THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Carl Sagan

Preface

My Teachers

I t was a blustery fall day in 1939.

In the streets outside the

apartment building, fallen leaves were swirling in little whirl-

winds, each with a life of its own. It was good to be inside and

warm and safe, with my mother preparing dinner in the next

room. In our apartment there were no older kids who picked on

you for no reason. Just the week before, 1 had been in a fight - 1

can't remember, after all these years, who it was with; maybe it

was Snoony Agata from the third floor - and, after a wild swing, 1

found 1 had put my fist through the plate glass window of

Schechter's drug store. Mr Schechter was solicitous: 'It's all right, I'm insured,' he said

as he put some unbelievably painful antiseptic on my wrist. My

mother took me to the doctor whose office was on the ground

floor of our building. With a pair of tweezers, he pulled out a

fragment of glass. Using needle and thread, he sewed two stitches. 'Two stitches!' my father had repeated later that night. He knew

about stitches, because he was a cutter in the garment industry; his

job was to use a very scary power saw to cut out patterns - backs,

say, or sleeves for ladies' coats and suits - from an enormous stack

of cloth. Then the patterns were conveyed to endless rows of

women sitting at sewing machines. He was pleased 1 had gotten

angry enough to overcome a natural timidity. Sometimes it was good to fight back. 1 hadn't planned to do

anything violent. It just happened. One moment Snoony was

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pushing me and the next moment my fist was through Mr

Schechter's window. I had injured my wrist, generated an unex-

pected medical expense, broken a plate glass window, and no one

was mad at me. As for Snoony, he was more friendly than ever. 1 puzzled over what the lesson was. But it was much more

pleasant to work it out up here in the warmth of the apartment,

gazing out through the living-room window into Lower New York

Bay, than to risk some new misadventure on the streets below. As she often did, my mother had changed her clothes and made

up her face in anticipation of my father's arrival. We talked about

my fight with Snoony. The Sun was almost setting and together we

looked out across the choppy waters. 'There are people fighting out there, killing each other,' she

said, waving vaguely across the Atlantic. I peered intently. T know,' 1 replied. 'I can see them.'

'No, you can't,' she replied, sceptically, almost severely, before

returning to the kitchen. 'They're too far away.'

How could she know whether I could see them or not?

wondered. Squinting, I had thought I'd made out a thin strip of

land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving

and duelling with swords as they did in my comic books. But maybe

she was right. Maybe it had just been my imagination, a little like

the midnight monsters that still, on occasion, awakened me from a

deep sleep, my pyjamas drenched in sweat, my heart pounding. How can you tell when someone is only imagining?

I gazed out

across the grey waters until night fell and I was called to wash my

hands for dinner. When he came home, my father swooped me up

in his arms. 1 could feel the cold of the outside world against his

one-day growth of beard. On a Sunday in that same year, my father had patiently explained

to me about zero as a placeholder in arithmetic, about the

wicked-sounding names of big numbers, and about how there's no

biggest number ('You can always add one,' he pointed out).

Suddenly, I was seized by a childish compulsion to write in

sequence all the integers from 1 to 1,000.

We had no pads of

paper, but my father offered up the stack of grey cardboards he

had been saving from when his shirts were sent to the laundry. I

My Teachers

started the project eagerly, but was surprised at how slowly it

went. When 1 had gotten no farther than the low hundreds, my

mother announced that it was time for me to take my bath. 1 was

disconsolate. 1 had to get a thousand. A mediator his whole life,

my father intervened: if 1 would cheerfully submit to the bath, he

would continue the sequence. 1 was overjoyed. By the time 1

emerged, he was approaching 900, and 1 was able to reach 1,000

only a little past my ordinary bedtime. The magnitude of large

numbers has never ceased to impress me. Also in 1939 my parents took me to the New York World's Fair. There, 1 was offered a vision of a perfect future made possible by

science and high technology. A time capsule was buried, packed

with artefacts of our time for the benefit of those in the far future -

who, astonishingly, might not know much about the people of

1939.

The 'World of Tomorrow' would be sleek, clean, stream-

lined and, as far as 1 could tell, without a trace of poor people. 'See sound' one exhibit bewilderingly commanded. And sure

enough, when the tuning fork was struck by the little hammer, a

beautiful sine wave marched across the oscilloscope screen. 'Hear

light' another poster exhorted. And sure enough, when the

flashlight shone on the photocell, 1 could hear something like the

static on our Motorola radio set when the dial was between

stations. Plainly the world held wonders of a kind 1 had never

guessed. How could a tone become a picture and light become a

noise?

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing

about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to scepticism

and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes

of thought that are central to the scientific method. They were

only one step out of poverty. But when 1 announced that 1 wanted

to be an astronomer, 1 received unqualified support - even if they

(as 1) had only the most rudimentary idea of what an astronomer

does. They never suggested that, all things considered, it might be

better to be a doctor or a lawyer. 1 wish 1 could tell you about inspirational teachers in science

from my elementary or junior high or high school days. But as 1

think back on it, there were none. There was rote memorization

about the Periodic Table of the Elements, levers and inclined

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

planes, green plant photosynthesis, and the difference between

anthracite and bituminous coal. But there was no soaring sense of

wonder, no hint of an evolutionary perspective, and nothing about

mistaken ideas that everybody had once believed. In high school

laboratory courses, there was an answer we were supposed to get. We were marked off if we didn't get it. There was no encourage-

ment to pursue our own interests or hunches or conceptual

mistakes. In the backs of textbooks there was material you could

tell was interesting. The school year would always end before we

got to it. You could find wonderful books on astronomy, say, in

the libraries, but not in the classroom. Long division was taught as

a set of rules from a cookbook, with no explanation of how this

particular sequence of short divisions, multiplications and subtrac-

tions got you the right answer. In high school, extracting square

roots was offered reverentially, as if it were a method once handed

down from Mt Sinai. It was our job merely to remember what we

had been commanded. Get the right answer, and never mind that

you don't understand what you're doing. I had a very capable

second-year algebra teacher from whom I learned much math-

ematics; but he was also a bully who enjoyed reducing young

women to tears. My interest in science was maintained through all

those school years by reading books and magazines on science fact

and fiction. College was the fulfilment of my dreams: I found teachers who

not only understood science, but who were actually able to explain

it. I was lucky enough to attend one of the great institutions of

learning of the time, the University of Chicago. I was a physics

student in a department orbiting around Enrico Fermi; I discov-

ered what true mathematical elegance is from Subrahmanyan

Chandrasekhar; I was given the chance to talk chemistry with

Harold Urey; over summers I was apprenticed in biology to H. J. Muller at Indiana University; and I learned planetary astronomy

from its only full-time practitioner at the time, G. P. Kuiper. It was from Kuiper that I first got a feeling for what is called a

back-of-the-envelope calculation: a possible explanation to a

problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to

your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approxi-

mate equations on the envelope, substitute in likely numerical

My Teachers

values, and see if your answer comes anywhere near explaining

your problem. If not, you look for a different explanation. It cut

through nonsense like a knife through butter. At the University of Chicago 1 also was lucky enough to go

through a general education programme devised by Robert M. Hutchins, where science was presented as an integral part of the

gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered

unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle,

Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski and Freud - among

many others. In an introductory science class, Ptolemy's view that

the Sun revolved around the Earth was presented so compellingly

that some students found themselves re-evaluating their commit-

ment to Copernicus. The status of the teachers in the Hutchins

curriculum had almost nothing to do with their research; per-

versely - unlike the American university standard of today -

teachers were valued for their teaching, their ability to inform and

inspire the next generation. In this heady atmosphere, 1 was able to fill in some of the many

gaps in my education. Much that had been deeply mysterious, and

not just in science, became clearer. I also witnessed at first hand

the joy felt by those whose privilege it is to uncover a little about

how the Universe works. I've always been grateful to my mentors of the 1950s, and tried

to make sure that each of them knew my appreciation. But as 1

look back, it seems clear to me that I learned the most essential

things not from my school teachers, nor even from my university

professors, but from my parents, who knew nothing at all about

science, in that single far-off year of 1939.

The Most Precious Thing

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and

childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

A s 1 got off the plane, he was waiting for me, holding up a

scrap of cardboard with my name scribbled on it. 1 was on

my way to a conference of scientists and TV broadcasters devoted

to the seemingly hopeless prospect of improving the presentation

of science on commercial television. The organizers had kindly

sent a driver. 'Do you mind if I ask you a question?' he said as we waited for

my bag. No, I didn't mind. 'Isn't it confusing to have the same name as that scientist guy?'

It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg?

Finally, it dawned on me. 'I am that scientist guy,' I answered. He paused and then smiled. 'Sorry. That's my problem. 1

thought it was yours too.'

He put out his hand. 'My name is William F. Buckley.' (Well,

he wasn't exactly William F. Buckley, but he did bear the name of

a contentious and well-known TV interviewer, for which he

doubtless took a lot of good-natured ribbing.)

As we settled into the car for the long drive, the windshield

The Most Precious Thing

wipers rhythmically thwacking, he told me he was glad 1 was 'that

scientist guy' - he had so many questions to ask about science. Would 1 mind?

No, 1 didn't mind. And so we got to talking. But not, as it turned out, about

science. He wanted to talk about frozen extraterrestrials languish-

ing in an Air Force base near San Antonio, 'channelling' (a way to

hear what's on the minds of dead people - not much, it turns out),

crystals, the prophecies of Nostradamus, astrology, the shroud of

Turin ...

He introduced each portentous subject with buoyant

enthusiasm. Each time 1 had to disappoint him:

'The evidence is crummy,' 1 kept saying. 'There's a much

simpler explanation.'

He was, in a way, widely read. He knew the various speculative

nuances on, let's say, the 'sunken continents' of Atlantis and

Lemuria. He had at his fingertips what underwater expeditions

were supposedly just setting out to find the tumbled columns and

broken minarets of a once-great civilization whose remains were

now visited only by deep sea luminescent fish and giant kraken. Except ...

while the ocean keeps many secrets, 1 knew that there

isn't a trace of oceanographic or geophysical support for Atlantis

and Lemuria. As far as science can tell, they never existed. By

now a little reluctantly, I told him so. As we drove through the rain, I could see him getting glummer

and glummer. 1 was dismissing not just some errant doctrine, but a

precious facet of his inner life. And yet there's so much in real science that's equally exciting,

more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge - as well as being

a lot closer to the truth. Did he know about the molecular building

blocks of life sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas between the

stars?

Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in

4-million-year-old volcanic ash?

What about the raising of the

Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia?

Or how viruses,

built like hypodermic syringes, slip their DNA past the host

organism's defences and subvert the reproductive machinery of

cells; or the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence; or the

newly discovered ancient civilization of Ebla that advertised the

virtues of Ebla beer?

