Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer

  To extend life significantly, we must understand the causes of death. Basically there are three: trauma, such as accidents; disease, such as cancer and arteriosclerosis; and entropy, or senescence (aging), which is a naturally occurring, progressive deterioration of various biochemical and cellular functions that begins early in adult life and ultimately results in an increased likelihood of dying from trauma or disease.

  How long can we live? The maximum life potential is the age at death of the longest-lived member of the species. For humans, the record for the oldest documented age ever achieved is 120 years. It is held by Shigechiyo Izumi, a Japanese stevedore. There are many undocumented claims of people living beyond 150 years and even up to 200 years; these frequently involve such cultural oddities as adding the ages of father and son together. Data on documented centenarians (people who live to be 100 years old) reveal that only one person will live to be 115 years old for every 2,100 million (2.1 billion) people. Today's world population of slightly over five billion is likely to produce only two or three individuals who will reach 115 years old. Life span is the age at which the average individual would die if there were no premature deaths from accidents or disease. This age is approximately 85 to 95 years and has not changed for centuries, and probably millennia. Life span, like maximum life potential, is probably a fixed biological constant for each species. Life expectancy is the age at which the average individual would die when accidents and disease have been taken into consideration. In 1987, life expectancy for women in the West was 78.8 years and for men 71.8 years, for an overall expectancy of 75.3 years. Worldwide, in 1995 life expectancy was estimated at 62 years. The numbers are continually on the rise. In the United States, life expectancy was 47 years in 1900. By 1950 the figure had climbed to 68. In Japan, the life expectancy for girls born in 1984 is 80.18 years, making it the first country to pass the 80 mark. It is unlikely, however, that life expectancy will ever go higher than the life span of 85 to 95.

  Though aging and death do appear to be certain, attempts to extend the biological functions of humans for as long as possible are slowly moving away from the lunatic fringe into the arena of legitimate science. Organ replacements, improved surgical techniques, immunizations against most major diseases, advanced nutritional knowledge, and the awareness of the salubrious effects of exercise have all contributed to the rapid rise in life expectancy.

  Another futuristic possibility is cloning, the exact duplication of an organism from a body cell (which is diploid, or has a full set of genes, as opposed to a sex cell, which is haploid, or has only a half set of genes). Cloning lower organisms has been accomplished but the barriers to cloning humans are both scientific and ethical. If these barriers go down, cloning may play a significant role in life extension. One of the major problems with organ transplantation is the rejection of foreign tissue. This issue would not exist with duplicate organs from a clone—just raise your clone in a sterile environment to keep the organs healthy, and then replace your own aging parts with the clone's younger, healthier organs.

  The ethical questions associated with this scenario are challenging, to say the least. Is the clone human? Does the clone have rights? Should there be a union for clones? (How about a new ACLU, the American Clone Liberties Union?) Is the clone a separate and independent individual? If no, then what about your individuality, since there is one of you living in two bodies? If yes, then are there two of "you"? For that matter, if you replace so many organs that all your original organs are gone, are you still "you"? If you believe in the Judeo-Christian form of immortality and you clone yourself, is there one soul or two?

  Finally, there is the fascinating field of cryonic suspension, or what Alan Harrington calls the "freeze-wait-reanimate" process. The principles of the procedure are relatively simple, the application is not. When the heart stops and death is officially pronounced, all the blood is removed and replaced with a fluid that preserves the organs and tissues while they are in a frozen state. Then, no matter what kills us—accident or disease—sooner or later the technologies of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us.

  Cryonics is still so new and experimental that the ethical questions have yet to come to public attention. For now, cryonic suspension is considered by the government as a form of burial, and individuals are frozen after they are declared legally dead by natural means, never by choice. If cryonicists could succeed in reviving someone, the distinction between the living and the dead would blur. Life and death would become a continuum instead of the discrete states they have always been. Certainly, definitions of death would have to be rewritten. And what about the problem of the soul? If there is such a thing, where does it go while the body is in cryonic suspension? If an individual chooses to be put into cryonic suspension before he is actually dead, then is the technician committing murder? Would it be murder only if the reanimation procedure failed to revive this suspended individual?

  If cryonic suspension technology ever matches the hopes and expectations of cryonicists, it may be feasible that someday one could choose to be frozen and reanimated at will, maybe even multiple times. Perhaps one could come back for ten-year stretches every century and essentially live a thousand years or more. Think of future historians able to write an oral history with someone who lived a thousand years before. But alas, as yet the entire field remains high-tech scientific speculation, or protoscience. Here are just a few of the problems:

  1. We do not know whether anyone frozen to date or anyone who will be frozen in the foreseeable future will ever be successfully revived. No higher organism has ever been truly frozen and brought back alive.

