If you would like to spread some hysteria, one method is to firmly convince members of a small subculture that something they strongly fear is actually happening.

If you choose a subculture that interacts with mainstream society; then the hysteria will often ultimately spread outside the bounds of its members. Members of the subculture will believe the story, and they in turn will tell others of their fear. People from outside this subculture who would not normally believe the story will note the sincerity and firm belief in the voices and mannerisms of their friends from within it and begin to reconsider their position. After all, those telling the tales have nothing to gain and are firm believers, so it must be true. Or so goes the logic.

In time, you will find many people, some with impressive credentials, believing the stories. They will be quoted and their credentials cited. Others will remain skeptical, but may begin to question whether their skepticism is appropriate. Ultimately, many of them will say, “With all of these stories, coming from all of these people, some of them must be true, even if many (or even most) are obviously absurd.” After all (goes the logic), with all this smoke, there must be fire. Or, in the case of satanic-cult hysteria, “With all this horse manure piled so high and so deep, there must be a devilish little pony under there somewhere.”

Born-again, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christians undoubtedly make up a subculture, by virtually any definition of the term. They have their own mass-market entertainment industry. They have “Christian” rock, “Christian” aerobics albums, “Christian” books on dinosaurs and evolution, and “Christian” comedians. They have schools and colleges with their own “Christian” curriculum that leaves out such facts as the widespread prevalence of other religions, the multicultural nature of the incredibly adaptive and flexible human race, evolution (human and otherwise), and the age of the universe. In short, many of them seek to live their lives so that they can minimize contact with all information sources that contradict their beliefs. If they do this successfully, then they can believe whatever they like and safely forget and ignore the troubling presence of not just secular humanists but also the mainstream churches of America and the world. On the other hand, most fundamentalist Christians do have regular jobs, shop at regular supermarkets, and live in normal neighborhoods, so they do interact with mainstream society on a fairly steady basis.

Within this evangelical subculture, Mike Warnke was a media superstar. Undoubtedly part of his appeal was the way in which he proved to people that if they dedicated themselves to Jesus then they could have a good life, no matter how terrible they might have once been. As proof of this, Mike Wamke offered himself. He confessed to having been not only a drug addict but also a high priest of a satanic cult that practiced human sacrifice and ritualistic rape and child abuse. Warnke proudly stated that, through Jesus, he now had a blissful family life.

Warnke’s alleged conversion from high satanic priest to dedicated Christian entertainer made a fascinating story and attracted considerable attention. Unlike Smith and Pazder’s Michelle Remembers, an earlier, influential, allegedly autobiographical, staunchly pro-Catholic, satanic-cult-hysteria book, The Satan Seller appealed to the evangelical Protestant community

In time, Warnke became known in some circles as an authority on satanic cults, and he appeared in that role on “20-20,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Larry King Live,” “Focus on the Family,” and “The 700 Club.” He was cited as an authority on Satanism and living proof of the existence of cults engaging in satanic ritual abuse in such works as Friesen’s Uncovering the Mystery of MPD [multiple personality disorder], Stratford’s Satins’ Underground, and Ryder’s Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse. These in turn were cited in other works. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Mike Warnke was solely responsible for the current spate of satanic-cult paranoia, he undoubtedly had a great influence. Few who have examined the arguments of believers in such cults can deny that many of them tend to have a worldview strongly grounded in Christian belief- systems and frequendy a conservative fundamentalist orientation.

Warnke’s book consists of his telling stories about the key events in his life and how they convinced him of the importance of adopting a Christian lifestyle. There were only two problems: He was a pretty lame and mediocre comedian, and he was corrupt and untruthful. In such a case, what is one to do? The answer is simple-call in Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein, a pair of born-again Christian investigative journalists.

Hertenstein and Trott, working for Cornerstone magazine, an evangelical publication, conducted a thorough investigation into Warnke’s claims. In Selling Satan: The Tragic History of Mike Warnke, they recount the investigation and the findings. Trott and Hertenstein tracked down and interviewed more than one hundred of Warnke’s acquaintances from throughout his life. Among the discoveries was that Warnke’s lies were not even very good ones. For example, by his own admission, he had been involved in drugs in college. He told how drug use led him on a self destructive path culminating in involvement in the occult. This in turn led him to Satanism, and ultimately to becoming high priest of the group. Following the period of occult involvement, Warnke joined the Navy and served in Vietnam with the Marine Corp as a medical corpsman. While in the service he was converted and “saved” by two Christians who were sure that even Mike Warnke, former drug addict and satanic high priest, was not too far gone for Jesus’ love to turn him around.