No, he hadn't heard. Nor did he know, even

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

vaguely, about quantum indeterminacy, and he recognized DNA

only as three frequently linked capital letters. Mr 'Buckley' - well-spoken, intelligent, curious - had heard

virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for

the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it

reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our

communications media had failed this man. What society permit-

ted to trickle through was mainly pretence and confusion. It had

never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap

imitation. He knew nothing about how science works. There are hundreds of books about Atlantis - the mythical

continent that is said to have existed something like 10,000 years

ago in the Atlantic Ocean. (Or somewhere. A recent book locates

it in Antarctica.) The story goes back to Plato, who reported it as

hearsay coming down to him from remote ages. Recent books

authoritatively describe the high level of Atlantean technology,

morals and spirituality, and the great tragedy of an entire popu-

lated continent sinking beneath the waves. There is a 'New Age'

Atlantis, 'the legendary civilization of advanced sciences,' chiefly

devoted to the 'science' of crystals. In a trilogy called Ciystal

Enlightenment by Katrina Raphaell - the books mainly responsi-

ble for the crystal craze in America - Atlantean crystals read

minds, transmit thoughts, are the repositories of ancient history

and the model and source of the pyramids of Egypt. Nothing

approximating evidence is offered to support these assertions. (A

resurgence of crystal mania may follow the recent finding by the

real science of seismology that the inner core of the Earth may be

composed of a single, huge, nearly perfect crystal - of iron.)

A few books - Dorothy Vitaliano's Legends of the Earth, for

example - sympathetically interpret the original Atlantis legends

in terms of a small island in the Mediterranean that was destroyed

by a volcanic eruption, or an ancient city that slid into the Gulf of

Corinth after an earthquake. This, for all we know, may be the

source of the legend, but it is a far cry from the destruction of a

continent on which had sprung forth a preternaturally advanced

technical and mystical civilization. What we almost never find - in public libraries or newsstand

The Most Precious Thing

magazines or prime-time television programmes - is the evidence

from sea floor spreading and plate tectonics, and from mapping

the ocean floor which shows quite unmistakably that there could

have been no continent between Europe and the Americas on

anything like the timescale proposed. Spurious accounts that snare, the gullible are readily available. Sceptical treatments are much harder to find. Scepticism does not

sell well. A bright and curious person who relies entirely on

popular culture to be informed about something like Atlantis is

hundreds or thousands of times more likely to come upon a fable

treated uncritically than a sober and balanced assessment. Maybe Mr Buckley should know to be more sceptical about

what's dished out to him by popular culture. But apart from that,

it's hard to see how it's his fault. He simply accepted what the

most widely available and accessible sources of information

claimed was true. For his naivete, he was systematically misled

and bamboozled. Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudo-

science. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon

ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were

widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate

evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for

pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular

culture by which bad science drives out good. All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even

gifted, people who harbour a passion for science. But that passion

is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 per cent of Americans

are 'scientifically illiterate'.

That's just the same fraction as those

African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate

just before the Civil War - when severe penalties were in force for

anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there's a degree of

arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it

applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 per cent

illiteracy is extremely serious. Every generation worries that educational standards are decay-

ing. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from

Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the young are disas-

trously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding. 9

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Twenty-four hundred years ago, the ageing and grumpy Plato, in

Book VII of the Laws, gave his definition of scientific illiteracy:

Who is unable to count one, two, three, or to distinguish odd

from even numbers, or is unable to count at all, or reckon

night and day, and who is totally unacquainted with the

revolution of the Sun and Moon, and the other stars ...

All

freemen, I conceive, should learn as much of these branches

of knowledge as every child in Egypt is taught when he learns

the alphabet. In that country arithmetical games have been

invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as

pleasure and amusement ...

1 ...

have late in life heard

with amazement of our ignorance in these matters; to me we

appear to be more like pigs than men, and I am quite

ashamed, not only of myself, but of all Greeks. 1 don't know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics

contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the

consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our

time than in any that has come before. It's perilous and foolhardy

for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming,

say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive

wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponen-

tial population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and

technology. If our nation can't manufacture, at high quality and

low price, products people want to buy, then industries will

continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to

other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of

fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data 'highways', abor-

tion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction,

government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-

resolution TV, airline and airport safety, foetal tissue transplants,

health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depres-

sion or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-

after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space

stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy - or even make intelligent

decisions in our own lives - if we don't grasp the underlying

The Most Precious Thing

issues?

As 1 write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of

Technology Assessment - the only organization specifically tasked

to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and

technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been

exemplary. Of the 535 members of the US Congress, rarely in the

twentieth century have as many as one per cent had any significant

background in science. The last scientifically literate President

may have been Thomas Jefferson.*

So how do Americans decide these matters?

How do they

instruct their representatives?

Who in fact makes these decisions,

and on what basis?

Hippocrates of Cos is the father of medicine. He is still remembered

2,500 years later for the Hippocratic Oath (a modified form of which

is still here and there taken by medical students upon their gradua-

tion).

But he is chiefly celebrated because of his efforts to bring

medicine out of the pall of superstition and into the light of science. In a typical passage Hippocrates wrote: 'Men think epilepsy divine,

merely because they do not understand it. But if they called

everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would

be no end of divine things.' Instead of acknowledging that in many

areas we are ignorant, we have tended to say things like the Universe

is permeated with the ineffable. A God of the Gaps is assigned

responsibility for what we do not yet understand. As knowledge of

medicine improved since the fourth century BC, there was more and

more that we understood and less and less that had to be attributed

to divine intervention - either in the causes or in the treatment of

disease. Deaths in childbirth and infant mortality have decreased,

lifetimes have lengthened, and medicine has improved the quality of

life for billions of us all over the planet. In the diagnosis of disease, Hippocrates introduced elements

of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous

* Although claims can be made for Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and

Jimmy Carter. Britain had such a Prime Minister in Margaret Thatcher. Her

early studies in chemistry, in part under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Dorothy

Hodgkin, were key to the UK's strong and successful advocacy that ozone-

depleting CFCs be banned worldwide. 11

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

observation: 'Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough

time.' Before the invention of the thermometer, he charted the

temperature curves of many diseases. He recommended that

physicians be able to tell, from present symptoms alone, the

probable past and future course of each illness. He stressed

honesty. He was willing to admit the limitations of the physician's

knowledge. He betrayed no embarrassment in confiding to poster-

ity that more than half his patients were killed by the diseases he

was treating. His options of course were limited; the drugs

available to him were chiefly laxatives, emetics and narcotics. Surgery was performed, and cauterization. Considerable further

advances were made in classical times through to the fall of Rome. While medicine in the Islamic world flourished, what followed

in Europe was truly a dark age. Much knowledge of anatomy and

surgery was lost. Reliance on prayer and miraculous healing

abounded. Secular physicians became extinct. Chants, potions,

horoscopes and amulets were widely used. Dissections of cadavers

were restricted or outlawed, so those who practised medicine were

prevented from acquiring first-hand knowledge of the human

body. Medical research came to a standstill. It was very like what the historian Edward Gibbon described for

the entire Eastern Empire, whose capital was Constantinople:

In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was

made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea had been added to the speculative systems of

antiquity, and a succession of patient disciples became in their

turn the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation. Even at its best, pre-modern medical practice did not save many. Queen Anne was the last Stuart monarch of Great Britain. In the last

seventeen years of the seventeenth century, she was pregnant

eighteen times. Only five children were born alive. Only one of them

survived infancy. He died before reaching adulthood, and before her

coronation in 1702.

There seems to be no evidence of some genetic

disorder. She had the best medical care money could buy. Diseases that once tragically carried off countless infants and

The Most Precious Thing

children have been progressively mitigated and cured by science -

through the discovery of the microbial world, via the insight that

physicians and midwives should wash their hands and sterilize

their instruments, through nutrition, public health and sanitation

measures, antibiotics, drugs, vaccines, the uncovering of the

molecular structure of DNA, molecular biology, and now gene

therapy. In the developed world at least, parents today have an

enormously better chance of seeing their children live to adult-

hood than did the heir to the throne of one of the most powerful

nations on Earth in the late seventeenth century. Smallpox has been

wiped out worldwide. The area of our planet infested with malaria-

carrying mosquitoes has dramatically shrunk. The number of years a

child diagnosed with leukaemia can expect to live has been increas-

ing progressively, year by year. Science permits the Earth to feed

about a hundred times more humans, and under conditions much

less grim, than it could a few thousand years ago. We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500

milligrams of tetracycline every twelve hours. (There is still a

religion, Christian Science, that denies the germ theory of disease; if

prayer fails, the faithful would rather see their children die than give

them antibiotics.) We can try nearly futile psychoanalytic talk

therapy on the schizophrenic patient, or we can give him 300 to 500

milligrams a day of chlozapine. The scientific treatments are hun-

dreds or thousands of times more effective than the alternatives. (And even when the alternatives seem to work, we don't actually

know that they played any role: spontaneous remissions, even of

cholera and schizophrenia, can occur without prayer and without

psychoanalysis.) Abandoning science means abandoning much more

than air conditioning, CD players, hair dryers and fast cars. In hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural times, the human life

expectancy was about 20 to 30 years. That's also what it was in

Western Europe in Late Roman and in Medieval times. It didn't

rise to 40 years until around the year 1870.

It reached 50 in 1915,

60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today approaching 80 (a little more

for women, a little less for men).

The rest of the world is retracing

the European increment in longevity. What is the cause of this

stunning, unprecedented, humanitarian transition?

The germ

theory of disease, public health measures, medicines and medical

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technology. Longevity is perhaps the best single measure of the

physical quality of life. (If you're dead, there's little you can do to

be happy.) This is a precious offering from science to humanity -

nothing less than the gift of life. But micro-organisms mutate. New diseases spread like wildfire. There is a constant battle between microbial measures and human

countermeasures. We keep pace in this competition not just by

designing new drugs and treatments, but by penetrating progres-

sively more deeply toward an understanding of the nature of life -

basic research. If the world is to escape the direst consequences of global

population growth and 10 or 12 billion people on the planet in the

late twenty-first century, we must invent safe but more efficient

means of growing food - with accompanying seed stocks, irrigation,

fertilizers, pesticides, transportation and refrigeration systems. It will

also take widely available and acceptable contraception, significant

steps toward political equality of women, and improvements in the

standards of living of the poorest people. How can all this be

accomplished without science and technology?

