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

by Michael Shermer

  Where Dean equivocates on the veracity question, Temple University history professor David Jacobs does not. Jacobs, who earned his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin and subsequently published his dissertation in 1975 as The UFO Controversy in America through Indiana University Press, in 1992 wrote Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (even landing a mainstream trade publisher in Simon & Schuster, one of the largest and most prestigious publishing houses in the world). In 1998 he ratcheted up the stakes with The Threat: The Secret Agenda—What the Aliens Really Want... and How They Plan to Get It. He admits in this latest book that "when I talk about the subject to my colleagues in the academic community, I know they think that my intellectual abilities are seriously impaired." Shortly after The Threat was released, I interviewed Jacobs on my weekly NPR radio show in Los Angeles. His intellectual abilities are not impaired in the least. I found him to be bright, articulate, and completely committed to his belief. He spoke like an academic, explained his theory and evidence with the cool dispatch of a seasoned scholar, and acted as if this claim were no different than discussing some other aspect of twentieth-century American history, which he teaches.

  Yet Jacobs' books resound with the anthem "I know this sounds weird, but I'm a smart guy." His first book includes a foreword by Harvard's John Mack (more on Mack below), who praises Jacobs as "scholarly and dispassionate," the product of "rigorous scholarship," "careful observation," and "meticulous documentation." In his second book his Ph.D. graces not only the cover, but appears as a header on every page, again punching home the message to the reader that no matter how weird it all seems, a Doctor of Philosophy is endorsing it. Jacobs' narrative style is designed to sound scholarly and scientific. He speaks of his "research," the "methodologies" used, his fellow "investigators," their "huge database," the "documentation" in support of the database, the numerous "theories," "hypotheses," and "evidence" that confirm not only the fact that the aliens are here, but enlighten us about their agenda. Even though this field of study has not one iota of physical evidence—all claims depend entirely on blurry photographs, grainy videos, recovered memories through hypnosis, and endless anecdotes about things that go bump in the night—Jacobs admits these limitations of his "data," but argues that if you combine them you can make the leap from skepticism to belief: "Our encounters with the abduction phenomenon have often come through the haze of confabulation, channeling, and unreliable memories reported by inexperienced or incompetent researchers. It smacks so much of cultural fantasy and psychogenesis that the barriers to acceptance of its reality seem unsurmount-able." Indeed, but never underestimate the power of belief. "Yet, I am persuaded that the abduction phenomenon is real. And as a result, the intellectual safety net with which I operated for so many years is now gone. I am as vulnerable as the abductees themselves. I should 'know better,' but I embrace as real a scenario that is both embarrassing and difficult to defend." If the evidence is so weak for this phenomenon, then how can a smart guy like Jacobs believe in it? His answer, coming in the final pages of the book, closes the belief off to counter evidence: "The aliens have fooled us. They lulled us into an attitude of disbelief, and hence complacency, at the very beginning of our awareness of their presence." It is the perfect circular (and impenetrable) argument. The aliens have either caused your belief or your skepticism. Either way, aliens exist.

  Whereas Jacobs admits that his evidence is anecdotal and thus nonfal-sifiable, Emory University's Courtney Brown, a professor of political science with a couple of bestselling books on aliens and UFOs by mainstream publishers, grounds his beliefs on a method of "data collection" he calls "Scientific Remote Viewing." SRV (both the name and the abbreviation are "registered service marks of Farsight, Inc.," so noted on his copyright page). SRV, more commonly known as Remote Viewing, is the process employed by a group of researchers hired by the CIA to try to close the "psi gap" (similar to the missile gap) between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s (one of them, Ed Dames, was Brown's mentor). During the cold war there was fear on the part of some American government officials that the Russians might have made greater advances in psychic power. So the CIA established a small department that spent $20 million in ten years to determine if they could "remote view" the location of missile silos, MIAs, and gather other intelligence information. The name is almost self-explanatory. To remote view you sit in a room and attempt to "see" (in your mind's eye, of sorts) the target object whose location could be anywhere in the world. After learning the RV ropes, from his home in the suburbs of Atlanta and then from his own institute dedicated to promoting SRV—The Farsight Institute—Brown began to remote view aliens and extraterrestrials.