The writers uncovered that Warnke had entered college, a secular junior college, September 13, 1965. He entered the Navy on June 2, 1966. During his one semester prior to dropping out, there was hardly enough time for the many adventures Warnke claimed happened. during his drug-addicted drug-dealer/Satanic-cultist turned-high-priest period. These included being shot three times, riding a motorcycle to Mexico to make drug deals for a gangster, imprisoning sex slaves in his apartment, participating in CIA-financed LSD experiments at the college, and kidnapping a variety of victims for his cult’s evil rituals and orchestrating the abduction of others. He described walking around campus dressed in black with pasty white skin, innumerable scabs on his face, waist-length hair, and six-inch-long fingernails, painted black and sharpened for fighting. As ludicrous as this thrill-a-minute college semester sounds, it became even more absurd as Trott and Hertenstein began pinning down the dates even further, based on Warnke’s descriptions of various diabolic ceremonies held under the light of a full moon. The dates fell apart completely.

Fellow students and college faculty found furrther problems with the story. It was, after all, set in the early sixties, not the late sixties. There were no drugs at the junior college at the time, no CIA-funded LSD experiments, and no people with waist-length hair, much less the rest of the bizarre description Warnke provided. This pattern of gross falsehood continued. His period in Vietnam, described as a “year in Hell,” was six months long, and most of his war stories had happened to other people or never occurred at all. Other stories could not be corroborated. For example, the two dedicated Christians who had “saved” Warnke had, he claimed, “died in Vietnam.” His blissful family life following the war consisted of a series of four marriages, each ending in divorce, with much womanizing on the side. The donation plate passed around after each show supposedly went to a center for aiding satanic-cult-abuse victims. Neither the center nor the victims existed. And as for his Christianity, Trott and Hertenstein uncovered that, in a completely unexpected episode of bizarreness, Warnke had secretly been ordained as an independent bishop in an obscure Eastern Orthodox sect, which he practiced on the side. It should be mentioned that this version of Christianity would be quite distasteful to most of the people who purchased or enjoyed his materials.

Warnke’s lies remained undiscovered for many years for several reasons. First, he told people what they wanted to hear. Second, those who did uncover signs of corruption, either did not know where to go to inform his public or else did not wish to go public because of their personal financial interest or their approval of the way Warnke would successfully gain converts (to a religion he didn't practice).

I found Selling Satan fascinating. It is more than the story of one individual; it also deals with his effect on others. Warnke, evil as he is, is an intriguing character. Hertenstein and Trott also provide a very interesting picture of the “Christian music industry.” Their book should be read by all those concerned with satanic-cult hysteria. It is targeted for an audience that needs to hear this message and finds the writings of most skeptics distasteful, or even blasphemous.

As for the rest of us, Cornerstone’s investigative pieces into such claims have been cited favorably by such authors as Robert Hicks and Jeffrey Victor, both of whom have contributed articles on this subject to the Skeptical Inquirer. Many skeptics often find such evangelical Christianity objectionable. Personally, I did not find this to be true as I read Selling Satan. In fact, it increased my respect for those who profess such beliefs. Trott and Hertenstein have made a valuable contribution to understanding the phenomenon of satanic-cult fears. I look forward to seeing the results of their next project.

Even with an early bedtime in winter you could see the stars. What were they? They weren’t like hedges or even streetlights; they were different. So I asked my friends what they were. They said, “They’re lights in the sky, kid.” I could tell they were lights in the sky, but that wasn’t an explanation. I mean, what were they? Little electric bulbs on long black wires, so you couldn’t see what they were held up by? What were they?

Not only could nobody tell me, but nobody even had the sense that it was an interesting question. They looked at me funny. I asked my parents; I asked my parents’ friends; I asked other adults. None of them knew. My mother said to me, “Look, we’ve just got you a library card. Take it, get on the streetcar, go to the New Utrecht branch of the New York Public Library, get out a book and find the answer.”

That seemed to me a fantastically clever idea. I made the journey. I asked the librarian for a book on stars. (I was very small; I can still remember looking up at her, and she was sitting down.) She was gone a few minutes, brought one back, and gave it to me. Eagerly I sat down and opened the pages. But it was about Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, I think, a terrible disappointment. And so I went back to her, explained (it wasn’t easy for me to do) that that wasn’t what I had in mind at all, that what I wanted was a book about real stars. She thought this was funny, which embarrassed me further. But anyway, she went and got another book, the right kind of book. I took it and opened it and slowly turned the pages, until I came to the answer.