1 know that science and technology are not just cornucopias

pouring gifts out into the world. Scientists not only conceived

nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels,

arguing that their nation - whichever it happened to be - had to

have one first. Then they manufactured over 60,000 of them. During the Cold War, scientists in the United States, the Soviet

Union, China and other nations were willing to expose their own

fellow citizens to radiation - in most cases without their know-

ledge - to prepare for nuclear war. Physicians in Tuskegee,

Alabama, misled a group of veterans into thinking they were

receiving medical treatment for their syphilis, when they were the

untreated controls. The atrocious cruelties of Nazi doctors are

well-known. Our technology has produced thalidomide, CFCs,

Agent Orange, nerve gas, pollution of air and water, species

extinctions, and industries so powerful they can ruin the climate of

the planet. Roughly half the scientists on Earth work at least

part-time for the military. While a few scientists are still perceived

as outsiders, courageously criticizing the ills of society and provid-

ing early warnings of potential technological catastrophes, many

The Most Precious Thing

are seen as compliant opportunists, or as the willing source of

corporate profits and weapons of mass destruction - never mind

the long-term consequences. The technological perils that science

serves up, its implicit challenge to received wisdom, and its

perceived difficulty, are all reasons for some people to mistrust

and avoid it. There's a reason people are nervous about science

and technology. And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our

world - down to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning

children's TV and the plethora of Faustian bargains in popular

culture, from the eponymous Dr Faustus himself to Dr Franken-

stein, Dr Strangelove, and Jurassic Park. But we can't simply conclude that science puts too much power

into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-

crazed politicians and so decide to get rid of it. Advances in

medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have

been lost in all the wars in history.* Advances in transportation,

communication and entertainment have transformed and unified

the world. In opinion poll after opinion poll science is rated

among the most admired and trusted occupations, despite the

misgivings. The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome

power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibil-

ity - more attention to the long-term consequences of technology,

a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid

easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming

too expensive. Do we care what's true?

Does it matter?...

where ignorance is bliss,

'Tis folly to be wise

wrote the poet Thomas Gray. But is it?

Edmund Way Teale in his

1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better:

* At a large dinner party recently, I asked the assembled guests - ranging in age,

I guess, from thirties to sixties - how many of them would be alive today if not

for antibiotics, cardiac pacemakers, and the rest of the panoply of modern

medicine. Only one hand went up. It was not mine. 15

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not,

so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you

got your money as long as you have got it. It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incom-

petence, for example; but it is better not to know about it?

Whose

interest does ignorance serve?

If we humans bear, say, hereditary

propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge

the only antidote?

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set

for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do

us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, as so many

before and after, decries the 'unbroken progress in the self-

belittling of man' brought about by the scientific revolution. Nietzsche mourns the loss of 'man's belief in his dignity, his

uniqueness, his irreplaceability in the scheme of existence'.

For

me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to

persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Which

attitude is better geared for our long-term survival?

Which gives

us more leverage on our future?

And if our naive self-confidence

is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss?

Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-

building experience?

To discover that the Universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to

12 thousand years old* improves our appreciation of its sweep and

grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly

complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity,

at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover, as

now seems probable, that our planet is one of billions of other

worlds in the Milky Way galaxy and that our galaxy is one of

billions more, majestically expands the arena of what is possible;

* 'No thinking religious person believes this. Old hat,' writes one of the referees

of this book. But many 'scientific creationists' not only believe it, but are

making increasingly aggressive and successful efforts to have it taught in the

schools, museums, zoos, and textbooks. Why?

Because adding up the 'begats',

the ages of patriarchs and others in the Bible gives such a figure, and the Bible

is 'inerrant'.

The Most Precious Thing

to find that our ancestors were also the ancestors of apes ties us to

the rest of life and makes possible important - if occasionally

rueful - reflections on human nature. Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with

science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come

to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we

will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have

made a bargain strongly in our favour. But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way,

distracting all the 'Buckleys' among us, providing easy answers,

dodging sceptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and

cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable

practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would

be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep

waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people

could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be

fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets

rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams

could, more often than can be explained by chance and our

knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future. These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use

the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless

to its nature - often because they are based on insufficient

evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. With the uninformed cooperation

(and often the cynical connivance) of newspapers, magazines,

book publishers, radio, television, movie producers and the like,

such ideas are easily and widely available. Far more difficult to

come upon, as I was reminded by my encounter with Mr 'Buckley',

are the alternative, more challenging and even more dazzling

findings of science. Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because dis-

tracting confrontations with reality - where we cannot control the

outcome of the comparison - are more readily avoided. The

standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more

relaxed. In part for these same reasons, it is much easier to

present pseudoscience to the general public than science. But this

isn't enough to explain its popularity. 17

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Naturally people try various belief systems on for size, to see if

they help. And if we're desperate enough, we become all too

willing to abandon what may be perceived as the heavy burden of

scepticism. Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs

that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about

personal powers we lack and long for (like those attributed to

comic book superheroes today, and earlier, to the gods).

In some

of its manifestations, it offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers,

cures for disease, promises that death is not the end. It reassures

us of our cosmic centrality and importance. It vouchsafes that we

are hooked up with, tied to, the Universe.* Sometimes it's a kind

of halfway house between old religion and new science, mistrusted

by both. At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also,

New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How

satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children's stories, to fulfil

our heart's desire just by wishing. How seductive this notion is,

especially when compared with the hard work and good luck

usually required to achieve our hopes. The enchanted fish or the

genie from the lamp will grant us three wishes - anything we want

except more wishes. Who has not pondered - just to be on the safe

side, just in case we ever come upon and accidentally rub an old,

squat brass oil lamp - what to ask for?

I remember, from childhood comic strips and books, a top-

hatted, moustachioed magician who brandished an ebony walking

stick. His name was Zatara. He could make anything happen,

anything at all. How did he do it?

Easy. He uttered his commands

backwards. So if he wanted a million dollars, he would say 'srallod

noillim a em evig'.

That's all there was to it. It was something like

prayer, but much surer of results. I spent a lot of time at age eight experimenting in this vein. * Although it's hard for me to see a more profound cosmic connection than the

astonishing tindings of modern nuclear astrophysics: except for hydrogen, all

the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our

bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars

thousands of light years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are,

as I like to say, starstuff. 18

The Most Precious Thing

commanding stones to levitate: 'esir, enots.' It never worked. 1

blamed my pronunciation. Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact propor-

tion as real science is misunderstood - except that the language

breaks down here. If you've never heard of science (to say nothing

of how it works), you can hardly be aware you're embracing

pseudoscience. You're simply thinking in one of the ways that

humans always have. Religions are often the state-protected

nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why reli-

gions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times

long gone. In some countries nearly everyone believes in astrology

and precognition, including government leaders. But this is not

simply drummed into them by religion; it is drawn out of the

enveloping culture in which everyone is comfortable with these

practices, and affirming testimonials are everywhere. Most of the case histories I will relate in this book are

American - because these are the cases 1 know best, not

because pseudoscience and mysticism are more prominent in

the United States than elsewhere. But the psychic spoonbender

and extraterrestrial channeller Uri Geller hails from Israel. As

tensions rise between Algerian secularists and Muslim funda-

mentalists, more and more people are discreetly consulting the

country's 10,000 soothsayers and clairvoyants (about half of

whom operate with a licence from the government).

High

French officials, including a former President of France,

arranged for millions of dollars to be invested in a scam (the

Elf-Aquitaine scandal) to find new petroleum reserves from

the air. In Germany, there is concern about carcinogenic 'Earth

rays' undetectable by science; they can be sensed only by

experienced dowsers brandishing forked sticks. 'Psychic sur-

gery' flourishes in the Philippines. Ghosts are something of a

national obsession in Britain. Since World War Two, Japan has

spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the

supernatural. An estimated 100,000 fortune-tellers flourish in

Japan; the clientele are mainly young women. Aum Shinrikyo,

a sect thought to be involved in the release of the nerve gas

sarin in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995, features

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

levitation, faith healing and ESP among its main tenets. Followers, at a high price, drank the 'miracle pond' water -

from the bath of Asahara, their leader. In Thailand, diseases

are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred

Scripture. 'Witches' are today being burned in South Africa. Australian peace-keeping forces in Haiti rescue a woman tied

to a tree; she is accused of flying from rooftop to rooftop, and

sucking the blood of children. Astrology is rife in India,

geomancy widespread in China. Perhaps the most successful recent global pseudoscience - by

many criteria, already a religion - is the Hindu doctrine of

transcendental meditation (TM).

The soporific homilies of its

founder and spiritual leader, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, can be

seen on television in America. Seated in the yogi position, his

white hair here and there flecked with black, surrounded by

garlands and floral offerings, he has a look. One day while

channel surfing we came upon this visage. 'You know who that

is?' asked our four-year-old son. 'God.' The worldwide TM

organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee

they promise through meditation to be able to walk you through

walls, to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in

unison they have, they say, diminished the crime rate in Washing-

ton DC and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, among other

secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been

offered for any such claims. TM sells folk medicine, runs trading

companies, medical clinics and 'research' universities, and has

unsuccessfully entered politics. In its oddly charismatic leader, its

promise of community, and the offer of magical powers in

exchange for money and fervent belief, it is typical of many

pseudosciences marketed for sacerdotal export. At each relinquishing of civil controls and scientific education,

another little spurt in pseudoscience occurs. Leon Trotsky described

it for Germany on the eve of the Hitler takeover (but in a description

that might equally have applied to the Soviet Union of 1933):

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there

lives alongside the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hun-

dred million people use electricity and still believe in the

The Most Precious Thing

magic powers of signs and exorcisms ...

Movie stars go to

mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created

by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What

inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance

and savagery!

Russia is an instructive case. Under the Tsars, religious supersti-

tion was encouraged, but scientific and sceptical thinking - except

by a few tame scientists - was ruthlessly expunged. Under

Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically

suppressed - except for the superstition of the state ideological

religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this

ideal as the most unself-critical mystery cult. Critical thinking -

except by scientists in hermetically sealed compartments of know-

ledge - was recognized as dangerous, was not taught in the

schools, and was punished where expressed. As a result, post-

Communism, many Russians view science with suspicion. When

the lid was lifted, as was also true of virulent ethnic hatreds, what

had all along been bubbling subsurface was exposed to view. The

region is now awash in UFOs, poltergeists, faith healers, quack

medicines, magic waters and old-time superstition. A stunning

decline in life expectancy, increasing infant mortality, rampant

epidemic disease, subminimal medical standards and ignorance of

preventive medicine all work to raise the threshold at which

scepticism is triggered in an increasingly desperate population. As

I write, the electorally most popular member of the Duma, a

leading supporter of the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is

one Anatoly Kashpirovsky - a faith healer who remotely cures

diseases ranging from hernias to AIDS by glaring at you out of

your television set. His face starts stopped clocks. A somewhat analogous situation exists in China. After the

death of Mao Zedong and the gradual emergence of a market

economy, UFOs, channelling and other examples of Western

pseudoscience emerged, along with such ancient Chinese practices

as ancestor worship, astrology and fortune telling - especially that

version that involves throwing yarrow sticks and working through

the hoary tetragrams of the I Ching. The government newspaper

lamented that 'the superstition of feudal ideology is reviving in our

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

countryside'.

