by D W Pasulka
Baudril ard and others have long argued: real and unreal are
no longer meaningful categories or frames of reference. That
doesn’t mean this framework doesn’t exist; it simply means
that it is irrelevant to many people. To the extent that theories
of UFOs, including extraterrestrials, ultra- terrestrials, and
interdimensionality, presuppose a modernist framework of
the real and the not real, they miss how these reports emerge
from a specific historical context.
The historical shift from modernity to postmodernity
and the pervasive effects of the media infrastructure deter-
mine and frame our perceptions. I am not throwing out or
discounting the reality of the UFO. I suggest that it should
cause us to rethink our own constructions of what we con-
sider to be real, because things we commonly take to be un-
real in a materialist sense, like movies and video games, have
real physiological and cognitive effects. Media technologies
have as much an impact on human bodies as biotechnologies,
and perhaps even more.
✦
4
WHEN STAR WARS BECAME REAL
The Mechanisms of Belief
MGM is making the first ten million dol ar religious
movie, only they don’t know it yet.
— A rt h u r C . C l a r k e , late 1960s, about MGM’s support of
2001: A Space Odyssey 1
Wel , it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that.
It’s a movie, just a movie.
— G e o r g e Lu c a s 2
The brain often fails to differentiate between virtual
experiences and real ones.
— J i m B l a s c ov i c h a n d J e r e m y Ba i l e n s o n 3
OVER A CUP OF COFFEE, a colleague and I were chatting
about my experience working with the screenwriters of the
blockbuster movie The Conjuring (2012). When I original y
received the cal , I had only been told that my expertise
was needed for a movie about Catholic culture. It has to be
a movie about an exorcism, I thought. The very first paper
I published dealt with movies about religion, including The
Exorcist. At the time, The Exorcist was the second- highest-
grossing film about the supernatural in history. Little did
I know that The Conjuring would soon displace it from this
position.
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“But it is just a movie. It’s not real,” my colleague said.
“This type of movie produces real physiological effects,”
I replied, “including practices and belief in things— even
supernatural things. They can also create and mimic real
memories. In a very real sense, we incorporate these films
into our minds and bodies. They become us.”
My colleague frowned. “That is very weird. Are you sure?”
“Yes. I am sure.”
In that early publication, I had only scratched the sur-
face of how films about religion influence and inform be-
lief. I would later learn that they don’t just get in our heads;
they become us, in the form of memories. I call this the
Total Recall Effect.4 It goes beyond confabulation, the ina-
bility to distinguish fact from fantasy— although it could be
considered a form of confabulation generated and nurtured
by modern technology. My research into urban legends re-
vealed that when people watched movies about religious
events, they often assumed they were seeing real events, and
they believed the movie versions even if they were not his-
torical y accurate. The movie image trumped the historical
record.
This was in 2005. I hadn’t yet delved into the cognitive
basis for these developments, as research into the cogni-
tive science of media and virtual reality was in its infancy.
I knew that screenwriters used a particular technique, made
popular by the graduate student writers of the screenplay
for the movie The Blair Witch Project (1999). They increased
their sales by pretending that the movie was based on a real
event. I was intrigued by this strategy. I knew that some-
thing similar was at work in movies loosely based on reli-
gious events— movies about Jesus, for example. At the time,
I wasn’t exactly sure how these connections worked and
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played out. When I was invited to work with screenwriters
who used these techniques, I jumped at the opportunity. It
was a stroke of luck to be offered a chance to see up close how
they worked. It was also a wonderful chance to conduct some
field research.
David Stinnett would be proud that I didn’t ascribe too
much significance to the synchronicities I discovered when
I arrived on the movie set. The screenwriters were Chad
Hayes and Carey Hayes, twin brothers from Malibu whose
very successful careers were about to get supercharged by
the success of this movie. The article I had written was about
people just like them. For their part, they were amazed to
meet a woman scholar of religion— just like the protagonist
of their last film The Reaping (2007), starring Hilary Swank.
(Who makes movies about women scholars of religion?!) We
realized that in a sense we had written about each other prior
to our meeting.