It was in there. It was stunning. The answer was that the Sun was a star, except very far away. The stars were suns; if you were close to them, they would look just like our sun. I tried to imagine how far away from the Sun you’d have to be for it to be as dim as a star. Of course I didn’t know the inverse-square law of light propagation; I hadn’t a ghost of a chance of figuring it out. But it was clear to me that you’d have to be very far away. Farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The dazzling idea of a universe vast beyond imagining swept over me. It has stayed with me ever since.

I sensed awe. And later on (it took me several years to find this), I realized that we were on a planet—a little, nonself-luminous world going around our star. And so all those other stars might have planets going around them. If planets, then life, intelligence, other Brooklyns—who knew? The diversity of those possible worlds struck me. They didn’t have to be exactly like ours, I was sure of it.

It seemed the most exciting thing to study. I didn’t realize that you could be a professional scientist; I had the idea that I’d have to be, I don’t know, a salesman (my father said that was better than the manufacturing end of things), and do science on weekends and evenings. It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that my biology teacher revealed to me that there was such a thing as a professional scientist, who got paid to do it; so you could spend all your time learning about the universe. It was a glorious day.

It’s been my enormous good luck—I was born at just the right time—to have had, to some extent, those childhood ambitions satisfied. I’ve been involved in the exploration of the solar system, in the most amazing parallel to the science fiction of my childhood. We actually send spacecraft to other worlds. We fly by them; we orbit them; we land on them. We design and control the robots: Tell it to dig, and it digs. Tell it to determine the chemistry of a soil sample, and it determines the chemistry. For me the continuum from childhood wonder and early science fiction to professional reality has been almost seamless. It’s never been, “Oh, gee, this is nothing like what I had imagined.” Just the opposite: It’s exactly like what I imagined. And so I feel enormously fortunate.

Science is still one of my chief joys. The popularization of science that Isaac Asimov did so well—the communication not just of the findings but of the methods of science—seems to me as natural as breathing. After all, when you’re in love, you want to tell the world. The idea that scientists shouldn’t talk about their science to the public seems to me bizarre.

There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. CSICOP plays a sometimes lonely but still—and in this case the word may be right—heroic role in trying to counter some of those trends.

We have a civilization based on science and technology, and we’ve cleverly arranged things so that almost nobody understands science and technology. That is as clear a prescription for disaster as you can imagine. While we might get away with this combustible mixture of ignorance and power for a while, sooner or later it’s going to blow up in our faces. The powers of modern technology are so formidable that it’s insufficient just to say, “Well, those in charge, I’m sure, are doing a good job.” This is a democracy, and for us to make sure that the powers of science and technology are used properly and prudently, we ourselves must understand science and technology. We must be involved in the decision-making process.

The predictive powers of some areas, at least, of science are phenomenal. They are the clearest counterargument I can imagine to those who say, “Oh, science is situational; science is just the current fashion; science is the promotion of the self-interests of those in power.” Surely there is some of that. Surely if there’s any powerful tool, those in power will try to use it, or even monopolize it. Surely scientists, being people, grow up in a society and reflect the prejudices of that society. How could it be otherwise? Some scientists have been nationalists; some have been racists; some have been sexists. But that doesn’t undermine the validity of science. It’s just a consequence of being human.

So, imagine—there are so many areas we could think of—imagine you want to know the sex of your unborn child. There are several approaches. You could, for example, do what the late film star who Annie and I admire greatly—Cary Grant—did before he was an actor. In a carnival or fair or consulting room, you suspend a watch or a plumb bob above the abdomen of the expectant mother; if it swings left-right it’s a boy, and if it swings forward-back it’s a girl. The method works one time in two. Of course he was out of there before the baby was born, so he never heard from customers who complained he got it wrong. Being right one chance in two—that’s not so bad. It’s better than, say, Kremlinologists used to do. But if you really want to know, then you go to amniocentesis, or to sonograms; and there your chance of being right is 99 out of 100. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than one out of two. If you really want to know, you go to science.

Or suppose you wanted to know when the next eclipse of the Sun is. Science does something really astonishing: It can tell you a century in advance where the eclipse is going to be on Earth and when, say, totality will be, to the second. Think of the predictive power this implies. Think of how much you must understand to be able to say when and where there’s going to be an eclipse so far in the future.

Or (the same physics exactly) imagine launching a spacecraft from Earth, like the Voyager spacecraft in 1977; 12 years later Voyager 1 arrives at Neptune within 100 kilometers or something of where it was supposed to be—not having to use some of the mid-course corrections that were available; 12 yean, 5 billion kilometers, on target!