It was (and remains) a rural, not primarily an urban,

affliction. Individuals with 'special powers' gained enormous follow-

ings. They could, they said, project Qi, the 'energy field of the

Universe', out of their bodies to change the molecular structure

of a chemical 2,000 kilometres away, to communicate with

aliens, to cure diseases. Some patients died under the ministra-

tions of one of these 'masters ofQi Gong' who was arrested and

convicted in 1993.

Wang Hongcheng, an amateur chemist,

claimed to have synthesized a liquid, small amounts of which,

when added to water, would convert it to gasoline or the

equivalent. For a time he was funded by the army and the secret

police, but when his invention was found to be a scam he was

arrested and imprisoned. Naturally the story spread that his

misfortune resulted not from fraud, but from his unwillingness

to reveal his 'secret formula' to the government. (Similar

stories have circulated in America for decades, usually with the

government role replaced by a major oil or auto company.)

Asian rhinos are being driven to extinction because their horns,

when pulverized, are said to prevent impotence; the market

encompasses all of East Asia. The government of China and the Chinese Communist Party

were alarmed by certain of these developments. On 5 December

1994, they issued a joint proclamation that read in part:

[Pjublic education in science has been withering in recent

years. At the same time, activities of superstition and igno-

rance have been growing, and antiscience and pseudoscience

cases have become frequent. Therefore, effective measures

must be applied as soon as possible to strengthen public

education in science. The level of public education in science

and technology is an important sign of the national scientific

accomplishment. It is a matter of overall importance in

economic development, scientific advance, and the progress

of society. We must be attentive and implement such public

education as part of the strategy to modernize our socialist

country and to make our nation powerful and prosperous. Ignorance is never socialist, nor is poverty. 22

The Most Precious Thing

So pseudoscience in America is part of a global trend. Its causes,

dangers, diagnosis and treatment are likely to be similar every-

where. Here, psychics ply their wares on extended television

commercials, personally endorsed by entertainers. They have

their own channel, the 'Psychic Friends Network'; a million

people a year sign on and use such guidance in their everyday

lives. For the chief executives of major corporations, for financial

analysts, for lawyers and bankers there is a species of astrologer/

soothsayer/psychic ready to advise on any matter. 'If people knew

how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones,

went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor,' says a

psychic from Cleveland, Ohio. Royalty has traditionally been

vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China and Rome astrol-

ogy was the exclusive property of the emperor; any private use of

this potent art was considered a capital offence. Emerging from a

particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and

Ronald Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public

matters - unknown to the voting public. Some portion of the

decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is

plainly in the hands of charlatans. If anything, the practice is

comparatively muted in America; its venue is worldwide. As amusing as some of pseudoscience may seem, as confident as

we may be that we would never be so gullible as to be swept up by

such a doctrine, we know it's happening all around us. Transcen-

dental meditation and Aum Shinrikyo seem to have attracted a

large number of accomplished people, some with advanced

degrees in physics or engineering. These are not doctrines for

nitwits. Something else is going on. What's more, no one interested in what religions are and how

they begin can ignore them. While vast barriers may seem to

stretch between a local, single-focus contention of pseudoscience

and something like a world religion, the partitions are very thin. The world presents us with nearly insurmountable problems. A

wide variety of solutions are offered, some of very limited

worldview, some of portentous sweep. In the usual Darwinian

natural selection of doctrines, some thrive for a time, while most

quickly vanish. But a few - sometimes, as history has shown, the

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

most scruffy and least prepossessing among them - may have the

power to change profoundly the history of the world. The continuum stretching from ill-practised science, pseudo-

science and superstition (New Age or Old), all the way to

respectable mystery religion, based on revelation, is indistinct. 1

try not to use the word 'cult' in this book in its usual meaning of a

religion the speaker dislikes, but try to reach for the headstone of

knowledge - do they really know what they claim to know?

Everyone, it turns out, has relevant expertise. In certain passages of this book 1 will be critical of the excesses

of theology, because at the extremes it is difficult to distinguish

pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. Nevertheless, 1

want to acknowledge at the outset the prodigious diversity and

complexity of religious thought and practice over the millennia;

the growth of liberal religion and ecumenical fellowship during the

last century; and the fact that - as in the Protestant Reformation,

the rise of Reform Judaism, Vatican II, and the so-called higher

criticism of the Bible - religion has fought (with varying degrees of

success) its own excesses. But in parallel to the many scientists

who seem reluctant to debate or even publicly discuss pseudo-

science, many proponents of mainstream religions are reluctant to

take on extreme conservatives and fundamentalists. If the trend

continues, eventually the field is theirs; they can win the debate by

default. One religious leader writes to me of his longing for 'disciplined

integrity' in religion:

We have grown far too sentimental ...

Devotionalism and

cheap psychology on one side, and arrogance and dogmatic

intolerance on the other distort authentic religious life almost

beyond recognition. Sometimes I come close to despair, but

then I live tenaciously and always with hope ...

Honest

religion, more familiar than its critics with the distortions and

absurdities perpetrated in its name, has an active interest in

encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own purposes ...

There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a

potent partnership against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think

it would soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-religion. The Most Precious Thing

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on

errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn

all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are

framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of

alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observa-

tion. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understand-

ing. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific

hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as

central to the scientific enterprise. Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed

precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a

prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Sceptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scien-

tists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced. Motor ability in healthy people is almost perfect. We rarely

stumble and fall, except in young and old age. We can learn tasks

such as riding a bicycle or skating or skipping, jumping rope or

driving a car, and retain that mastery for the rest of our lives. Even if we've gone a decade without doing it, it comes back to us

effortlessly. The precision and retention of our motor skills may,

however, give us a false sense of confidence in our other talents. Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We

are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know

What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life,

by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people systematically err in

understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being

influenced by the opinions of others. We're good in some things, but

not in everything. Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. 'For

Man is a giddy thing,' teaches William Shakespeare. That's where

the stuffy sceptical rigour of science comes in. Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudo-

science is that science has a far keener appreciation of human

imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or 'inerrant'

revelation).

If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are

liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error -

even serious error, profound mistakes - will be our companion

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-

assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our

chances improve enormously. If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter

how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicat-

ing its critical method, how can the average person possibly

distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Both then are presented

as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The distinc-

tion between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No

perplexities needed to be muddled through. But when profound

political changes occurred and strictures on free thought were

loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims - especially

those that told us what we wanted to hear - gained a vast

following. Every notion, however improbable, became authorita-

tive. It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make

clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the

misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practi-

tioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks

for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to

present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of

patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the

messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and

grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of

science. 26

Science and Hope

Two men came to a hole in the sky. One asked the other to

lift him up ...

But so beautiful was it in heaven that the

man who looked in over the edge forgot everything, forgot

his companion whom he had promised to help up and simply

ran off into all the splendour of heaven. from an Iglulik Inuit prose poem,

early twentieth century, told by Inugpasugjuk to

Knud Rasmussen, the Greenlandic arctic explorer

I was a child in a time of hope. 1 wanted to be a scientist from my

earliest school days. The crystallizing moment came when 1 first

caught on that the stars are mighty suns, when it first dawned on me

how staggeringly far away they must be to appear as mere points of

light in the sky. I'm not sure 1 even knew the meaning of the word

'science' then, but I wanted somehow to immerse myself in all that

grandeur. I was gripped by the splendour of the Universe, transfixed

by the prospect of understanding how things really work, of helping

to uncover deep mysteries, of exploring new worlds - maybe even

literally. It has been my good fortune to have had that dream in part

fulfilled. For me, the romance of science remains as appealing and

new as it was on that day, more than half a century ago, when I was

shown the wonders of the 1939 World's Fair. Popularizing science - trying to make its methods and

findings accessible to non-scientists - then follows naturally and

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

immediately. Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a

personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with

science. But there's another reason: science is more than a body of

knowledge; it is a way of thinking. 1 have a foreboding of an

America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the

United States is a service and information economy; when nearly

all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other

countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of

a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even

grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their

own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when,

clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes,

our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what

feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back

into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is

most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the

enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now

down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator

programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and

superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As

1 write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the

movie Dumb and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular

(and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that

study and learning - not just of science, but of anything - are

avoidable, even undesirable. We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial

elements - transportation, communications, and all other indus-

tries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting

the environment; and even the key democratic institution of

voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have

also arranged things so that almost no one understands science

and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get

away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible

mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. A Candle in the Dark is the title of a courageous, largely

Biblically based, book by Thomas Ady, published in London in

Science and Hope

1656, attacking the witch-hunts then in progress as a scam 'to

delude the people'.

Any illness or storm, anything out of the

ordinary, was popularly attributed to witchcraft. Witches must

exist, Ady quoted the 'witchmongers' as arguing, 'else how should

these things be, or come to pass?' For much of our history, we

were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable

dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to

soften or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely

successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get

hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and

meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was

considered sufficient cause to burn women to death. Ady also warned of the danger that 'the Nations [will] perish for

lack of knowledge'.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused

not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our

ignorance about ourselves. 1 worry that, especially as the millen-

nium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year

by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous

and attractive. Where have we heard it before?

Whenever our

ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity,

during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we

agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when

fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought

familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries

still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light years

across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the

case forever. We are constantly stumbling on surprises. Yet some

New Age and religious writers assert that scientists believe that

'what they find is all there is'.

Scientists may reject mystic

revelations for which there is no evidence except somebody's

say-so, but they hardly believe their knowledge of Nature to be

complete. Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just

the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human

action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of

alternative courses of action. The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and

disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let

the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see

which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between

no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and

the most rigorous sceptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and

established wisdom. This kind of thinking is also an essential tool

for a democracy in an age of change. One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in,

error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider

this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we

exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the

outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent

and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into

pseudoscience and superstition. Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's

accompanied by an error bar - a quiet but insistent reminder that

no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how

much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small,

the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars

are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. Except in

pure mathematics nothing is known for certain (although much is

certainly false).

Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the

veridical status of their attempts to understand the world - ranging

from conjectures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all

the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systemati-

cally confirmed through many interrogations of how the world

works. But even laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There

may be new circumstances never before examined - inside black

holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light -

where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however

valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it;

Science and Hope

they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have

attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful

claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most

we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding,

learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the

Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always

elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can

hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body

of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive,

visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. You

often see error bars in public opinion polls ('an uncertainty of plus

or minus three per cent', say).

Imagine a society in which every

speech in the Congressional Record, every television commercial,

every sermon had an accompanying error bar or its equivalent. One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust argu-

ments from authority'.