My work as a consultant on the movie, coupled with my
research on the cognitive science of media, helped me iden-
tify how certain media techniques influence religious belief
and belief in the supernatural. I published my updated re-
search in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion,
describing some of these techniques and their effects.5 That
work coincided with the beginning of my research into UFO
phenomena. I quickly realized that the phenomenon offers
the best example of how these techniques, the mechanisms
of belief, work to inform and sustain religious belief and
practice.
Two such techniques are the “based on true events”
strategy and something I term the “realist montage.” The
first is employed in many fictional adaptations of histor-
ical events. Historical movies about religion begin with a
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preexisting assumption that the events to be portrayed are
real, as in movies about Jesus and his life. Jesus was a histor-
ical figure, and so viewers perceive movies about his life as
historical accounts. Of course, they are not. Jesus is usual y
shown as a white European, yet he was not. Mary Magdalene,
one of Jesus’s followers, is portrayed as a reformed prostitute,
although there is no evidence that she was a prostitute, re-
formed or otherwise.
The second strategy, realist montage, splices different
scenes together to create a narrative and establish a cognitive
connection between them. Scenes from fiction are placed
side by side with scenes from real life, or nonfiction, to create
a realistic effect. This method is often used when pictures of
scenes that original y had no causal relation
ship are grafted
together to form a new meaning or a new narrative, as well as
to create internet memes (Figure 4.1).
This technique is used to great effect in the closing
scenes and credits of The Conjuring. The movie was based
on the lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, as well as the Perron
family, all of whom are real people. Their pictures and their
real names, as well as pictures from their lives, were placed
alongside pictures of the actors (in costume) who had played
them. This created an effect whereby the spectator could
easily conflate the real lives with their fictional portrayals.
Another way to generate belief in a fictional production
or a fictional adaptation of historical events is to get cultural
authorities to comment on the piece in the media. When
the marketing company Grace Hill Media was promoting
the blockbuster movie The Passion of the Christ (2004), they
invited scholars of religion and theologians to a prescreening.
When these authority figures published their reviews, it
created a buzz in the media. I realized that I functioned as
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Figure 4.1. Behind- the- scenes photo of Vera Farmiga and Lorraine
Warren from The Conjuring. Source: MovieStil sDB.com.
such a cultural authority for The Conjuring, when the di-
rector James Wan tweeted that they had hired a consultant
for the movie.
Neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks helps us understand how
movies about presumed historical or real events create the
conditions in which spectators can easily conflate fiction with
fact. We create cognitive models of events, Zacks explains.
These models can get conflated, especial y if two or more
events resemble each other— even if one is real and one is fic-
tional. “It’s not the case that you have one bucket into which
you drop all the real- life events, another for movie events,
and a third for events in novels,” he notes.6 The tendency to
confuse fact and fiction— to put a model into the “wrong”
bucket— is elevated when fictional movies use techniques
that create a sense of realism, like the realist montage and the
“based on real events” strategy.
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Such use of the mechanisms of belief is inherent in
documentaries and in propaganda. Zacks looks at Alfred
Hitchcock’s Saboteur, a film about a Nazi saboteur who is
supported by American sympathizers. He argues that al-
though the film was fictional, the producers had a real- world
agenda— they wanted to alert Americans to the fact that
such events could happen. As happened years later with the
marketing of The Passion of the Christ, cultural authorities
commented on Saboteur in the media and lauded it as accu-
rate on many levels, if not literal y true (as it clearly wasn’t).
Zacks notes:
I would bet that for many viewers the events of the film were
integrated with the information they got from the newspapers
and newsreels. If you were to have come back a couple months
after the movie was shown and ask viewers about a factory
bombing, I would bet a good number would tell you about
the factory bombing without realizing they were describing
fiction. That is just what makes such a movie effective as prop-
aganda: If viewers integrate models of events in the film with
their models of events in the world, then they will use the
events in the film as the basis for modifying their behavior in
the future.7
The problem with fictional representations that are ac-
cepted as real or conflated with the real is that it happens
unconsciously. Perhaps people can be trained to control this
process, but probably not. Zacks does suggest strategies to
combat it. He cites a study in which students were shown
a factual y inaccurate film about historical events. The
researchers tried to combat this effect with “a very specific
warning that the movie might contain bogus information,
and correcting students when they initial y accepted the
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bogus facts. Those two interventions reduced the effect of
the misinformation.”8 But it didn’t remove the effect com-
pletely. Another problem is that producers most likely will
resist putting such disclaimers on their movies or media
productions, because the confusion between fact and fiction
has proven to be very lucrative.