So if you want to really be able to predict the future—not in everything, but in some areas—there’s only one regime of human scholarship, of human claims to knowledge, that really delivers the goods, and that’s science. Religions would give their eyeteeth to be able to predict anything like that well. Think of how much mileage they would make if they ever could do predictions comparably unambiguous and precise.

Now how does it work? Why is it so successful?

Science has built-in error-correcting mechanisms—because science recognizes that scientists, like everybody else, are fallible, that we make mistakes, that we’re driven by the same prejudices as everybody else. There are no forbidden questions. Arguments from authority are worthless. Claims must be demonstrated. Ad hominem arguments—arguments about the personality of somebody who disagrees with you—are irrelevant; they can be sleazeballs and be right, and you can be a pillar of the community and be wrong.

If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Ph.D. oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, “Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find—because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I’m not prepared, I’m in deep trouble.”

You take a look at contentious scientific meetings. You find university colloquia in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into presenting what she or he is saying, and suddenly there are interruptions, maybe withering questions, from the audience. You take a look at the publication conventions in which you submit a scientific paper to a journal, and it goes out to anonymous referees whose job it is to think, Did you do anything stupid? If you didn’t do anything stupid, is there anything in here that is sufficiently interesting to be published? What are the deficiencies of this paper? Has it been done by anybody else? Is the argument adequate, or should you resubmit the paper after you’ve actually demonstrated what you’re speculating on? And so on. And it’s anonymous: You don’t know who your critics are. You have to rely on the editor to send it out to real experts who are not overtly malicious. This is the everyday expectation in the scientific community. And those who don’t expect it—even good scientists who just can’t hold up under criticism—have difficult careers.

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist likes to be criticized. Every scientist feels an affection for his or her ideas and scientific results. You feel protective of them. But you don’t reply to critics: “Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I’m very fond of it. It’s done you no harm. Please don’t attack it.” That’s not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away. Don’t waste any neurons on what doesn’t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. (Isaac Newton was surely the greatest physicist before Albert Einstein.)

Now think of what other areas of human society have such a reward structure, in which we revere those who prove that the fundamental doctrines that we have adopted are wrong. Think of it in politics, or in economics, or in religion; think of it in how we organize our society. Often, it’s exactly the opposite: There we reward those who reassure us that what we’ve been told is right, that we need not concern ourselves about it. This difference, I believe, is at least a basic reason why we’ve made so much progress in science, and so little in some other areas.

We are fallible. We cannot expect to foist our wishes on the universe. So another key aspect of science is experiment. Scientists do not trust what is intuitively obvious, because intuitively obvious gets you nowhere. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. I mean, really obvious; obvious! Go out in a flat field and take a look: Is it round or flat? Don’t listen to me; go prove it to yourself. That heavier bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious. That blood-sucking leeches cure disease was once obvious. That some people are naturally and by divine right slaves was once obvious. That the Earth is at the center of the universe was once obvious. You’re skeptical? Go out, take a look: stars rise in the East, set in the West; here we are, stationary (do you feel the Earth whirling?); we see them going around us. We are at the center; they go around us.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth—never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they’d be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: “To physics and metaphysics.” Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and . . . the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

Why is it so important to have widely distributed understanding of science and technology? For one thing, it’s the golden road out of poverty for developing nations. And developing nations understand that, because you have only to look at modern American graduate schools—in mathematics, in engineering, in physics—to find, in case after case, that more than half the students are from other countries. This is something America is doing for the world. But it conveys a clear sense that the developing nations understand what is essential for their future. What worries me is that Americans may not be equally dear on the subject.

Let me touch on the dangers of technology. Almost every astronaut who has visited Earth orbit has made this point: I was up there, they say, and I looked toward the horizon, and there was this thin, blue band that’s the Earth’s atmosphere. I had been told we live in an ocean of air. But there it was, so fragile, such a delicate blue: I was worried for it.

In fact, the thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere, compared with the size of the Earth, is in about the same ratio as the thickness of a coat of shellac on a schoolroom globe is to the diameter of the globe. That’s the air that nurtures us and almost all other life on Earth, that protects us from deadly ultraviolet light from the Sun, that through the greenhouse effect brings the surface temperature above the freezing point. (Without the greenhouse effect, the entire Earth would plunge below the freezing point of water and we’d all be dead.) Now that atmosphere, so thin and fragile, is under assault by our technology. We are pumping all kinds of stuff into it. You know about the concern that chlorofluorocarbons are depleting the ozone layer; and that carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases are producing global warming, a steady trend amidst fluctuations produced by volcanic eruptions and other sources. Who knows what other challenges we are posing to this vulnerable layer of air that we haven’t been wise enough to foresee?