(Scientists, being primates, and thus given

to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this

commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too

painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like

everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional

unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous

to doctrines less self-critical, or with pretensions to certitude. Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the

world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may

not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It

may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. Some of

science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually

because the world is complicated - or because we're complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or

because we've been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to

take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-

confidence erodes. But when we pass beyond the barrier, when the findings and

methods of science get through to us, when we understand and put

this knowledge to use, many feel deep satisfaction. This is true for

everyone, but especially for children - born with a zest for

knowledge, aware that they must live in a future moulded by

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

science, but so often convinced in their adolescence that science is

not for them. I know personally, both from having science

explained to me and from my attempts to explain it to others, how

gratifying it is when we get it, when obscure terms suddenly take

on meaning, when we grasp what all the fuss is about, when deep

wonders are revealed. In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of

reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of

joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnifi-

cence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of

knowledge over time converts science into something only a little

short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind. 'Spirit' comes from the Latin word 'to breathe'.

What we

breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite

usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the

word 'spiritual' that we are talking of anything other than matter

(including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything

outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use

the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a

profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in

an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we

grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring

feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely

spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music

or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those

of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that

science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a

disservice to both. Science may be hard to understand. It may challenge cherished

beliefs. When its products are placed at the disposal of politicians

or industrialists, it may lead to weapons of mass destruction and

grave threats to the environment. But one thing you have to say

about it: it delivers the goods. Not every branch of science can foretell the future - palaeontology

can't - but many can and with stunning accuracy. If you want to

know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try

magicians or mystics, but you'll do much better with scientists. They

Science and Hope

will tell you where on Earth to stand, when you have to be there, and

whether it will be a partial eclipse, a total eclipse, or an annular

eclipse. They can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a

millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the

spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take vitamin

B,, If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you

can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child,

you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want (left-right, a boy;

forward-back, a girl - or maybe it's the other way around), but

they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real

accuracy (here, 99 per cent accuracy), try amniocentesis and sono-

grams. Try science. Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves

with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophe-

cies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up

their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic

accuracy and reliability of science?

There isn't a religion on the

planet that doesn't long for a comparable ability - precise, and

repeatedly demonstrated before committed sceptics - to foretell

future events. No other human institution comes close. Is this worshipping at the altar of science?

Is this replacing one

faith by another, equally arbitrary?

In my view, not at all. The

directly observed success of science is the reason I advocate its

use. If something else worked better, 1 would advocate the

something else. Does science insulate itself from philosophical

criticism?

Does it define itself as having a monopoly on the

'truth'?

Think again of that eclipse a thousand years in the future. Compare as many doctrines as you can think of, note what

predictions they make of the future, which ones are vague, which

ones are precise, and which doctrines - every one of them subject

to human fallibility - have error-correcting mechanisms built in. Take account of the fact that not one of them is perfect. Then

simply pick the one that in a fair comparison works best (as

opposed to feels) best. If different doctrines are superior in quite

separate and independent fields, we are of course free to choose

several - but not if they contradict one another. Far from being

idolatry, this is the means by which we can distinguish the false

idols from the real thing. THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in

error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in

science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no

sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the

most rigorous, sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from

the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august or beloved

you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined,

expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are

encouraged to contend - substantively and in depth. The process of science may sound messy and disorderly. In a

way, it is. If you examine science in its everyday aspect, of course

you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotion, person-

ality and character. But there's one facet that is really striking to

the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism considered

acceptable or even desirable. There is much warm and inspired

encouragement of apprentice scientists by their mentors. But the

poor graduate student at his or her PhD orai exam is subjected to

a withering crossfire of questions from the very professors who

have the candidate's future in their grasp. Naturally the students

are nervous; who wouldn't be?

True, they've prepared for it for

years. But they understand that at this critical moment, they have

to be able to answer searching questions posed by experts. So in

preparing to defend their theses, they must practise a very useful

habit of thought: they must anticipate questions. They have to ask:

where in my dissertation is there a weakness that someone else

might find?

I'd better identify it before they do. You sit in at contentious scientific meetings. You find university

colloquia in which the speaker has hardly gotten thirty seconds

into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments

from the audience. You examine the conventions in which a

written report is submitted to a scientific journal for possible

publication, then is conveyed by the editor to anonymous referees

whose job it is to ask: did the author do anything stupid?

Is there

anything in here that is sufficiently interesting to be published?

What are the deficiencies of this paper?

Have the main results

been found by anybody else?

Is the argument adequate, or should

the paper be resubmitted after the author has actually demon-

strated what is here only speculated on?

And it's anonymous: the

Science and Hope

author doesn't know who the critics are. This is the everyday

expectation in the scientific community. Why do we put up with it?

Do we like to be criticized?

No, no

scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for

his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don't reply to critics,

wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I'm very fond of it; it's

done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just

rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons

to new ideas that better explain the data. The British physicist

Michael Faraday warned of the powerful temptation

to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in the

favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose

them ...

We receive as friendly that which agrees with [us],

we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very

reverse is required by every dictate of common sense. Valid criticism does you a favour. Some people consider science arrogant - especially when it

purports to contradict beliefs of long standing or when it intro-

duces bizarre concepts that seem contradictory to common sense;

like an earthquake that rattles our faith in the very ground we're

standing on, challenging our accustomed beliefs, shaking the

doctrines we have grown to rely upon, can be profoundly disturb-

ing. Nevertheless, I maintain that science is part and parcel

humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants

on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take

seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have

been wrong. We understand human imperfection. We insist on

independent and - to the extent possible - quantitative verifica-

tion of proposed tenets of belief. We are constantly prodding,

challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual

errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove

established beliefs. Here's one of many examples: the laws of motion and the

inverse square law of gravitation associated with the name of Isaac

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Newton are properly considered among the crowning achieve-

ments of the human species. Three hundred years later we use

Newtonian dynamics to predict those eclipses. Years after launch,

billions of miles from Earth (with only tiny corrections from

Einstein), the spacecraft beautifully arrives at a predetermined

point in the orbit of the target world, just as the world comes

ambling by. The accuracy is astonishing. Plainly, Newton knew

what he was doing. But scientists have not been content to leave well enough alone. They have persistently sought chinks in the Newtonian armour. At high speeds and strong gravities, Newtonian physics breaks

down. This is one of the great findings of Albert Einstein's Special

and General Relativity, and is one of the reasons his memory is so

greatly honoured. Newtonian physics is valid over a wide range of

conditions including those of everyday life. But in certain circum-

stances highly unusual for human beings - we are not, after all, in

the habit of travelling near light speed - it simply doesn't give the

right answer; it does not conform to observations of Nature. Special and General Relativity are indistinguishable from Newto-

nian physics in its realm of validity, but make very different

predictions - predictions in excellent accord with observation - in

those other regimes (high speed, strong gravity).

Newtonian

physics turns out to be an approximation to the truth, good in

circumstances with which we are routinely familiar, bad in others. It is a splendid and justly celebrated accomplishment of the

human mind, but it has its limitations. However, in accord with our understanding of human fallibility,

heeding the counsel that we may asymptotically approach the

truth but will never fully reach it, scientists are today investigating

regimes in which General Relativity may break down. For exam-

ple, General Relativity predicts a startling phenomenon called

gravitational waves. They have never been detected directly. But

if they do not exist, there is something fundamentally wrong with

General Relativity. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars

whose flicker rates can now be measured to fifteen decimal places. Two very dense pulsars in orbit around each other are predicted to

radiate copious quantities of gravitational waves, which will in

time slightly alter the orbits and rotation periods of the two stars. Science and Hope

Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse of Princeton University have

used this method to test the predictions of General Relativity in a

wholly novel way. For all they knew, the results would be

inconsistent with General Relativity and they would have over-

turned one of the chief pillars of modern physics. Not only were

they willing to challenge General Relativity, they were widely

encouraged to do so. As it turns out, the observations of binary

pulsars give a precise verification of the predictions of General

Relativity, and for this Taylor and Hulse were co-recipients of the

1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. In diverse ways, many other physi-

cists are testing General Relativity, for example by attempting

directly to detect the elusive gravitational waves. They hope to

strain the theory to the breaking point and discover whether a

regime of Nature exists in which Einstein's great advance in

understanding in turn begins to fray. These efforts will continue as long as there are scientists. General Relativity is certainly an inadequate description of

Nature at the quantum level, but even if that were not the case,

even if General Relativity were everywhere and forever valid,

what better way of convincing ourselves of its validity than a

concerted effort to discover its failings and limitations?

This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not

inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths

acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous

and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies?

Beyond the test of everyday living, who is systematically testing

the circumstances in which traditional religious teachings may no

longer apply?

(It is certainly conceivable that doctrines and ethics

that may have worked fairly well in patriarchal or patristic or

medieval times might be thoroughly invalid in the very different

world we inhabit today.) What sermons even-handedly examine

the God hypothesis?

What rewards are religious sceptics given by

the established religions - or, for that matter, social and economic

sceptics by the society in which they swim?

Science, Ann Druyan notes, is forever whispering in our ears,

'Remember, you're very new at this. You might be mistaken. You've been wrong before.' Despite all the talk of humility, show

me something comparable in religion. Scripture is said to be

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

divinely inspired - a phrase with many meanings. But what if it's

simply made up by fallible humans?

Miracles are attested, but

what if they're instead some mix of charlatanry, unfamiliar states

of consciousness, misapprehensions of natural phenomena and

mental illness?

No contemporary religion and no New Age belief

seems to me to take sufficient account of the grandeur, magnifi-

cence, subtlety and intricacy of the Universe revealed by science. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is

prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on its

divine inspiration. But of course 1 might be wrong. Read the following two paragraphs - not to understand the

science described, but to get a feeling for the author's style of

thinking. He is facing anomalies, apparent paradoxes in physics;

'asymmetries' he calls them. What can we learn from them?

It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics - as usually

understood at the present time - when applied to moving

bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be

inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the recipro-

cal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The

observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative

motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the cus-

tomary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases

in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in

motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at

rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an

electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a

current at the places where parts of the conductor are

situated. But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in

motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the

magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive

force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but

which gives rise - assuming equality of relative motion in the

two cases discussed - to electric currents of the same path and

intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the

former case. 38

Science and Hope

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful

attempts to discover any motion of the earth relative to the

'ether', suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as

well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to

the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has

already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the

same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all

frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics

hold good. What is the author trying to tell us here?

