American Cosmic

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.

  W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 2 1

  “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

  1 2 2 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  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

  W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 2 3

  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

  1 2 4 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  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.

  W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 2 5

  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

  1 2 6 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  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

  W H E N S TA R WA R S B E C A M E R E A L | 1 2 7

  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.

  1 2 8 | A M E R IC A N C O SM IC

  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