The inadvertent side effects of technology can challenge the environment on which our very lives depend. That means that we must understand science and technology; we must anticipate long-term consequences in a very clever way—not just the bottom line on the profit-and-loss column for the corporation for this year, but the consequences for the nation and the species 10, 20, 50, 100 years in the future. If we absolutely stop all chlorofluorocarbon and allied chemical production right now (as we’re in fact doing), the ozonosphere will heal itself in about a hundred years. Therefore our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren must suffer through the mistakes that we’ve made. That’s a second reason for science education: the dangers of technology. We must understand them better.

A third reason: origins. Every human culture has devoted some of its intellectual, moral, and material resources to trying to understand where everything comes from—our nation, our species, our planet, our star, our galaxy, our universe. Stop someone on the street and ask about it. You will not find many people who never thought about it, who are incurious about their ultimate origins.

I hold there’s a kind of Gresham’s Law that applies in the confrontation of science and pseudoscience: In the popular imagination, at least, the bad science drives out the good. What I mean is this: If you are awash in lost continents and channeling and UFOs and all the long litany of claims so well exposed in Skeptical Inquirer, you may not have intellectual room for the findings of science. You’re sated with wonder. Our culture in one way produces the fantastic findings of science, and then in another way cuts them off before they reach the average person. So people who are curious, intelligent, dedicated to understanding the world, may nevertheless be (in our view) enmired in superstition and pseudoscience. You could say, Well, they ought to know better, they ought to be more critical, and so on; but that’s too harsh. It’s not very much their fault, I say. It’s the fault of a society that preferentially propagates the baloney and holds back the ambrosia.

The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curious, interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their beliefs. They may be credulous, but they’re not stupid. If we bear in mind human frailty and fallibility, we will understand their plight.

For example: I’ve lately been thinking about alien abductions, and false claims of childhood sexual abuse, and stories of satanic ritual abuse in the context of recovered memories. There are interesting similarities among those classes of cases. I think if we are to understand any of them, we must understand all of them. But there’s a maddening tendency of the skeptics, when addressing invented stories of childhood sexual abuse, to forget that real and appalling abuse happens. It is not true that all these claims of childhood sexual abuse are silly and pumped up by unethical therapists. Yesterday’s paper reported that a survey of 13 states found that one-sixth of all the rape victims reported to police are under the age of 12. And this is a category of rape that is preferentially under-reported to police, for obvious reasons. Of these girls, one-fifth were raped by their fathers. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of betrayal. We must bear that in mind when we consider patients who, say, because they have an eating disorder, have suppressed childhood sexual abuse diagnosed by their psychiatrists.

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseudoscience or even superstition with contempt.

In the nineteenth century it was mediums: You’d go to the stance, and you’d be put in touch with dead relatives. These days it’s a little different; it’s called channeling. What both are basically about is the human fear of dying. I don’t know about you; I find the idea of dying unpleasant. If I had a choice, at least for a while, I would just as soon not die. Twice in my life I came very close to doing so. (I did not have a near-death experience, I’m sorry to say.) I can understand anxiety about dying.

About 14 years ago both my parents died. We had a very good relationship. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I wouldn’t ask much: I would like five minutes a year with them; to tell them how their kids and their grandchildren are doing, and how Annie and I are doing. I know it sounds stupid, but I’d like to ask them, “Is everything all right with you?” Just a little contact. So I don’t guffaw at women who go to their husbands’ tombstones and chat them up every now and then. That’s not hard to understand. And if we have difficulties on the ontological status of who it is they’re talking to, that’s all right. That’s not what this is about. This is humans being human.

In the alien-abduction context, I’ve been trying to understand the fact that humans hallucinate—that it’s a human commonplace—yes, under conditions of sensory deprivation or drugs or deprival of REM sleep, but also just in the ordinary course of existence. I have, maybe a dozen times since my parents died, heard one of them say my name: just the single word, “Carl.” I miss them; they called me by my first name so much during the time they were alive; I was in the practice of responding instantly when I was called; it has deep psychic roots. So my brain plays it back every now and then. This doesn’t surprise me at all; I sort of like it. But it’s a hallucination. If I were a little less skeptical, though, I could see how easy it would be to say, “They’re around somewhere. I can hear them.”

Raymond Moody, who is an M.D., I think, an author who writes innumerable books on life after death, actually quoted me in the first chapter of his latest book, saying that I heard my parents calling me Carl, and so, look, even he believes in life after death. This badly misses my point. If this is one of the arguments from Chapter 1 of the latest book of a principal exponent of life after death, I suspect that despite our most fervent wishes, the case is weak.