I'll try to explain the

background later in this book. For now, we can perhaps recognize

that the language is spare, technical, cautious, clear, and not a jot

more complicated than it need be. You would not offhand guess

from how it's phrased (or from its unostentatious title, 'On the

Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies') that this article represents

the crucial arrival of the theory of Special Relativity into the

world, the gateway to the triumphant announcement of the

equivalence of mass and energy, the deflation of the conceit that

our small world occupies some 'privileged reference frame' in the

Universe, and in several different ways an epochal event in human

history. The opening words of Albert Einstein's 1905 paper are

characteristic of the scientific report. It is refreshingly unselfserv-

ing, circumspect, understated. Contrast its restrained tone with,

say, the products of modern advertising, political speeches,

authoritative theological pronouncements - or for that matter the

blurb on the cover of this book. Notice how Einstein's paper begins by trying to make sense of

experimental results. Wherever possible, scientists experiment. Which experiments suggest themselves often depends on which

theories currently prevail. Scientists are intent on testing those

theories to the breaking point. They do not trust what is intuitively

obvious. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. That heavy

bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious. That blood-

sucking leeches cure most diseases was once obvious. That some

people are naturally and by divine decree slaves was once obvious. That there is such a place as the centre of the Universe, and that

the Earth sits in that exalted spot was once obvious. That there is

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

an absolute standard of rest was once obvious. The truth may be

puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held beliefs. Experiment is how we get a handle on it. At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, 'To physics and

metaphysics'.

By 'metaphysics', people then meant something

like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking

about them. They could also have included pseudoscience. Wood answered along these lines: the physicist has an idea. The

more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He

consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more

promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the

laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment

is painstaking. Many possibilities are checked. The accuracy of

measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the

chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the

experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful

experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the

physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error,

and moves on to something else.*

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood con-

cluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of

one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference

is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. For me, there are four main reasons for a concerted effort to

convey science - on radio and TV, in movies, newspapers, books,

computer programs, theme parks and classrooms - to every

citizen. In all uses of science, it is insufficient - indeed it is

dangerous - to produce only a small, highly competent, well-

rewarded priesthood of professionals. Instead, some fundamental

understanding of the findings and methods of science must be

available on the broadest scale. * As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, 'In going on with these

experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find

ourselves obliged to destroy?' At the very least, he thought, the experience

sufficed to 'help to make a vain Man humble'.

Science and Hope

Despite plentiful opportunities for misuse, science can be the

golden road out of poverty and backwardness for emerging

nations. It makes national economies and the global civilization

run. Many nations understand this. It is why so many graduate

students in science and engineering at American graduate

schools - still the best in the world - are from other countries. The corollary, one that the United States sometimes fails to

grasp, is that abandoning science is the road back into poverty

and backwardness. Science alerts us to the perils introduced by our world-altering

technologies, especially to the global environment on which our

lives depend. Science provides an essential early warning

system. Science teaches us about the deepest issues of origins, natures

and fates-of our species, of life, of our planet, of the Universe. For the first time in human history we are able to secure a real

understanding of some of these matters. Every culture on Earth

has addressed such issues and valued their importance. All of

us feel goosebumps when we approach these grand questions. In the long run, the greatest gift of science may be in teaching

us, in ways no other human endeavour has been able, some-

thing about our cosmic context, about where, when and who we

are. The values of science and the values of democracy are concord-

ant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy

began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and

place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Science

confers power on anyone who takes the trouble to learn it

(although too many have been systematically prevented from

doing so).

Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free

exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science

holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both

science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and

vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent

argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. Science

is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to

knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against supersti-

tion, against religion misapplied to where it has no business

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

being. If we're true to its values, it can tell us when we're being

lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes. The more widespread its language, rules and methods, the

better chance we have of preserving what Thomas Jefferson

and his colleagues had in mind. But democracy can also be

subverted more thoroughly through the products of science

than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed. Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of

confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication and cour-

age. But if we don't practise these tough habits of thought, we

cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and

we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for

grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along. An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on earth - scrutinizing

what we mainly present to our children on television and radio

and in movies, newspapers, magazines, comics and many books-

might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder,

rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism. We keep

at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into

them science and a sense of hope?

The Man in the Moon

and the Face on Mars

The moon leaps

In the Great River's current ...

Floating on the wind. What do 1 resemble?

Du Fu, 'Travelling at Night'

(China, Tang Dynasty, 765)

E ach field of science has its own complement of pseudo-

science. Geophysicists have flat Earths, hollow Earths,

Earths with wildly bobbing axes to contend with, rapidly rising

and sinking continents, plus earthquake prophets. Botanists

have plants whose passionate emotional lives can be monitored

with lie detectors, anthropologists have surviving ape-men,

zoologists have extant dinosaurs, and evolutionary biologists

have Biblical literalists snapping at their flanks. Archaeologists

have ancient astronauts, forged runes and spurious statuary. Physicists have perpetual motion machines, an army of amateur

relativity disprovers, and perhaps cold fusion. Chemists still

have alchemy. Psychologists have much of psychoanalysis and

almost all of parapsychology. Economists have long-range

economic forecasting. Meteorologists, so far, have long-range

weather forecasting, as in the sunspot-oriented Fanner's Alma-

nac (although long-term climate forecasting is another matter).

Astronomy has, as its most prominent pseudoscience, astrology

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- the discipline out of which it emerged. The pseudosciences

sometimes intersect, compounding the confusion - as in telepathic

searches for buried treasures from Atlantis, or astrological economic

forecasting. But because I work mainly with planets, and because I've been

interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudo-

sciences that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve

other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to call

'aliens'.

In the chapters immediately following, I want to lay out

two recent, somewhat related pseudoscientific doctrines. They

share the possibility that human perceptual and cognitive imper-

fections play a role in deceiving us on matters of great import. The

first contends that a giant stone face from ages past is staring

expressionlessly up at the sky from the sands of Mars. The second

maintains that alien beings from distant worlds visit the Earth with

casual impunity. Even when summarized so baldly, isn't there a kind of thrill in

contemplating these claims?

What if such hoary science fiction

ideas - resonant surely with deep human fears and longings -

actually were coming to pass?

Whose interest can fail to be

aroused?

Immersed in such material, even the crassest cynic is

stirred. Are we absolutely sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt,

that we can dismiss these claims?

And if hardened debunkers can

sense the appeal, what must those untutored in scientific scepti-

cism, like Mr 'Buckley', feel?

For most of history - before spacecraft, before telescopes, when

we were still largely immersed in magical thinking - the Moon was

an enigma. Almost no one thought of it as a world. What do we actually see when we look up at the Moon with the

naked eye?

We make out a configuration of irregular bright and

dark markings - not a close representation of any familiar object. But, almost irresistibly, our eyes connect the markings, emphasiz-

ing some, ignoring others. We seek a pattern and we find one. In

world myth and folklore, many images are seen: a woman

weaving, stands of laurel trees, an elephant jumping off a cliff, a

girl with a basket on her back, a rabbit, the lunar intestines spilled

out on its surface after evisceration by an irritable flightless bird, a

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

woman pounding tapa cloth, a four-eyed jaguar. People of one

culture have trouble understanding how such bizarre things could

be seen by the people of another. The most common image is the Man in the Moon. Of course, it

doesn't really look like a man. Its features are lopsided, warped,

drooping. There's a beefsteak or something over the left eye. And

what expression does that mouth convey?

An 'O' of surprise?

hint of sadness, even lamentation?

Doleful recognition of the

travails of life on Earth?

Certainly the face is too round. The ears

are missing. 1 guess he's bald on top. Nevertheless, every time 1

look at it, 1 see a human face. World folklore depicts the Moon as something prosaic. In the

pre-Apollo generation, children were told that the Moon was

made of green (that is, smelly) cheese, and for some reason this

was thought not marvellous but hilarious. In children's books and

editorial cartoons, the Man in the Moon is often drawn simply as a

face set in a circle, not too different from the bland 'happy face' of

a pair of dots and an upturned arc. Benignly, he looks down on

the nocturnal frolics of animals and children, of the knife and the

spoon. Consider again the two categories of terrain we recognize when

we examine the Moon with the naked eye: the brighter forehead,

cheeks and chin, and the darker eyes and mouth. Through a

telescope, the bright features are revealed to be ancient cratered

highlands, dating back, we now know (from the radioactive dating

of samples returned by the Apollo astronauts), to almost 4.5

billion years ago. The dark features are somewhat younger flows

of basaltic lava called maria (singular, mare - both from the Latin

word for ocean, although the Moon, we now know, is dry as a

bone).

The maria welled up in the first few hundred million years

of lunar history, partly induced by the high-speed impact of

enormous asteroids and comets. The right eye is Mare Imbrium,

the beefsteak drooping over the left eye is the combination of

Mare Serenitatis and Mare Tranquilitatis (where Apollo 11

landed), and the off-centre open mouth is Mare Humorum. (No

craters can be made out by ordinary, unaided human vision.)

The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes,

most of which took place before humans, before mammals, before

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vertebrates, before multicelled organisms, and probably even

before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our

species to put a human face on random cosmic violence. Humans, like other primates, are a gregarious lot. We enjoy one

another's company. We're mammals and parental care of the young

is essential for the continuance of the hereditary lines. The parent

smiles at the child, the child smiles back, and a bond is forged or

strengthened. As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and

we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants

who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back

less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents and less likely

to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a

human face and to respond with a goony grin. As an inadvertent side effect, the pattern-recognition machin-

ery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of

other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and uncon-

sciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup describes another. There

are many other examples. Sometimes it's a geological formation, such as the Old Man of

the Mountain at Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. We recognize

that, rather than some supernatural agency or an otherwise

undiscovered ancient civilization in New Hampshire, this is the

product of erosion and collapse of a rock face. Anyway, it doesn't

look much like a face anymore. There's the Devil's Head in North

Carolina, the Sphinx Rock in Wast Water, Cumbria, England, the

Old Woman in France, the Vartan Rock in Armenia. Sometimes

it's a reclining woman, as Mt Ixtaccihuatl in Mexico. Sometimes

it's other body parts, as the Grand Tetons in Wyoming -

approached from the West, a pair of mountain peaks named by

French explorers. (Actually there are three.) Sometimes it's

changing patterns in the clouds. In late medieval and renaissance

Spain, visions of the Virgin Mary were 'confirmed' by people

seeing saints in cloud forms. (While sailing out of Suva, Fiji, 1

once saw the head of a truly terrifying monster, jaws agape, set in

a brooding storm cloud.)

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

Occasionally, a vegetable or a pattern of wood grain or the hide

of a cow resembles a human face. There was a celebrated eggplant

that closely resembled Richard M. Nixon. What shall we deduce

from this fact?

Divine or extraterrestrial intervention?

Republican

meddling in eggplant genetics?