  2. The freezing technology appears to do considerable damage to brain cells, though the exact nature and extent of such damage have yet to be determined since no one has been revived to put it to the test. Even if the physical damage is slight, it still remains to be seen whether memory and personal identity will be restored. Our scientific understanding of where and how memory and personal identity are stored is fairly unsophisticated. Neurophysiologists have come a long way toward an explanation of memory storage and retrieval, but the theory is by no means complete. It is possible, though seemingly unlikely, that complete restoration will still result in memory loss. We just do not know without an actual test case. If cryonic revival does not result in return of considerable personal memory and identity, then what's the point?

  3. The entire science of cryonics presently depends on future technological developments. As cryonicists Mike Darwin and Brian Wowk explain, "Even the best known cryo-preservation methods still lead to brain injuries irreversible by present technology. Until brain cryo-preservation is perfected, cryonics will rely on future technologies, not just for tissue replacement, but also for repair of tissues essential to the patient's survival" (1989, p. 10). This is the biggest flaw in cryonics. Ubiquitous in the cryonics literature are reminders that the history of science and technology is replete with stories of misunderstood mavericks, surprise discoveries, and dogmatic closed-mindedness to revolutionary new ideas. The stories are all true, but cryonicists ignore all the revolutionary new ideas that were wrong. Unfortunately for cryonicists, past success does not guarantee future progress in any field. Cryonics presently depends on nanotechnology, the construction of tiny computer-driven machines. As Eric Drexler (1986) has shown, and Richard Feynman demonstrated as early as 1959, "There's plenty of room at the bottom" for molecular-size technologies. But theory and application are two different things, and a scientific conclusion cannot be based on what might be, no matter how logical it may seem or who endorses it. Until we have evidence, our judgment must remain, appropriately enough, suspended.

  Historical Transcendence— Is It So Small a Thing?

  Given these prospects, where can the nonreligious individual find meaning in an apparently meaningless universe? Can we transcend the banality of life without leaving the body? History is the one field of thought that deals with human action across time and b
eyond any one individual's personal story. History transcends the here-and-now through its fairly long past and near limitless future. History is a product of sequences of events that come together in their own unique ways. Those events are mostly human actions, so history is a product of the way individual human actions come together to produce the future, however constrained by certain previous conditions, such as laws of nature, economic forces, demographic trends, and cultural mores. We are free, but not to do just anything. And the significance of a human action is also restricted by when in the historical sequence the action is taken. The earlier the action is in a sequence, the more sensitive the sequence is to minor changes—the so-called butterfly effect.

  The key to historical transcendence is that since you cannot know when in the sequence you are (since history is contiguous) and what effects present actions may have on future outcomes, positive change requires that you choose your actions wisely—all of them. What you do tomorrow could change the course of history, even if only long after you are gone. Think of all the famous people of the past who died relatively unknown. Today, they have transcended their own time because we perceive that some of their actions altered history, even if they were unaware that they were doing anything important. One may gain transcendence by affecting history, by actions whose influence extends well beyond one's biological existence. The alternatives to this scenario—apathy about one's effect on others and the world, or belief in the existence of another life for which science provides no proof—may lead one to miss something of profound importance in this life. We should heed Matthew Arnold's beautiful words from his Empedocles on Etna (1852):

  Is it so small a thing, To have enjoyed the sun,

  To have lived light in the Spring,

  To have loved, to have thought, to have done;

  To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes—

  That we must feign a bliss Of doubtful future date,

  And while we dream on this, Lose all our present state,

  And relegate to worlds. . . yet distant our repose?

  6

  Abducted!

  Encounters with Aliens

  On Monday, August 8, 1983, I was abducted by aliens. It was late at night and I was traveling along a lonely rural highway approaching the small town of Haigler, Nebraska, when a large craft with bright lights hovered alongside me and forced me to stop. Alien creatures got out and cajoled me into their vehicle. I do not remember what happened inside but when I found myself traveling back down the road I had lost ninety minutes of time. Abductees call this "missing time," and my abduction a "close encounter of the third kind." I'll never forget the experience, and, like other abductees, I've recounted my abduction story numerous times on television and countless times to live audiences.

  A Personal Abduction Experience

  This may seem like a strange story for a skeptic to be telling, so let me fill in the details. As I explained in Chapter 1, for many years I competed as a professional ultra-marathon bicycle racer, primarily focusing on the 3,000-mile, nonstop, transcontinental Race Across America. "Nonstop" means racers go long stretches without sleep, riding an average of twenty-two out of every twenty-four hours. It is a rolling experiment on stress, sleep deprivation, and mental breakdown.

  Under normal sleep conditions, most dream activity is immediately forgotten or fades fairly soon after waking into consciousness. Extreme sleep deprivation breaks down the wall between reality and fantasy. You have severe hallucinations that seem as real as the sensations and perceptions of daily life. The words you hear and speak are recalled like a normal memory. The people you see are as corporeal as those in real life.