But still, suppose I wasn’t steeped in the virtues of scientific skepticism and felt as I do about my parents, and along comes someone who says, “I can put you in touch with them.” Suppose he’s clever, and found out something about my parents in the past, and is good at faking voices, and so on—a darkened room and incense and all of that. I could see being swept away emotionally.

Would you think less of me if I fell for it? Imagine I was never educated about skepticism, had no idea that it’s a virtue, but instead believed that it was grumpy and negative and rejecting of everything that’s humane. Couldn’t you understand my openness to being conned by a medium or a channeler?

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them—the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. Whereas, an approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition, that recognizes that the society has arranged things so that skepticism is not well taught, might be much more widely accepted.^*

If we understand this, then of course we have compassion for the abductees and those who come upon crop circles and believe they’re supernatural, or at least of extraterrestrial manufacture. This is key to making science and the scientific method more attractive, especially to the young, because it’s a battle for the future.

Science involves a seemingly self-contradictory mix of attitudes: On the one hand, it requires an almost complete openness to all ideas, no matter how bizarre and weird they sound, a propensity to wonder. As I walk along, my time slows down; I shrink in the direction of motion, and I get more massive. That’s crazy! On the scale of the very small, the molecule can be in this position, in that position, but it is prohibited from being in any intermediate position. That’s wild! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the second is a consequence of quantum mechanics. Like it or not, that’s the way the world is. If you insist that it’s ridiculous, you will be forever closed to the major findings of science. But at the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way you can distinguish the right from the wrong, the wheat from the chaff, is by critical experiment and analysis.

Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis—which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism—especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested—and you’re not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.

It’s no fun, as I said at the beginning, to be on the receiving end of skeptical questioning. But it’s the affordable price we pay for having the benefits of so powerful a tool as science.

Notes

1. If skeptical habits of thought are widely distributed and prized, then who is the skepticism going to be mainly applied to? To those in power. Those in power, therefore, do not have a vested interest in every- body being able to ask searching questions.

Copyright ©1994 by Carl Sagan

Alien Abductions: Confrontation, Controversy

Robert Baker, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Kentucky, began the session by stating his position that almost all so- called UFO abductions are primarily a psychological phenomenon resulting from hypnotherapy. Regressive hypnosis, Baker contends, is an unreliable procedure because it unlocks the patient’s imagination: "Once you turn on the imagination, all things are possible.” Baker also said that sleep paralysis—a condition that can occur in the period between sleeping and waking—accompanied by hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, can produce bizarre effects that may account for the vivid alien encounters so many have reported. Not only can these “waking dreams” result in startling apparitions, but they may also produce a range of physiological symptoms, including heightened audio perception, sensations of floating or falling, and even the feeling that some device has been implanted somewhere in the body. Although the predictability is low and the exact causes of such sleep disorders are not known—stress is believed to be a primary contributor—Baker reported that 4 to 5 percent of the American population have had such experiences on one or more occasions in their lives. Baker said that, except for variations in the hallucinatory content, the descriptions given by known sleep-paralysis patients are almost identical to the accounts of alleged alien abductees.

Although somewhat in agreement with Baker and other skeptics that UFO-abduction stories are difficult to accept, Thomas Bullard, folklorist at Indiana University, said that the abduction phenomenon is “an anomaly worth investigating.” He said that there is an unusually high degree of consistency in the abductees’ descriptions not only of the aliens (short, humanoid figures with large heads) but also of the sequence of events that occur during the alleged abductions. In a brief slide presentation, Bullard demonstrated that early representations of aliens varied considerably, while more recent images have had a high degree of consistency. He also disputed the claim, alluded to by Baker, that the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind provided the model for the alien figure. He said that, of the 103 cases in his study, more than half of the 43 that had been published prior to the release of that movie contained descriptions of short, humanoid figures. Bullard maintained that there are too many experiences that cannot be easily explained through standard methods and urged skeptics to examine and investigate these UFO claims. (During the question-and-answer period, however, Baker pointed out that the burden of proof is not on the skeptics, but on those who are making these extraordinary claims.)

John Mack

John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, drew the most attention and curiosity from the audience. His recent book, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, in which he proclaims the belief that many of his patients actually have been abducted by aliens, has received extensive media coverage. Indeed, Mack is now the most visible spokesman for the abduction phenomenon. He maintains he was once intensely skeptical of such claims but now categorizes the UFO-abduction cases as “authentic mysteries.” He said he has considered other possible causes (i.e., sleep paralysis, nightmares), but the UFO-abduction cases have “a quality of their own.”

