Is it any wonder that the paranormal has taken such a foothold in this society? With unprecedented access to people and to information that may change or even contradict what has popularly been considered fact, the timeless saying that, “There is no such thing as ghosts,” is rendered obsolete and subjective. On a symbolic level, an individual’s interaction with the Internet in 2013 is very similar to an individual’s interaction with the spirits through a medium during the Spiritualist movement of the late 1800s. Nameless, faceless, possibly false beings interact with us, making predictions and observations, telling of distant lands and new religions; they tell us of science and the natural world and that we are all one being connected through the mysteries of life. Madame Blavatsky would be proud.
More specifically, the ghost hunter age combines faith with technology; ghost hunters venture forth into haunted houses with infrared cameras, digital voice recorders, thermal night vision cameras, digital video recorders, and a vast array of computer programs and hardware. They search for empirical evidence of something that is notoriously devoid of anything that can be conclusively proven; the rationale being that the improvement in technology will somehow be able to verify our faith and thus turn faith into reality. Oddly enough, it seems that the exact opposite has occurred; rather than eliminating the need for faith, the technology explosion, spurred by the advent of the Internet, has created more need for faith than ever before. The ghost hunters have faith that there exists a spirit world beyond our natural world; and as the grounding reality of the world we once knew falls away beneath our feet, we begin to wonder and become interested in the possibility of a spirit world. The pretenses of science in modern-day ghost hunting serve only to bolster the faithful with the notion of empirical evidence that does not really exist. As Shirley Jackson wrote in her work The Haunting of Hill House, “People … are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.”6 But the paranormal is confined to the shadows and boundaries and darkness of the human experience; it is not so easily named.
In 2005 Dan Rather left CBS Evening News following a controversy regarding the truthfulness of a story that he had brought to light during the 2004 election. After 43 years, the voice of truth had been upset—dethroned, and dissolved in a bubbling cauldron of dissenting voices, competing stories, and multiple variations of truth. The major networks saw their ratings plummet as the whole idea of sitting down for the news at 7 p.m. faded in the wake of the Internet and the 24-hour news media cycle on cable news programs. Newspapers began to struggle for readership and had to quickly adapt to the Internet or be left behind. Today, we choose our truth; we choose our sources of information based on our personal idea of truth. If I choose to believe that aliens are secretly running the world, I can find validation—truth—on the Internet; I can converse with other people who believe the same, and together we can find evidences, narratives, and “scientific” proofs that uphold those beliefs. Twenty-five years ago I may have found myself relegated to the mental hospital.
The Raelians believe that, “Thousands of years ago, scientists from another planet came to Earth and created all forms of life, including human beings, whom they created in their own image … Once humanity reached a sufficient level of scientific understanding, the Elohim decided to make themselves more visible in UFO sightings and to conceive their final messages. Rael was given two missions: spreading that last message on Earth and preparing an embassy to welcome the return of our creators.”7 While earth and humanity have never had a shortage of people willing to follow strange cults and practice beliefs outside the mainstream of religion and science, as of this writing, the Raelian movement claims over 60,000 members worldwide and 4,866 people on Facebook who “like this.” The Internet, through its unprecedented ability to link people together, has created a world in which our beliefs, no matter how outlandish they may seem to others, can find validation, evidence, and truth.
Our technology and science have betrayed us; we are now a nation based almost entirely on faith; faith in politics, faith in science, faith in religion, faith in our nation, and faith in our ideas. We have to have faith because the availability of contradictory information and opinion makes nearly any assertion debatable and subject to criticism, review, and, most of all, doubt. When we are constantly forced to ask ourselves, “Do I really know what I think I know?” we are forced to rely on faith instead of information and “facts” to support our reality. That faith reveals itself in the religious fervor by which people express their beliefs and in their willingness to sacrifice for them. While this has long been the case in religion, it has now spread itself to countless other areas of life, including science; because, in this new age, everything is in question. As Erich Fromm postulated, American beliefs are a veneer over the primitive totemism that was once merged with the American land. Once again, we find ourselves in a primitive frame of mind. We know nothing because everything is in question; therefore, we have only belief. The totem serves to turn belief into reality; it represents a spiritual connection between man and the physical world. Our totems are no longer plants and animals, but rather science, technology, religion, history, psychology, and politics. The land is the same, but the totems have changed.
Is it any wonder that the paranormal is thriving today? If you (rational being that you are) stood alone among 60,000 Raelians, you would be considered insane. Similarly, we sit alone in front of a computer screen, awash in a sea of nameless beings that offer to confirm or contradict our reality. Our allegiances and beliefs are subject to the click of a mouse, the choosing of a totem.
THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
In April of 2003, the Human Genome Project completed its five-year plan of mapping the human genome. The 20,000 genes in the human genome were identified, and some of them were even identified as to what role they played in development and disease. The fantastical double helix, the very puzzle of man’s humanity, had been unraveled for the world. The building blocks of our very being had been disassembled and mapped out by a team of scientists. The mysterious double helix had been decoded, and as the world marveled at the accomplishment, there was a subtle, simultaneous gasp that the mystery of mankind was now less of a mystery. We had unraveled the foundation of our bodies and being and found … well, not much. While the mapping of the human genome is of great importance to the future of medicine and our ability to fight and prevent disease, it did surprisingly little for helping mankind understand his place in the world, aside from the rather humbling fact that the human genome contains only 20,000 genes—double that of the typical roundworm, and a far cry from the original estimate of 30,000.8 There was no answer as to our origins; there was no key to the unlocking of life; there was no “God” gene, nor anything that pointed in the direction of man being anything other than an animal with opposable thumbs and a knack for math.
The influence of the successful mapping of the human genome on the world of the paranormal and the ghost hunter age is much more subtle than the influence of the Internet. It does not, necessarily, leave us awash in a sea of information; in fact, the sheer underwhelming nature of the discovery could be seen as a welcome bit of grounding for humankind. But, as with many other scientific discoveries that should have grounded mankind, the mapping of the human genome has helped spur a greater and more popular interest in spirits and life after death. There is a very human need being fulfilled with programs like Ghost Hunters—the need to feel that we are something more than animal and that our unique abilities, our self-awareness, is not just an accident of evolution or the result of a random sequence of amino acids. In essence, it is a search for purpose and a search for an answer to the question of “Why?” The double helix has been unwound, but the mystery still remains.
The Spiritualist movement, which began in the 1850s, was a uniquely American working-class movement, though it became very aristocratic in Europe. In a previous chapter we exp
lored how that movement could have been affected by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Darwin contended that man had evolved from lesser beings and, essentially, removed any notion of divine origins and an eternal soul. What should have been a grounding reality for humanity during that time was, instead, met with a large shift to Spiritualism, as mankind tried to confirm the existence of the soul after death; to affirm the belief that man is something more than animal and that death is not the end of our being. The Spiritualist movement was rife with fraud and trickery; however, even in the face of scandal, people kept returning to mediums, continuing to believe in spite of obvious fraud. There was a need that had to be fulfilled. It was faith that kept the Spiritualist movement alive in the face of contrary evidence: faith in God, faith in the soul, and faith in mankind. World War I largely ended that faith.
Likewise, the ghost hunter age has been a time of faith, as mankind seeks to establish the soul’s continuance after death and to reaffirm that man is more than animal. While the mapping of the human genome is not as earth shattering as the Origin was, it is a rather disenchanting look at the basics of humanity. We have plumbed the depths of our bodies and found no soul, no spirit, no key that unlocks the mystery of our existence. The Human Genome Project reminded us that we are very closely related to all the other creatures that walk, crawl, or swim on this planet. It did not show us that we were extraordinary; rather, it showed the opposite. Thus, people during the ghost hunter age are seeking their own confirmation of the soul—the divine nature of man. During a time when everything is in doubt and everything is subject to faith, those who are looking for something more to believe in will find it in the paranormal world of the Ghost Hunters.
The ghost hunter age is actually nothing more than Spiritualism remade in the wake of technological achievements and reality television, and, similar to the Spiritualist movement, is a movement of the common man. Now, instead of sitting before a medium in a candlelit room of the medium’s design, we venture forth at night into modern-day Gothic castles—old haunts and abandoned places where legends have grown from rumored whispers. We go with digital recorders and electromagnetic frequency detectors, infrared and night vision cameras, and we attempt to commune with the dead and find evidence that life continues after death. Mediums still play an active role in the hunt, but now their role is more passive, giving way to the real star of the show—technology, which will hopefully confirm our faith in the human soul. And these Spiritualist adventures are not limited to the few, but rather anyone can become a ghost hunter. Today, cities offer “ghost tours” that take tourists on a walk through the city’s most famous haunted sites; legend-trippers are people who travel to places rumored to be haunted or possessed by the paranormal; courses in ghost hunting are available, and people with similar interests can form their own paranormal investigation group, set up a website, and interact with other ghost hunting groups in the area. All of this is an effort to preserve the mystery and confirm the deeply held belief that there is a purpose to our lives, a soul in our bodies, and a divinity in our existence. The Internet has made much of this possible through its democratization of information and the ability of people to communicate on an unprecedented scale. Thus, ghost hunting (Spiritualism) has become democratized as well; you don’t need much—just the cover of night, a willingness to believe, and a place to explore. But it is not, necessarily, the haunted houses that we are exploring, but rather, ourselves; it is an attempt to find meaning in our lives. With the divinity of mankind cast into doubt through Darwin’s work and then, once again, through the mapping of the human genome, the paranormal offers a way to sidestep that doubt and immerse ourselves in belief.