The issue is much larger than just the virtues (or evils)
of catering to commodity capitalism. Immersive virtual re-
ality and the infrastructure that supports it are the real
game- changers in this story. Arriving at conclusions similar
to Zacks’s, scholars at Stanford University’s Virtual Human
Interaction Lab have found that “the brain often fails to differ-
entiate between virtual experiences and real ones.”9 This fact,
coupled with new, digital y inspired media techniques that
mimic the strategies traditional y employed by Hol ywood
producers, means that we can now generate a truly immer-
sive experience of what has heretofore been unreal and im-
possible. The inability of spectators to separate the film
version from the factual version of events, and the blending
together of fictional productions and real- life events work to-
gether to create something entirely different and new— even
new belief systems. In fact, it has helped generate the belief
system of the UFO.
I F S TA R WA R S W E R E R E A L I T
WO U L D L O O K L I K E T H I S
Scott Browne is right. A new era is upon us, the era of the
fabricated UFO, which is also the object of near- universal
belief. The fabricated UFO is the best example of how the
mechanisms of belief— realist montage, the potential reality
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of an event, the reliance on cultural authorities, the splicing
of digital characters into iconic historical photographs, and
depictions of scenes from ordinary lives— work together to
create belief. From the 1990s series The X- Files to the con-
temporary digital productions that combine computer-
generated imagery (CGI) with real, historical footage of
military combat from World Wars I and II, these productions
combine and blend fact and fiction, playing coyly with the
spectator’s desire to know a “truth.” It is a perfect storm of
belief- generating mechanisms and forces that result in a lu-
crative industry, all based on faked videos and rumors of
truth— and the future- real— which is the potential reality of
the UFO.
Belief in UFOs is increasing.10 UFO- related program-
ming is increasing too, especial y within settings that os-
tensibly offer information about real events, like the
National Geographic Channel and the History Channel.
Increasingly, this fictionalized programming about UFOs
is being interspersed with productions about historical
and
real events. Brad Dancer, National Geographic’s senior vice
president for audience and business development, recently
acknowledged that companies like his might play a role in
bolstering UFO belief. Speaking about National Geographic’s
recent publicity campaigns, he said, “We were trying to have
a little fun and see if pop culture references have had an im-
pact on people’s beliefs. Hol ywood may have contributed
to the belief. As movies portraying aliens become increas-
ingly convincing, they may subconsciously affect people’s
attitudes.”11 In a pol , National Geographic asked its audience
what they believed the world would be like if extraterrestrials
were real. Respondents thought that The X- Files was the best
representation of what actual UFOs and aliens would be like.
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The public chose this program for the same reasons
that The X- Files is exemplary of this trend. The show is an
account of a systemic— and systematic— government cover-
up of the reality of UFOs and extraterrestrials. Is it fic-
tional? To the extent that there have been such government
cover- ups of purported UFO events, it is not. Declassified
documents have revealed that several governments, in-
cluding those of the United States and the United Kingdom,
have indeed covered up and managed information about
reported UFO events.12 The 1953 Robertson Panel, which
was the impetus for Project Blue Book, suggested a media
campaign to manage public perception of the phenomena.
Significantly, the report recommends the very kinds of
strategies used by the screenwriters of The Conjuring, the
student producers of The Blair Witch Project, and Grace
Hill Media’s marketers— that is, the use of documentary-
style techniques and authoritative experts to help mold
public perceptions.13
The X- Files mimics real life in a way that is much more
powerful than The Conjuring, partly due to the fact that
The X- Files was a weekly television series that ran for al-
most ten years (1993– 2002). The loglines of The X- Files
invited spectators to consider that “The Truth Is Out There”
and, more important, that it was okay to admit “I Want to
Believe.” This latter logline, juxtaposed with the image of a
flying saucer, became one of the most popular memes of the