But Mack did not simply defend his position that, based on his anecdotal evidence, aliens have visited the planet. He also posed some questions regarding the polarization of skeptics and believers. Asking the audience to consider the question “What is the appropriate epistemology?” Mack said that this phenomenon may be inviting us to stretch our system of understanding realities. “Other cultures have always known that there were other realities, other beings, other dimensions. There is a world of other dimensions, of other realities that can cross over into our own world.” Which realities, beings, and dimensions, he did not say.

In closing, Mack asked why skeptics are so vehement in their attacks and wondered how they can have so much certainty. “Are we seeking to be the arbiters of reality?” he asked. CSICOP Chairman Paul Kurtz, moderator of the session, briefly responded that skeptics are simply practicing scientific methodology when they question UFO-abduction cases and other paranormal claims.

William Cone, a clinical psychologist from New-port Beach, California, said he found a great deal of the research being conducted to be "atrociously bad” and echoed the charge made earlier by Robert Baker that poorly trained researchers often impose their beliefs on patients. The patients themselves, in Cone’s experience, go public either to be paid by the media or to garner notoriety and attention from public appearances, or are simply looking for a sense of identity, wanting to belong somewhere. He said he has also diagnosed many of these people as mentally ill, paranoid, or delusional. Cone admitted he had found a subgroup of patients who do not fit his explanations, but he emphasized that “a remembrance of an event does not make the event so"—a point that would be reiterated throughout the conference.

On the recommendation of John Mack, Sharon Phillip, a hypnotherapist, spoke next. Since experiencing a UFO sighting as a teenager, Phillip said, she has had many UFO and alien encounters, once witnessing an alien materialize in a doorway. She maintains that what she encountered were not sleep-paralysis hallucinations, but conscious experiences, and urged the audience to keep an open mind in these matters.

Donna Bassett

To balance the proceedings, Donna Bassett, a researcher who had participated in John Mack’s recent study, was then called up to speak. At first Bassett seemed to indicate she was one of Mack’s “abductees.” But she quickly announced that since September 1992 she had been only posing as one in order to infiltrate Mack’s study and learn about his research methods. “I faked it,” Bassett said, “women have been doing it for centuries.” She reported that during her investigation she discovered that, despite Mack’s good intentions, his procedures were flawed — he used little or no scientific methodology. She said that during therapy sessions with Mack, many patients would often practice "overlay,” a term she said they invented to refer to their embellishing their stories. “They [the abductees] told John what he wanted to hear,” Bassett added. She said she felt that many of the patients were seeking attention. Although she believed Mack’s approach was wrong, she said that the subject nevertheless deserves study.

In response, Mack expressed his disappointment over what had just occurred. “I am saddened by this. . . . I am a little bit clearer about it when I am told that she (Bassett) was found to play this role by Philip Klass — since that’s his purpose, to destroy and undercut the credibility of this work.” Although one audience member commented that not informing Mack prior to the conference that Bassett would be speaking was ethically questionable (even though her story had already been covered in Time’s April 25 investigative report about Mack), another said that the fact that Mack had not discovered Donna Bassett as a fake called into question his whole methodology. Mack replied: “I'm not yet convinced one way or the other — whether she did in fact hoax or whether she has in fact had these experiences herself. I don't know.” After answering a few more questions (and restating the need for an "expanded epistemology”), Mack again implicated Klass in having a hand in Donna Bassett’s work.

At this time, Klass had heard enough and angrily approached the stage. Taking the microphone, he chastised Mack for making what he labeled "false innuendoes.” “Before you made accusations . . . why didn't you check with me? I could have told you that the first time I talked to Donna and her husband about you and your work was when they called me on January 9.” After a few more exchanges, Paul Kurtz intervened and brought the session to a conclusion.

Ending the session on a humorous note, Robert Baker jokingly proposed that CSICOP’s research should go in a new direction: “Sixty- nine percent of Americans believe in angels, and 32 percent claim they have had contact with them. Now that’s a lot better than for alien abductions. I think we ought to investigate angels.”

The Belief Engine: How World Views Are Formed

The session on perception and belief formation was introduced by moderator James Alcock, professor of psychology at Glendon College, York University. Alcock described sources of human perception and emphasized the ease with which our minds can make causal connections and patterns that may not exist. Our minds “take in information from the environment, combine it with aspects of memory, shape it to satisfy certain needs, and produce a belief that may or may not have anything to do with reality,” Alcock said. Contributing to this framework of belief creation is what he called “magical thinking.” As children, causal patterns are often incorrectly learned merely because one event is followed by another. Despite our expanding ability to operate with a critical perspective as we grow, fallacious beliefs that are functional and that, for example, aid our emotional survivability, can be sustained with this magical thinking, which Alcock said never completely leaves us. “We must always, to some degree, be suspicious of our own experience,” he concluded. “We must never take it as the arbiter of truth.”

