife warriors,” and “truth seekers,” eager for an authentic experience to “see for themselves” (A. Hill 2010).
Throughout the history of investigation into these topics, scientific interest has waxed and waned. Influential people and ideas have come and gone. Some threads continue to weave through and remain relevant but most fade away. The newcomers wish to jump right in and neglect valuable historical information. The public, always fascinated by the unknown and mysterious, discovered that ARIGs filled the empty void scientists left when they abandoned serious interest in the paranormal. Those who made it their serious leisure activity gladly assumed the role of amateur expert. Mayer (2013) studied the “phenomenology” aspect of American (and German) ghost hunting. He noted that the paranormal investigators are socially situated in such a way that they are both “insiders” and “outsiders.” They advocate use of “science” but are untrained amateurs. They claim to be skeptics but promote belief. They desire fame and celebrity but brand themselves as the everyman just asking questions. They say they are seeking truth while promoting unsupported, implausible ideas. And, they dream of financial gain while boasting that they do not charge for their work.
Short-circuiting of the formal process for becoming credentialed as a teacher or expert is detrimental to the public. One could even argue that such activities promote scientific illiteracy as people mistake what is being explained as corresponding to genuine scientific terms and methods. The audience is delivered inaccurate information, a distorted view of science, and an unsound investigational process devoid of a connection to history, existing scholarship, and cultural context.
Science is…
A discussion about the correct nature of modern science was necessary for this examination of ARIGs to compare what they do as “science” to an accepted scientific methodology.
The concept of science as method, process, community, and body of knowledge is not always grasped by the lay public who see science more as a certain kind of academic person or what’s in a textbook. Science requires using the most reliable methods of inquiry to obtain reliable knowledge. This multilevel, nuanced understanding of the scientific endeavor is lost on ARIGs just as it is invisible to those who never pause to examine the foundations and norms of scientific research. The average person has no knowledge of how science really works because we are never taught about it—a major oversight in the education system and one that hampers scientific literacy across the world. Today’s popularity of paranormal investigation is not, however, just a failure of science education or lack of teaching critical thinking skills, it has much to do with psychosocial and sociological factors. The portrayal of science by ARIGs also provi
des us with important insights into the public perception of what science is and how it works. Science as a cultural concept is different than science as applied by active scientists. Science is a construct as well as a real, complex endeavor in human society. It also has a strong social, even political character (Dolby 1975). There are only so many social resources to go around—money, attention, authority, respect. Scientists get defensive if a charlatan or faker attempts to usurp those areas that historically have been the realm of scientific endeavors and tries to undermine the authority of science. However, a great deal of work is required to do research up to scientific standards. Most ARIGs do not have the resources, preparation, or opportunities to push their work to a scientifically acceptable level. Since it takes a significant investment of time, money, and perseverance to attain a higher degree or coveted letters after one’s name, scientists are keen to retain their rights and ownership of the authority of science and resent those who attempt to fool the public into thinking their abilities and pronouncements are of equal merit. But the public displays a desire for science to be more democratic, for the average person to participate and have a say in what is explored and investigated.
I observed how ARIGs retreated from their strong public “scientific” stance and quickly qualified their processes when confronted. They did not rise to the challenge to present, support, and defend their evidence. Instead, they often resorted to the weak and meaningless counter for the skeptic to “prove it doesn’t exist”—we could go round and round forever and get perfectly nowhere with that end goal.
ARIGs lack communalism. Instead, we have hundreds of different interpretations of data and sets of conclusions, little to no cooperative efforts, and seriously flawed data sets interpreted by researchers with an entrenched bias for a particular outcome. Continuing to communicate only in their small groups who subscribe to the same beliefs and methods, ignoring criticism and requests for clarifications, ARIGs risk painting themselves into a smaller and smaller corner with no satisfactory way out except to produce even more unacceptable excuses. Their hypotheses and theories remain undeveloped and poorly tested, if tested at all. The conclusions serve as creative but unsupported explanations that sound interesting but are more fiction than fact. Many seemed to be explicitly seeking confirmation of their prior belief in ghosts, hauntings, cryptids, or UFOs as paranormal.
ARIGs have taken advantage of several social aspects relating to science to gain advantages with the public. By using sciencey appurtenances and appealing to democratic sentiments about knowledge, they can effectively serve in the role of scientist in their specific subject areas. Laypersons have a difficult time judging expertise, especially in these times when incredible volumes of information are available for little to no cost. The public is free to choose their “expert” based on their belief preferences. As Francis Bacon, a founding father of science, said: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” Someone who sounds suitably impressive will stand up for any position when it serves some purpose. Scientists have been found to argue against clear-cut theories such as evolution, climate change, vaccination efficacy, cigarette health effects and many fringe paranormal ideas. Credentials, especially diplomas and celebrity status, become highly effective tools to garner trust and followers. Since scientific concepts are difficult to comprehend and evaluate by those not educated in such fields, laypeople rely on trustworthy sources for acceptable information. And they deem a source trustworthy based on clues and cues. Even small portrayals of scientificity are influential in accruing authority and trust from the lay public. When a preferred paranormal belief is supported by an apparently authoritative person who sounds sciencey, people feel justified in greater acceptance of it and they use the sciencey aspect as a basis to convince others of its legitimacy (Blancke et al. 2016). This results in pseudoscience being given equal weight to scientific concepts in the public sphere.