  Like Jacobs' degree, Brown's Ph.D. is prominently displayed on his books. Interestingly, however, his Emory University connection is nowhere to be found in his second book, Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for Mankind. I asked him about this in a 1999 radio interview. Emory, it would seem, wants nothing to do with UFOlogy and alien encounters—Brown had to sign a document specifying that when he is discussing his encounters with aliens to the media and the public, no mention of the university is to be made. And, like Jacobs, Brown came off on the air as a thoughtful and intelligent scientist "just following the data" (as they are all wont to say) wherever that might lead.

  The claims in Brown's two books are nothing short of spectacularly weird. Through his numerous SRV sessions he says he has spoken with Jesus and Buddha (both, apparently, are advanced aliens), visited other inhabited planets, time traveled to Mars back when it was fully inhabited by intelligent ETs, and has even determined that aliens are living among us—one group in particular resides underground in New Mexico. When I asked him about these unusual claims on the air he balked, redirecting the conversation to the "scientific" aspects of remote viewing, how valid and reliable a method it is for collecting data, how as a social scientist he has applied the rigorous methodologies of the statistical sciences to his newfound research methodology, and that this should all be taken very seriously by scientists. (His first book, published in 1996, was entitled Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth) The rhetoric of his written narrative also wafts with scientism meant to convey the message that this weird thing is being presented by a very smart person. Consider just one randomly chosen passage:

  A P4 1/2S is the same as a P4 1/2, but it is a sketch rather than a verbal description. When the viewer perceives some visual data in Phase 4 that can be sketched, the viewer writes "P4 1/2 S" in either the physicals or the sub-space column, depending on whether the sketch is to be of something in physical reality or subspace reality. The viewer then takes another piece of paper, positions it lengthwise, labels it P4 1/2S centered at the top, and gives it a page number that is the same as the matrix page containing the column entry "P4 1/2S," with an A appended to it. Thus, if the entry for the P4 1/2S is located on page 9, then the P4 1/2S sketch is located on page 9A.

  What this passage describes is different methods a remote viewer can use to record different aspects of the fantasy trip: either it is a voyage through the physical world or through "subspace" existence. My point is not to ridicule through obfuscation but to reveal the lengths smart people will go to in order to rationalize a weird belief. When Brown appears on Art Bell's late night radio show he can wax poetic about alien invasions and Jesus' advice. But when he's on my show—by definition a science show broadcast in Southern California and listened to by many from the Caltech, JPL, and aerospace communities, he wants only to discuss the rigors of his scientific methodologies.

  In like manner did the multimillionaire Silicon Valley business genius Joe Firmage (1999) respond when I interviewed him on the radio. The 28-year-old founder of the $3 billion Internet company USWeb (who had already sold his first Internet company for $24 million when he was only 19) requested that he be introduced as the founder and chairman of the International Space Sciences Organization
(ISSO) and was interested only in discussing his love of science and his new work as a "scientist" for ISSO (to my knowledge he has no formal training as a scientist). What about all those press reports that erupted immediately following his announcement that he was quitting USWeb to pursue his belief that UFOs have landed and that the United States government had captured some of the alien technology and "back-engineered" it and fed it to the American science and technology industries? They exaggerated and distorted what he really believes, Firmage explained. He never actually said that he believed the U.S. government stole alien technologies. Nor did he really want to elaborate upon a 1997 experience he had (he seemed genuinely uncomfortable when I brought it up) with an alien intelligence. The media, he explained, exaggerated that one as well. This I found odd, even disingenuous, since it was his own public relations company that generated all the media attention, including the stories of stolen alien technology and his life-changing alien encounter.