Ray Hyman, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, reinforced Alcock’s comments with a demonstration that left many suspicious of their own experience. Hyman summoned two volunteers from the audience. He asked each to select a key and to bend it using only a stroking movement and a strong will. After a few minutes with no results from his volunteers, Hyman was seemingly able to bend a key with only the power of his mind, an accomplishment he said was due to the “Geller effect.” As a professor teaching classes in critical thinking, Hyman said he performs this trick for students to illustrate the undependable nature of eyewitness testimony. After producing a bent key, his students attempt to recall, in writing, what occurred during the demonstration, as well as to provide a possible theory to explain how the effect was achieved. What Hyman has consistently found over the years is that students will not report on the most crucial aspects of the trick simply because they do not know what to look for. In proposing theories, most offer natural explanations, such as switched keys, special key knowledge, or even enhanced finger strength. However, about one-quarter of his students contend that an authentic paranormal event has occurred. And only one student has ever correctly described Hyman’s method.

Andrew Neher, professor of psychology at Cabrillo College, in Aptos, California, surveyed the audience to measure the degree of belief and disbelief in the paranormal. In his three-question poll, Neher found that most in the audience did not believe in paranormal events, are confident of their position, and are comfortable believing that paranormal events do not exist. Neher, who questioned how so many could have such a high degree of comfort in their stated positions, was answered by one audience member: “I am no more uncomfortable with a disbelief or the assumption that God does not exist, than I am with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or the tooth fairy. I don't find anything more interesting or more valid from one to the other.”

In discussing various motives for belief formation, Neher asserted that believers and skeptics often construct their views in similar ways. Each learns from families, friends, different organizations, and the society at large, and each tends to stereotype the other — sometimes members of their own group. Neher cautioned skeptics not to allow their biases and dispositions to prevent the scientific study of certain beliefs. “Science can direct its energies to determining what is helpful to believe, without necessarily only researching whether the belief is veridical.” Neher said that many who tend to reject science as elitist, irrelevant, or closed-minded have not been introduced to it as a process we all perform daily. “Science is not just something that scientists do somewhere else. All of us are scientists.”

Anthony Pratkanis, professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, spoke on “How to Sell a Pseudoscience.” He delineated methods of persuasion many use to promote and sell deceptive “products.” Subtly increasing steps of commitment, creating "credible” sources and leaders to end doubt, and establishing "granfalloons” ("in the know” groups of shared social identities) are but a few of the persuasive tactics used to gain a target’s trust. These methods often incorporate widely accepted, commonplace “truths” that can be used to embellish concepts or issues to create the desired submissive effect, Pratkanis said. And — as he himself experienced after publishing negative findings in subliminal-tape studies — to dispense with troublesome opponents to your cause, innuendo and character assassination are frequently used. Pratkanis called for careful understanding of these persuasion tactics.

An Illustrated History of UFOs

James McGaha, a retired Air Force pilot and an amateur astronomer, treated the audience to an interesting and often humorous history of UFOs. In an hour-long illustrated talk, McGaha chronicled the alleged UFO encounters, media influences, and government-conspiracy beliefs dating from the 1896 airship incidents up to the sinister abduction claims of the 1990s. He showed a wide range of bizarre UFO shapes and alien forms, explaining that “UFOs parallel popular culture, particularly science-fiction movies, books, magazines, and television shows.” McGaha demonstrated that just before each of the waves of UFO-sightings over the years, popular UFO stories were often prevalent in the entertainment media. In contrast to the view held by Thomas Bullard, a speaker on the previous evening, McGaha asserted that the evolution of alien images into a creature with a small body and a large, bulbous head is indeed a result of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. McGaha also referred to numerous alien encounters and supposed government cover-ups, including the 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting, that he believes were simply mountaintop mirages, and the Roswell incident, in which a clerical error set in motion the amazing tales of an alien spacecraft and government secrets. The accusations that government agencies are concealing aliens and their vehicles as well as the belief that Air Force pilots are trained as UFO observers, he also dispelled as unfounded.

McGaha said we should not abandon our reasoning ability and scientific understanding of nature, despite the ever-increasing range of UFO beliefs in American culture. “Where is the evidence? There is no empirical evidence that UFOs have ever visited the planet, none — UFOlogy is clearly a belief system.”

Coverage of the 1994 CSICOP Conference will continue in the next issue.