  During the inaugural 1982 race, I slept three hours on each of the first two nights and consequently fell behind the leader, who was proving that one could get by with considerably less sleep. By New Mexico, I began riding long stretches without sleep in order to catch up, but I was not prepared for the hallucinations that were to come. Mostly they were the garden-variety hallucinations often experienced by weary truck drivers, who call the phenomenon "white-line fever": bushes form into lifelike animals, cracks in the road make meaningful designs, and mailboxes look like people. I saw giraffes and lions. I waved to mailboxes. I even had an out-of-body experience near Tucumcari, New Mexico, where I saw myself riding on the shoulder of Interstate 40 from above.

  Finishing third that year, I vowed to ride sleepless in 1983 until I got the lead or collapsed. Eighty-three hours away from the Santa Monica Pier, just shy of Haigler, Nebraska, and 1,259 miles into the race, I was falling asleep on the bike so my support crew (every rider has one) put me down for a forty-five-minute nap. When I awoke I got back on my bike, but I was still so sleepy that my crew tried to get me back into the motorhome. It was then that I slipped into some sort of altered state of consciousness and became convinced that my entire support crew were aliens from another planet and that they were going to kill me. So clever were these aliens that they even looked, dressed, and spoke like my crew. I began to quiz individual crew members about details from their personal lives and about the bike that no alien should know. I asked my mechanic if he had glued on my bike tires with spaghetti sauce. When he replied that he had glued them on with Clement glue (also red), I was quite impressed with the research the aliens had done. Other questions and correct answers followed. The context for this hallucination was a 1960s television program—The Invaders—in which the aliens looked exactly like humans with the exception of a stiff little finger. I looked for stiff pinkies on my crew members. The motorhome with its bright lights became their spacecraft. After the crew managed to bed me down for another forty-five minutes, I awoke clear-headed and the problem was solved. To this day, however, I recall the hallucination as vividly and clearly as any strong memory.

  Now, I am not claiming that people who have had alien abduction experiences were sleep deprived or undergoing extreme physical and mental stress. However, I think it is fairly clear that if an alien abduction experience can happen under these conditions, it can happen under other conditions. Obviously I was not abducted by aliens, so what is more likely: that other people are having experiences similar to mine, triggered by other altered states and unusual circumstances, or that we really are being visited secretly by aliens from other worlds? By Hume's criterion of how to judge a miracle—"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish"—we would have to choose the first explanation. It is not impossible that aliens are traveling thousands of light years to Earth and dropping in undetected, but it is much more likely that humans are experiencing altered states of consciousness and interpreting them in the context of what is popular in our culture today, namely, space aliens.

  Autopsy of an Alien

  Humans have achieved space flight and even sent spacecraft out of the solar system, so why couldn't other intelligent beings have done the same thing? Perhaps they have learned to traverse the enormous distances between the stars by accelerating beyond the speed of light, even though all laws of nature known to us prohibit this. Perhaps they have solved the problem of collisions with space dust and particles which would shatter a spacecraft traveling at such enormous speeds. And somehow they have reached such technological sophistication without destroying themselves in their versions of war and genocide. These are very hard problems to solve, but look how much humans have accomplished since 1903 when the Wright brothers lofted their tiny craft into the air for twelve seconds. Should we be so arrogant as to think that only we exist and that only we could solve such problems?

  This is a subject discussed at great length and in great detail by scientists, astronomers, biologists, and science fiction writers. Some, like astronomer Carl Sagan (1973, 1980), believe that the odds are good that the universe is teeming with life. Given the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and the hundreds of billions of galaxies in t
he known universe, what are the chances that ours is the only one that has evolved intelligent sentients? Others, like cosmologist Frank Tipler (1981), are convinced that extraterrestrials do not exist because if they did they would be here by now. Given that there is nothing special about the timing of human evolution, it is fairly likely that if intelligent beings evolved elsewhere, at least half of them would be ahead of us in biological evolution, which should put them far, far ahead of us scientifically and technologically, which means they would have found Earth by now.

  Some people claim that not only have aliens found Earth, they crash-landed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and we can see what they look like on film. On August 28, 1995, the Fox network aired what has come to be known as the "Roswell Incident," which featured footage of an autopsy of what appears to be an alien body (see figure 9). The footage came from Ray Santilli, a London-based video producer who claims to have come across the black-and-white film while he was searching the U.S. Army archives for footage of Elvis (who served eighteen months in the military) for a documentary on the singer. The individual who sold him the footage (reportedly for $100,000) remains anonymous, Santilli maintains, because it is illegal to sell U.S. government property. Santilli, in turn, sold use of the footage to Fox. The U.S. Air Force has stated that the wreckage at Roswell came from a crashed top-secret surveillance balloon—"Project Mogul"—launched to monitor Soviet nuclear testing from the upper atmosphere. Given that the cold war was heating up in 1947, it is not surprising that at the time the Air Force was reluctant to discuss the crash, but this gave rise to decades of speculation by believers in UFOs, especially those with a bent for conspiracy theories. There are, however, numerous problems with the alien autopsy film as evidence of an alien encounter.