  In the fall of 1997, Firmage says that he was awakened in the early morning to see "a remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light hovering over my bed." The being asked Firmage: "Why have you called me here?" Firmage says he replied: "I want to travel in space." The alien questioned his desire and inquired why such a wish should be granted. "Because I'm willing to die for it," Firmage answered. At this point, says Firmage, out of the alien being "emerged an electric blue sphere, just smaller than a basketball. ... It left his body, floated down and entered me. Instantly I was overcome by the most unimaginable ecstasy I have ever experienced, a pleasure vastly beyond orgasm. . . . Something had been given to me." The result was Firmage's ISSO and his 1999 Internet electronic book immod-esdy entitled The Truth, a rambling 244-page manuscript filled with warnings to humanity that could have been taken out of a 1950s B science fiction film. The book is heavily sprinkled with the jargon of physics and aeronautics, including Firmage's goal to convince the "scientific establishment" of the reality of UFOs and such advanced technologies as Zero Point Energy from the vacuum of space, "propellantless propulsion" and "gravitational propulsion" for "greater-than-light" travel, "vacuum fluctuations" to alter "gravitational and inertial masses," and the like.

  Again, my point is not to belittle, but to understand. Why would a smart man like Joe Firmage give up such a remarkably lucrative and successful career as a Silicon Valley wizard to chase the chimera of aliens? Well, he was raised as a Mormon but in his teen years he "began to have questions about the more dogmatic aspects of the religion." Mormons believe in direct human-angel contact based on the claim that the Church's founder, Joseph Smith, was contacted by the angel Moroni and guided to the sacred golden tablets from which the Book of Mormon was written. In The Truth, Firmage explains that the revelation "was received by a man named Joseph Smith, whose descriptions of encounters with brilliant, white-clothed beings are almost indistinguishable from many modern-day accounts of first-hand encounters with 'visitors.'" So, Joseph Smith had a close encounter of the third kind. And apparently he was by no means the first. Eighteen hundred years earlier St. John the Divine received his "revelation" from which the last book in the Bible was written, and shortly before that a carpenter from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth experienced his own visions and epiphanies from on high. Although he does not say it directly, the inference is clear: Jesus the Christ, St. John the Divine, Joseph Smith, and Joseph Firmage each made contact with one of these higher beings, and as a consequence changed the world. Firmage found his calling, and the meaning of his close encounters:

  One of the purposes of this Internet book is to share with each of you fundamentally new ideas—ideas that one day could transform the world. In this work, I wish to propose a way to completely restructure over time our economic institutions to operate in a manner compatible with a living Earth, while preserving the proven entrepreneurial creativity that has built a remarkable modern civilization. ... Is this a radical proposal? Absolutely. Is it insane? Yes. Is it a Utopian fantasy? Totally. Radical and insane proposals are necessary to save a short-sighted and dangerously hubris nation from self-destruction. . .. My business partner and I built USWeb Corporation, the largest Internet services company on the planet, so I know what I am talking about creating here.

  Indeed he does. He is a smart man with a weird belief and a lot of money to legitimize it. But neither the smarts nor the money alter one iota the fact that there exists not one piece of tangible evidence of alien visitation. And where evidence is lacking, the mind fills in the gaps, and smart minds are better at gap filling.

  Cornell University, Emory University, Temple University, and Silicon Valley are impressive venues from which to launch weird salvos, but UFOlogists and the alien experiencer (the preferred term to "abduction") community received its biggest boost in 1994 with the publication of Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack. Mack's M.D. is boldly emblazoned on the cover, along with "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" (awarded for a biography of T. E. Lawrence, not a book on psychiatry), thereby establishing credibility. The publisher might as well have printed at the bottom of the dust jacket: "smart man endorses weird belief." Mack admits in his introduction that when he first heard about abductee proponent and pioneer Budd Hopkins, and of people claiming to have been abducted by aliens, "I then said something to the effect that he must be crazy and so must they." But when Mack met some of them "they seemed in other respects quite sane." Further, as far as he could tell, these folks had nothing to gain and everything to lose in coming forth with such stories, therefore "they were troubled as a consequence of something that had apparently happened to them." Mack's skepticism morphed into belief after interviewing over a hundred alien experiencers, concluding that "there was nothing to suggest that their stories were delusional, a misinterpretation of dreams, or the product of fantasy. None of them seemed like people who would concoct a strange story for some personal purpose."