No. We recognize that there are

large numbers of eggplants in the world and that, given enough of

them, sooner or later we'll come upon one that looks like a human

face, even a very particular human face. When the face is of a religious personage - as, for example, a

tortilla purported to exhibit the face of Jesus - believers tend

quickly to deduce the hand of God. In an age more sceptical than

most, they crave reassurance. Still, it seems unlikely that a miracle

is being worked on so evanescent a medium. Considering how

many tortillas have been pounded out since the beginning of the

world, it would be surprising if a few didn't have at least vaguely

familiar features.*

Magical properties have been ascribed to ginseng and man-

drake roots, in part because of vague resemblances to the

human form. Some chestnut shoots show smiling faces. Some

corals look like hands. The ear fungus (also unpleasantly called

'Jew's ear') indeed looks like an ear, and something rather like

enormous eyes can be seen on the wings of certain moths. Some

of this may not be mere coincidence; plants and animals that

suggest a face may be less likely to be gobbled up by creatures

with faces - or creatures who are afraid of predators with faces. A 'walking stick' is an insect spectacularly well disguised as a

twig. Naturally, it tends to live on and around trees. Its mimicry

of the plant world saves it from birds and other predators, and

is almost certainly the reason that its extraordinary form was

slowly moulded by Darwinian natural selection. Such crossings

of the boundaries between kingdoms of life are unnerving. A

* These cases are very different from that of the so-called Shroud of Turin, which

shows something too close to a human form to be a misapprehended natural

pattern and which is now suggested by carbon-14 dating to be not the death

shroud of Jesus, but a pious hoax from the fourteenth century - a time when

the manufacture of fraudulent religious relics was a thriving and profitable

home handicraft industry. 47

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

young child viewing a walking stick can easily imagine an army

of sticks, branches and trees marching for some ominous planty

purpose. Many instances of this sort are described and illustrated in a

1979 book called Natural Likeness by John Michell, a British

enthusiast of the occult. He takes seriously the claims of

Richard Shaver, who - as described below - played a role in the

origin of the UFO excitement in America. Shaver cut open

rocks on his Wisconsin farm and discovered, written in a

pictographic language that only he could see, much less under-

stand, a comprehensive history of the world. Michell also

accepts at face value the claims of the dramatist and surrealist

theoretician Antonin Artaud, who, in part under the influence

of peyote, saw in the patterns on the outsides of rocks erotic

images, a man being tortured, ferocious animals and the like. 'The whole landscape revealed itself,' Michell says, 'as the

creation of a single thought.' But a key question: was that

thought inside or outside Artaud's head?

Artaud concluded,

and Michell agrees, that the patterns so apparent in the rocks

were manufactured by an ancient civilization, rather than by

Artaud's partly hallucinogen-induced altered state of con-

sciousness. When Artaud returned from Mexico to Europe, he

was diagnosed as mad. Michell decries the 'materialist outlook'

that greeted Artaud's patterns sceptically. Michell shows us a photograph of the Sun taken in X-ray light

which looks vaguely like a face and informs us that 'followers of

Gurdjieff see the face of their Master' in the solar corona. Innumerable faces in trees, mountains and boulders all over the

world are inferred to be the product of ancient wisdom. Perhaps some are: it's a good practical joke, as well as a

tempting religious symbol, to pile stones so from afar they look

like a giant face. The view that most of these forms are patterns natural to

rock-forming processes and the bilateral symmetry of plants and

animals, plus a little natural selection - all processed through the

human-biased filter of our perception - Michell describes as

'materialism' and a 'nineteenth-century delusion'.

'Conditioned

by rationalist beliefs, our view of the world is duller and more

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

confined than nature intended.' By what process he has plumbed

the intentions of Nature is not revealed. Of the images he presents, Michell concludes that

their mystery remains essentially untouched, a constant

source of wonder, delight and speculation. All we know for

sure is that nature created them and at the same time gave us

the apparatus to perceive them and minds to appreciate their

endless fascination. For the greatest profit and enjoyment

they should be viewed as nature intended, with the eye of

innocence, unclouded by theories and preconceptions, with

the manifold vision, innate in all of us, that enriches and

dignifies human life, rather than with the cultivated single

vision of the dull and opinionated. Perhaps the most famous spurious claim of a portentous pattern

involves the canals of Mars. First observed in 1877, they were

seemingly confirmed by a succession of dedicated professional

astronomers peering through large telescopes all over the

world. A network of single and double straight lines was

reported, crisscrossing the Martian surface and with such

uncanny geometrical regularity that they could only be of

intelligent origin. Evocative conclusions were drawn about a

parched and dying planet populated by an older and wiser

technical civilization dedicated to conservation of water

resources. Hundreds of canals were mapped and named. But,

oddly, they avoided showing up on photographs. The human

eye, it was suggested, could remember the brief instants of

perfect atmospheric transparency, while the undiscriminating

photographic plate averaged the few clear with the many blurry

moments. Some astronomers saw the canals. Many did not. Perhaps certain observers were more skilled at seeing canals. Or

perhaps the whole business was some kind of perceptual delusion. Much of the idea of Mars as an abode of life, as well as the

prevalence of 'Martians' in popular fiction, derives from the

canals. I myself grew up steeped in this literature, and when 1

found myself an experimenter on the Mariner 9 mission to Mars -

the first spacecraft to orbit the red planet - naturally 1 was

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

interested to see what the real circumstances were. With Mariner

9 and with Viking, we were able to map the planet pole-to-pole,

detecting features hundreds of times smaller than the best that

could be seen from Earth. 1 found, not altogether to my surprise,

not a trace of canals. There were a few more or less linear features

that had been made out through the telescope - for example, a

5,000-kilometre-long rift valley that would have been hard to

miss. But the hundreds of 'classical' canals carrying water from the

polar caps through the arid deserts to the parched equatorial cities

simply did not exist. They were an illusion, some malfunction of

the human hand-eye-brain combination at the limit of resolution

when we peer through an unsteady and turbulent atmosphere. Even a succession of professional scientists - including famous

astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed

and now justly celebrated - can make serious, even profound

errors in pattern recognition. Especially where the implications of

what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not

exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. The Martian

canal myth constitutes an important cautionary tale. For the canals, spacecraft missions provided the means of

correcting our misapprehensions. But it is also true that some of

the most haunting claims of unexpected patterns emerge from

spacecraft exploration. In the early 1960s, 1 urged that we be

attentive to the possibility of finding the artefacts of ancient

civilizations, either those indigenous to a given world, or those

constructed by visitors from elsewhere. 1 didn't imagine that this

would be easy or probable, and 1 certainly did not suggest that, on

so important a matter, anything short of iron-clad evidence would

be worth considering. Beginning with John Glenn's evocative report of 'fireflies' sur-

rounding his space capsule, every time an astronaut reported seeing

something not immediately understood, there were those who

deduced 'aliens'.

Prosaic explanations - specks of paint flecking off

the ship in the space environment, say - were dismissed with

contempt. The lure of the marvellous blunts our critical faculties. (As

if a man become a moon is not marvel enough.)

Around the time of the Apollo lunar landings, many non-

experts - owners of small telescopes, flying saucer zealots, writers

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

for aerospace magazines - pored over the returned photographs

seeking anomalies that NASA scientists and astronauts had

overlooked. Soon there were reports of gigantic Latin letters and

Arabic numerals inscribed on the lunar surface, pyramids, high-

ways, crosses, glowing UFOs. Bridges were reported on the

Moon, radio antennas, the tracks of enormous crawling vehicles,

and the devastation left by machines able to slice craters in two. Every one of these claims, though, turns out to be a natural lunar

geological formation misjudged by amateur analysts, internal

reflections in the optics of the astronauts' Hasselblad cameras,

and the like. Some enthusiasts discerned the long shadows of

ballistic missiles - Soviet missiles, it was ominously confided,

aimed at America. The rockets, also described as 'spires', turn out

to be low hills casting long shadows when the Sun is near the lunar

horizon. A little trigonometry dispels the mirage. These experiences also provide fair warning: for a complex

terrain sculpted by unfamiliar processes, amateurs (and some-

times even professionals) examining photographs, especially near

the limit of resolution, may get into trouble. Their hopes and

fears, the excitement of possible discoveries of great import, may

overwhelm the usual sceptical and cautious approach of science. If we examine available surface images of Venus, occasionally a

peculiar landform swims into view - as, for example, a rough

portrait of Joseph Stalin discovered by American geologists

analysing Soviet orbital radar imagery. No one maintains, I

gather, that unreconstructed Stalinists had doctored the magnetic

tapes, or that the former Soviets were engaged in engineering

activities of unprecedented and hitherto unrevealed scale on the

surface of Venus - where every spacecraft to land has been fried in

an hour or two. The odds are overwhelming that this feature,

whatever it is, is due to geology. The same is true of what seems to

be a portrait of the cartoon character Bugs Bunny on the Uranian

moon Ariel. A Hubble space telescope image of Titan in the

near-infrared shows clouds roughly configured to make a world-

sized smiling face. Every planetary scientist has a favourite

example. The astronomy of the Milky Way also is replete with imagined

likenesses - for example, the Horsehead, Eskimo, Owl,

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Homunculus, Tarantula and North American Nebulae, all irregu-

lar clouds of gas and dust, illuminated by bright stars and each on

a scale that dwarfs our solar system. When astronomers mapped

the distribution of galaxies out to a few hundred million light

years, they found themselves outlining a crude human form which

has been called 'the Stickman'.

The configuration is understood as

something like enormous adjacent soap bubbles, the galaxies

formed on the surface of adjacent bubbles and almost no galaxies

in the interiors. This makes it quite likely that they will mark out a

pattern with bilateral symmetry something like the Stickman. Mars is much more clement than Venus, although the Viking

landers provided no compelling evidence for life. Its terrain is

extremely heterogeneous and diverse. With 100,000 or so close-up

photographs available, it is not surprising that claims have been

made over the years about something unusual on Mars. There is, for

example, a cheerful 'happy face' sitting inside a Martian impact

crater 8 kilometres (5 miles) across, with a set of radial splash marks

outside, making it look like the conventional representation of a

smiling Sun. But no one claims that this has been engineered by an

advanced (and excessively genial) Martian civilization, perhaps to

attract our attention. We recognize that, with objects of all sizes

falling out of the sky, with the surface rebounding, slumping and

reconfiguring itself after each impact, and with ancient water and

mudflows and modern windborne sand sculpting the surface, a wide

variety of landforms must be generated. If we scrutinize 100,000

pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon some-

thing like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy,

it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there. A few small mountains on Mars resemble pyramids. In the

Elysium high plateau, there is a cluster of them - the biggest a few

kilometres across at the base - all oriented in the same direction. There is something a little eerie about these pyramids in the

desert, so reminiscent of the Gizeh plateau in Egypt, and 1 would

love to examine them more closely. Is it reasonable, though, to

deduce Martian pharaohs?

Similar features are also known on Earth in miniature, espe-

cially in Antarctica. Some of them would come up to your knees. If we knew nothing else about them, would it be fair to conclude

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

that they've been manufactured by scale-model Egyptians living in

the Antarctic wasteland?

(The hypothesis loosely fits the observa-

tions, but much else we know about the polar environment and the

physiology of humans speaks against it.) They are, in fact, generated

by wind erosion - the splatter of fine particles picked up by strong

winds blowing mainly in the same direction and, over the years,

sculpting what once were irregular hummocks into nicely symmetri-

cal pyramids. They're called dreikanters, from a German word

meaning three sides. This is order generated out of chaos by natural

processes - something we see over and over again throughout the

Universe (in rotating spiral galaxies, for instance).

