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

by Michael Shermer

  There is remarkable irony in this statement—one I find difficult to believe Kuhn would endorse—because one of the main points of Kuhn's revolutionary 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that it is virtually impossible for any of us to "suspend . .. language forms and simply collect raw information." We are all embedded in a worldview, locked in a paradigm, and ensconced in a culture. And, as we saw, the attribution and confirmation biases are all powerful and pervasive that none of us can escape. The language forms of alien abduction narratives are very much a part of a larger culture in twentieth-century America that includes science fiction literature about aliens, the actual exploration of space, films and television programs about spacecraft and aliens, and especially the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) being conducted by mainstream scientists. This is, in large part, the explanation skeptics offer for the consistency of the abduction stories—the memory motifs come from these commonly experienced cultural inputs. But the point is that Mack's alleged unsullied collection of "raw information" seems disingenuous from what we know about how beliefs are formed. (I would also point out—though there is no way that Mack would know this from his one foray into the paranormal— that the identification of the Kuhnian paradigm and the call for a revolutionary shift to the believer's radical idea is made by nearly every claimant who is out of the mainstream, from UFOlogists and psychic investigators to proponents of cold fusion and perpetual motion machines.) Joe Friday's "Just the facts, ma'am" sounds good in principle, but is never conducted in practice. All observations are filtered through a model or theory, so at some point Mack's observations within a skeptical paradigm became data in support of a believing paradigm. How did this happen?

  John Mack is smart enough to realize that the data and data collection techniques he and others use in drawing out these abduction narratives are questionable to say the least. Hypnotic regression, fantasy role playing, and suggestive talk therapy all leading to so-called recovered memories, is now well known to actually generate false memories. Of the alleged disappearance of abductees, Mack admits that "there is no firm proof that abduction was the cause of their absence." The scars from alien surgeries, Mack admits, are "usually too trivial by themselves to be medically significant." Of the missing babies from alien-human sexual encounters, Mack notes that there is "not yet a case where a physician has documented that a fetus has disappeared in relation to an abduction." And of the evidence in total, Mack confesses that it is "maddeningly subtle and difficult to corroborate with as much supporting data as firm proof would require."

  To accept these shortcomings and continue his work, Mack must make a reality leap of Kuhnian proportions. The limitation is not in our methodologies of research, it is in the subjects themselves: "If the abduction phenomenon, as I suspect, manifests itself in our physical space/time world but is not of it in a literal sense, our notions of accuracy of recall regarding what did or did not 'happen' (Kuhn's advice about suspending categories seems relevant here) may not apply, at least not in the literal physical sense." These aliens may not be from "space," as in outer space, but may be from another dimension, accessible only through these ephemeral mental states and thus immune to skeptics' demand for a body or artifact from the spacecraft. This may be a Kuhnian model of science, but it is not Popperian since there is no way to falsify the claims. Mack's retreat to allowing "aliens" to be inner dimensional beings capable of detection only in the minds of experiencers is indistinguishable from my own hypothesis that they are entirely the product of neural activity. With no way to distinguish between these two hypotheses, we are out of the realm of science and into the field of creative literature. Science fiction, I think, would more adequately describe this entire field.

  The epistemological problems from the beginning, then, are enormous, as Mack himself confesses in giving up the game of science entirely: "In this work, as in any clinically sound investigation, the psyche of the investigator, or, more accurately, the interaction of the psyches of the client and the clinician, is the means of gaining knowledge. . . . Thus experience, the reporting of that experience, and the receiving of that experience through the psyche of the investigator are, in the absence of physical verification or 'proof ... the only ways that we can know about abductions." Four hundred pages later, in a final section entitled "Paradigm Shift," Mack once again calls for a change comparable to the Copernican revolution (a favorite analogy among paranormalists and fringers of all stripes): "It would appear that what is required is a kind of cultural ego death, more profoundly shattering (a word that many abductees use when they acknowledge the actuality of their experiences) than the Copernican revolution. . . ." How else are we to understand these alien intelligences? "It is an intelligence that provides enough evidence that something profoundly important is at work, but it does not offer the kinds of proof that would satisfy an exclusively empirical, rationalistic way of knowing."

  As Mack told Robert Boynton (1994) in Esquire magazine, "People always think that aliens are either real or psychological, and I ask them to consider the possibility that they are somehow both. But that means our entire definition of reality has to change." Boynton notes that Mack has long been searching for that alternate reality through such trendy New Age beliefs as EST and holotropic breathing techniques: "He uses the latter to attain a trancelike state. During one session, he had a past-life experience in which he was a sixteenth-century Russian who had to watch while a band of Mongols decapitated his four-year-old son." In fact, Mack admitted to Carl Sagan (1996) that "I wasn't looking for this. There's nothing in my background that prepared me. It's completely persuasive because of the emotional power of these experiences." In a revealing interview in Time magazine Mack said, "I don't know why there's such a zeal to find a conventional physical explanation. We've lost all that ability to know a world beyond the physical. I am a bridge between those two worlds."

  Mack's bridge has expanded into another book (1999), Passport to the Cosmos, in which he once again pleads that "I am not in this book seeking to establish the material reality of the alien abduction phenomenon. . . rather, I am more concerned with the meaning of these experiences for the so-called abductees and for humankind more generally." In this sense, Mack's abduction belief system operates much like religion and other faith-based beliefs, in that for those who believe proof is not necessary, for those who do not believe, proof is not possible. In other words, the belief in UFOs and alien abductions, like that of other weird beliefs, is orthogonal to and independent of the evidence for or against it, or the intelligence of its proponents, which makes my point. Q.E.D.

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