  Agreed, but is "concoct" the right word? I think not. "Experiencer" is an apt description because there is no doubt that the experiences these people have had are very real. The core question is, does the experience represent something exclusively inside the mind or outside in the real world? Since there is no physical evidence to confirm the validity of the latter hypothesis, the logical conclusion to draw, knowing what we do about the fantastic imagery the brain is capable of producing, is that experiencer's experiences are nothing more than mental representations of stricdy internal brain phenomena. Their motivation for telling Mack and others about these experiences, assuming (naively perhaps) that they do not do it for the public attention, fame, or money, is external validation of an internal process. And the more prestigious the source of that vahdation—the "smarter" the validator is, so to speak—the more valid becomes the experience: "Hey, I'm not losing my mind—that smart guy at Harvard says it's real."

  The Harvard affiliation with such fringe elements was not lost on the university's administration, who made motions to reign in Mack and squelch his alien agenda, but he retained a lawyer, held his ground on the issue of academic freedom (Mack is tenured), and won the right to continue his academic center called PEER, Program for Extraordinary Experience Research. Many questioned his motives. "He enjoys being the center of attention," said Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, who led the formal academic investigation of Mack's research. "He's not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore," Relman continued, "but in the interests of academic freedom, Harvard can afford to have a couple of oddballs" (quoted in Lucas 2001).

  The consequences of this shift in belief for Mack—his own form of validation in a way—were profound: "What the abduction phenomenon has led me ... to see is that we participate in a universe or universes that are filled with intelligences from which we have cut ourselves off, having lost the senses by which we might know them." However, allow me to fill in the ellipses: "I would now say inevitably." (Read it again with the ellipses filled.) Why inevitably? Mack's answer is enl
ightening: "It has become clear to me also that our restricted worldview or paradigm lies behind most of the major destructive patterns that threaten the human future— mindless corporate acquisitiveness that perpetuates vast differences between rich and poor and contributes to hunger and disease; ethnonational violence resulting in mass killing which could grow into a nuclear holocaust; and ecological destruction on a scale that threatens the survival of the earth's living systems."

  The story is as old as the science fiction genre from which it sprang, and reveals the deeper mythic motif behind encounter narratives as a type of secular theology, with UEOs and aliens as gods and messiahs coming down to rescue us from our self-imposed destruction—think of Robert Wise's 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, where the superior alien intelligence in this Christ allegory (the alien's Earth name was "Mr. Carpenter") comes to save the planet from nuclear armageddon. Here we glimpse a possible motive for Mack. Is he a secular saint, Moses come down from the Harvard mountain to mingle with the masses and enlighten us to the true meaning of the cosmos? This is, perhaps, an exaggeration, but there is something deeper in Mack's story that he reveals toward the end of the introduction to his book, and that is his fascination with Thomas Kuhn's concept of the paradigm, and the revolutionary paradigm shift:

  I knew Tom Kuhn since childhood, for his parents and mine were friends in New York and I had often attended eggnog parties at Christmastime in the Kuhns' home. What I found most hopeful was Kuhn's observation that the Western scientific paradigm had come to assume the rigidity of a theology, and that this belief system was held in place by the structures, categories, and polarities of language, such as real/unreal, exists/does not exist, objective/subjective, intrapsychic/external world, and happened/did not happen. He suggested that in pursuing my investigations I suspend to the degree that I was able all of these language forms and simply collect raw information, putting aside whether or not what I was learning fit any particular worldview. Later I would see what I had found and whether any coherent theoretical formulation would be possible.