Blancke et al. explain the problem at the center of belief in these topics and why being scientifical is so effective as a strategy:
People are not interested in impartial truth, but in finding and supporting beliefs that make intuitive sense.
Pseudoscientific concepts are pervasive (1) because posing as science works as a tool of persuasion, and (2) because people lack the motivation to correct their intuitive beliefs, but instead seek to confirm them and, simultaneously, distrust genuine scientific expertise. Various factors explain why cultural mimicry of science is a successful strategy for irrational beliefs to adopt: the fact that science is a dominant cultural authority (mimicking science can only be a successful strategy in a culture that already holds science in high regard), the exploitation of epistemic vigilance, people’s misunderstanding of science’s authority, the use of science as an argument, and epistemic negligence.
With working scientists untrained and unwilling to do public outreach to educate or to correct misunderstanding, society is faced with the conundrum that Carl Sagan described in 1990: “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.”5 As much as the public would like to participate and support scientific conclusions they prefer, science is not a democracy. An idea promoted by a few does not have equal weight as those theories that have been well-tested and are strongly cross-supported by tenets and facts from other areas. Science is also not like a trial in a court of law. The analogy to legal arguments is commonly made by ARIGs who say that their evidence would be acceptable in court to convict a person of a crime. Science relies on more than just a preponderance of evidence. To establish natural facts requires consideration of existing knowledge and achieving a consistency of explanations. Fields like ufology, ghostology, cryptozoology have remained marginal because of the less-than-rigorous methods that fall short of scientific standards.
Science Appreciation
Loxton & Prothero (2013) individually presented their view on cryptozoology in relation to science and education. Daniel Loxton feels that the investigation of Bigfoot and cryptids is a “gateway” to scientific literacy. As a children’s writer and illustrator, he has observed that the monsters are interesting and can kick-start a conversation with kids about biology, evolution, and evidence. On the other hand, Don Prothero, a prolific author and professor of natural sciences, sees cryptozoology ideas as promoting scientific misunderstanding. It’s bad enough that science illiteracy is rampant in the U.S., silly ideas about a real live ape-man roaming our country undetected without leaving a certifiable physical trace impede the reality of accepting scientific truths about nature. Considering my exchanges with ARIGs, I agree with both views but they apply to different audiences. Critical thinking skills can be learned and applied by everyone of all ages, in all stages of life, and to many important activities in life. It is essential to start teaching these skills very early, such as in elementary education. Use of creative topics such as hauntings, monsters, and UFOs to illustrate how to think through these claims critically is a winning approach. Kids love it, they relate to it and they remember it, planting in their minds a pivotal idea that what the public thinks is true may, in fact, be more complicated or outright false. It may instill a desire in some students to probe claims with further questions and nurture skeptical tendencies. Once the mode of thinking about claims is set and the person is beyond formal education, it will be more difficult to instill new practical skills. Therefore, constant media attention to these paranormal claims as valid, placing pseudoscientific ideas in equal comparison to scientific conclusions, reinforces mistaken ideas as true.
I see high hurdles to making progress with public appreciation of science, its methods, and conclusions. The notion that science is outside the average person’s purview is detrimental to science appreciation. Society must be comfortable with the scientific process, trusting that it is the best method we have but accepting that conclusions are always subject to revision. This is an incredibl
y difficult sentiment to accommodate. Most people want an answer and are unsatisfied with probabilities.
I found many examples with ARIGs that reflected a confused view about science in relation to definitions and norms accepted by the modern scientific community. Confusion was especially obvious when occult or religious beliefs are mixed with “scientific” protocol. While it isn’t a problem for a scientist or investigator to hold religious or occult beliefs, when those beliefs influence the collection of information and conclusions made, then the tenet of scientific naturalism has been breached. These groups are seeking success on their own terms which fall short of scientific endeavors. As a society, we can improve and learn to think well in general. This would also benefit paranormal investigations. If we could decouple the idea of the idealized “scientific method” from the larger concepts of science and critical thinking, I believe more progress could be made. ARIGs can make sound decisions without scientific training or pretending to be scientists. This has been shown to be true by the activities of the few skeptical-minded ARIGs. It will not be possible to inject science or critical thinking into the discussion with those who seek enlightenment via the paranormal. For those ARIGs that have a spiritual goal, science is not welcome.
Scientifical Americans Page 28