There is another side to the influence of the Human Genome Project. On December 27, 2002, a company called Clonaid announced to the world that it had successfully cloned a baby girl and named her Eve. This set off a firestorm of controversy surrounding the use of genetics for the cloning of human beings. Scientists had already been able to clone a variety of animals, most notably Dolly, the first cloned sheep, and there was much talk of cloning being used to help grow and replace failing organs in sick people. The notion of human cloning has obviously been visited in the past through films and books, but it was, and still remains, an ethical issue of the highest order. Clonaid is a company owned and operated by the Raelians, who believe that humanity was created by an alien race that made us in their own image through cloning. Therefore, the Raelians see cloning as a step toward immortality and achieving what the original “gods” had intended for humanity. They believe that when humanity has reached technological maturity, we will be reunited with our alien ancestors.
Clonaid was promptly brought to court with the child’s welfare in question. However, Clonaid had relocated the family to Israel, which lacked any cloning legislation, and the judge was not able to issue any order for the return of the child. Clonaid has since claimed to have cloned many more children for clients around the world, though this has never been independently verified and has led to claims of a hoax. “Without the tests, the cloning claims cannot be validated. Some experts believe the whole thing is a hoax by the religious sect behind Clonaid, a group called the Raelians that believes life on Earth was started by space aliens.”9 However, there was a general unease about Clonaid’s announcement, especially because they had the funds, facilities, and willing surrogates to complete such a project.
The news was unsettling for a variety of reasons, but one aspect that stands out is the incorporation of science and technology by the paranormal. The scientific community had been invaded, even usurped, by a group that believed humanity was fathered by an alien race that is communicating their message to man through the prophet Rael. The Raelians are one of many “UFO cults” that popped up during the UFO invasion. UFO cults claim that they are in direct contact with alien races that distribute knowledge of the origins of mankind and offer dire prophesies if we continue on our current path. The Raelians are certainly one of the most successful and lasting of those cults; most of them collapsed under the weight of their own prophesies, which never materialized into reality.
However, the Raelians, despite all logic to the contrary, continue on with the adoption of scientific technology for use in a belief system that is an affront to the very science it wields. The Raelians, naturally, are not the first group to claim that aliens spawned our existence. Erich von Däniken’s book, Chariots of the Gods, became a popular best-seller when it used ancient texts and mythology to call into question the current understanding of earth and man’s history, and it spawned numerous similar books and belief systems. However, mastery of the intricacies of human DNA has still not yielded an understanding or an answer to the great mystery of life: why are we here? While science may be able to provide the nuts and bolts of how it happened, the question of “why” remains a spiritual one. That is, once again, the realm of faith and the paranormal.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; this is a basic law of physics. But it seems that this particular law may spread beyond the boundaries of the physical world into the social and spiritual realms. For every step taken toward the disenchantment of the modern world, there appears to be an equal and opposite step toward the belief in magic, spirits, aliens, and witches. We have not yet found, and may never find, the gene that seemingly hardwires our brains to seek out enchantment, magic, and mystery. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism against the lonely, stark reality of an existential universe, or perhaps it is the by-product of a highly complex brain, which rests in the only animal that is constantly aware of its own mortality.
Indeed, there are stories passed down through ancient texts that tell of the beginning of the world and our origins. The Bible, Sumerian texts, and the Hindu Vedas all offer explanation and history as to the origins of man, and all of them talk of gods that descended from the skies. Evolution opposes these myths, and the mapping of the human genome has reinforced that opposition. However, to exist in modern society
is to exist in a place that is comprised of myths; total, absolute reality cannot be known by any single human mind, and in the ghost hunter age, it may be further away than ever before. Therefore, the mythology is reinforced, validated, evidenced, and shared. “The imagery of myth, therefore, can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game. And where the rules or forms of such play are abandoned, mythology dissolves—and, with mythology, life.”10
Attempts to unravel secrets are met with resistance; people will clutch their mythologies as they would their very lives, because it is that mythology that enables them to live.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world was forever changed. Nearly every American knows where they were and what they were doing when they first heard of an airliner crashing into the World Trade Center. With the crashing of the second airliner into the second tower and the crashing of a third into the Pentagon, it became obvious that this was a terrorist attack on the people of the United States. Fueled by pure, blind, murderous faith, 19 Arab hijackers successfully carried out the most devastating attack on American soil in the history of our nation. This act single-handedly shaped the course of the geopolitical world over the next decade and will continue to do so into the future.
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