Each time it

happens we're tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker. On Mars, there is evidence of winds much fiercer than any ever

experienced on Earth, ranging up to half the speed of sound. Planet-wide duststorms are common, carrying fine grains of sand. A steady pitter-patter of particles moving much faster than in the

fiercest gales of Earth should, over ages of geological time, work

profound changes in rock faces and landforms. It would not be too

surprising if a few features - even very large ones - were sculpted

by aeolian processes into the pyramidal forms we see. There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, where a great stone face a

kilometre across stares unblinkingly up at the sky. It is an unfriendly

face, but one that seems recognizably human. In some representa-

tions, it could have been sculpted by Praxiteles. It lies in a landscape

where many low hills have been moulded into odd forms, perhaps by

some mixture of ancient mudflows and subsequent wind erosion. From the number of impact craters, the surrounding terrain looks to

be at least hundreds of millions of years old. Intermittently, 'The Face' has attracted attention, both in the

United States and in the former Soviet Union. The headline in the

20 November 1984 Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid

not celebrated for its integrity, read:

SOVIET SCIENTIST'S AMAZING CLAIM: RUINED

TEMPLES FOUND ON MARS. SPACE PROBE DIS-

COVERS REMAINS OF 50,000-YEAR-OLD CIVILIZA-

TION. 53

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

The revelations are attributed to an anonymous Soviet source and

breathlessly describe discoveries made by a nonexistent Soviet

space vehicle. But the story of 'The Face' is almost entirely an American one. It was found by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976.

There was an

unfortunate dismissal of the feature by a project official as a trick

of light and shadow, which prompted a later accusation that

NASA was covering up the discovery of the millennium. A few

engineers, computer specialists and others - some of them con-

tract employees of NASA - worked on their own time digitally to

enhance the image. Perhaps they hoped for stunning revelations. That's permissible in science, even encouraged - as long as your

standards of evidence are high. Some of them were fairly cautious

and deserve to be commended for advancing the subject. Others

were less restrained, deducing not only that the Face was a

genuine, monumental sculpture of a human being, but claiming to

find a city nearby with temples and fortifications.* From spurious

arguments, one writer announced that the monuments had a

particular astronomical orientation - not now, though, but half a

million years ago - from which it followed that the Cydonian

wonders were erected in that remote epoch. But then how could

the builders have been human?

Half a million years ago, our

ancestors were busy mastering stone tools and fire. They did not

have spaceships. The Martian Face is compared to 'similar faces ...

constructed

in civilizations on Earth. The faces are looking up at the sky

because they're looking up to God.' Or the Face was constructed

by the survivors of an interplanetary war that left the surface of

Mars (and the Moon) pockmarked and ravaged. What causes all

those craters anyway?

Is the Face a remnant of a long-extinct

human civilization?

Were the builders originally from Earth or

Mars?

Could the Face have been sculpted by interstellar visitors

* The general idea is quite old, going back at least a century to the Martian canal

myth of Percival Lowell. As one of many examples, P. E. Cleator, in his 1936

book Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel, speculated:

'On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely

testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.'

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

stopping briefly on Mars?

Was it left for us to discover?

Might

they also have come to Earth and initiated life here?

Or at least

human life?

Were they, whoever they were, gods?

Much fervent

speculation is evoked. More recently, claims have been made for a connection between

'monuments' on Mars and 'crop circles' on Earth; of inexhaustible

supplies of energy waiting to be extracted from ancient Martian

machines; and of a massive NASA cover-up to hide the truth from

the American public. Such pronouncements go far beyond more

incautious speculation about enigmatic landforms. When, in August 1993, the Mars Observer spacecraft failed

within hailing distance of Mars, there were those who accused

NASA of faking the mishap so it could study the Face in detail

without having to release the images to the public. (If so, the

charade is quite elaborate: all the experts on Martian geomorphol-

ogy know nothing about it, and some of us have been working

hard to design new missions to Mars less vulnerable to the

malfunction that destroyed Mars Observer.) There was even a

handful of pickets outside the gates of the Jet Propulsion Labora-

tory, worked up over this supposed abuse of power. The tabloid Weekly World News for 14 September 1993 devoted

its front page to the headline 'New NASA Photo Proves Humans

Lived on Mars!' A fake face, allegedly taken by Mars Obsei~ver in

orbit about Mars (in fact, the spacecraft seems to have failed

before achieving orbit), is said by a non-existent 'leading space

scientist' to prove that Martians colonized Earth 200,000 years

ago. The information is being suppressed, he is made to say, to

prevent 'world panic'.

Put aside the improbability that such a revelation would actually

lead to 'world panic'.

For anyone who has witnessed a portentous

scientific finding in the making - the July 1994 impact of Comet

Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter comes to mind - it will be clear

that scientists tend to be effervescent and uncontainable. They

have an indomitable compulsion to share new data. Only through

prior agreement, not ex post facto, do scientists abide military

secrecy. 1 reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective,

collaborative and communicative. 55

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

If we restrict ourselves to what is actually known, and ignore the

tabloid industry that manufactures epochal discoveries out of thin

air, where are we?

When we know only a little about the Face, it

raises goosebumps. When we know a little more, the mystery

quickly shallows. Mars has a surface area of almost 150 million square kilometres. Is it so astonishing that one (comparatively) postage-stamp-sized

patch in 150 million should look artificial - especially given our

penchant, since infancy, for finding faces?

When we examine the

neighbouring jumble of hillocks, mesas and other complex surface

forms, we recognize that the feature is akin to many that do not at

all resemble a human face. Why this resemblance?

Would the

ancient Martian engineers rework only this mesa (well, maybe a

few others) and leave all others unimproved by monumental

sculpture?

Or shall we conclude that other blocky mesas are also

sculpted into the form of faces, but weirder faces, unfamiliar to us

on Earth?

If we study the original image more carefully, we find that a

strategically placed 'nostril' - one that adds much to the impres-

sion of a face - is in fact a black dot corresponding to lost data in

the radio transmission from Mars to Earth. The best picture of the

Face shows one side lit by the Sun, the other in deep shadow. Using the original digital data, we can severely enhance the

contrast in the shadows. When we do, we find something rather

unfacelike there. The Face is at best half a face. Despite our

shortness of breath and the beating of our hearts, the Martian

sphinx looks natural - not artificial, not a dead ringer for a human

face. It was probably sculpted by slow geological process over

millions of years. But I might be wrong. It's hard to be sure about a world we've

seen so little of in extreme close-up. These features merit closer

attention with higher resolution. Much more detailed photos of

the Face would surely settle issues of symmetry and help resolve

the debate between geology and monumental sculpture. Small

impact craters found on or near the Face can settle the question of

its age. In the case (most unlikely in my view) that the nearby

structures were really once a city, that fact should also be obvious

on closer examination. Are there broken streets?

Crenellations in

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

the 'fort'?

Ziggurats, towers, columned temples, monumental

statuary, immense frescoes?

Or just rocks?

Even if these claims are extremely improbable - as 1 think they

are - they are worth examining. Unlike the UFO phenomenon,

we have here the opportunity for a definitive experiment. This

kind of hypothesis is falsifiable, a property that brings it well into

the scientific arena. I hope that forthcoming American and

Russian missions to Mars, especially orbiters with high-resolution

television cameras, will make a special effort - among hundreds of

other scientific questions - to look much more closely at the

pyramids and what some people call the Face and the city. Even if it becomes plain to everyone that these Martian features

are geological and not artificial, monumental faces in space (and

allied wonders) will not, I fear, go away. Already there are

supermarket tabloids reporting nearly identical faces seen from

Venus to Neptune (floating in the clouds?).

The 'findings' are

typically attributed to fictitious Russian spacecraft and imaginary

space scientists, which of course makes it marginally harder for a

sceptic to check the story out. One of the Mars face enthusiasts now announces:

Breakthru News of the Century

Censored by NASA

for fear of Religious upheavals and breakdowns. The Discovery of ancient

ALIEN RUINS ON THE MOON

A 'giant city, size of Los Angeles basin, covered by immense glass

dome, abandoned millions of years ago, and shattered by meteors

with gigantic tower 5 miles tall, with giant one mile square cube on

top' is breathlessly 'CONFIRMED' on the well-studied Moon. The evidence?

Photos taken by NASA robotic and Apollo mis-

sions whose significance was suppressed by the government and

overlooked by all those lunar scientists in many countries who

don't work for the 'government'.

The 18 August 1992 issue of Weekly World News reports the

discovery by 'a secret NASA satellite' of 'thousands maybe even

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

millions of voices' emanating from the black hole at the centre of

the galaxy M51, all singing ' "Glory, glory, glory to the Lord on

high" over and over again'.

In English. There is even a tabloid

report, hilly although murkily illustrated, of a space probe that

photographed God, or at least his eyes and the bridge of his nose,

up there in the Orion Nebula. The 20 July 1993 WWN sports a banner headline, 'Clinton

Meets with JFK!' along with a faked photo of a plausibly aged,

slumped-over John Kennedy, having secretly survived the assassi-

nation attempt, in a wheelchair at Camp David. Many pages

inside the tabloid, we are informed about another item of possible

interest. In 'Doomsday Asteroids', an alleged top-secret docu-

ment quotes alleged 'top' scientists about an alleged asteroid

('M-167') that will allegedly hit the Earth on 11 November 1993

and 'could mean the end of life on Earth'.

President Clinton is

described as being kept 'constantly informed of the asteroid's

position and speed'.

Perhaps it was one of the items he discussed

in his meeting with President Kennedy. Somehow, the fact that

the Earth escaped this catastrophe did not merit even a retrospec-

tive paragraph after 11 November 1993 uneventfully passed. At

least the headline writer's judgement not to burden the front page

with the news of the end of the world was vindicated. Some see this as just a kind of fun. However, we live in a time

when a real long-term statistical threat of an impact of an asteroid

with the Earth has been identified. (This real science is of course

the inspiration, if that's the word, of the WWN story.) Govern-

ment agencies are studying what to do about it. Stories like this

suffuse the subject with apocalyptic exaggeration and whimsy,

make it difficult for the public to distinguish real perils from

tabloid fiction, and conceivably can impede our ability to take

precautionary steps to mitigate the danger. The tabloids are often sued - sometimes by actors and actresses

who stoutly deny they have performed loathsome acts - and large

sums of money occasionally change hands. The tabloids must

consider such suits as just one of the costs of doing a very

profitable business. In their defence they often say that they are at

the mercy of their writers and have no institutional responsibility

to check out the truth of what they publish. Sal Ivone, the

The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

managing editor of Weekly World News, discussing the stories he

publishes, says 'For all I know, they could be the product of active

imaginations. But because we're a tabloid, we don't have to

question ourselves out of a story.' Scepticism doesn't sell news-

papers. Writers who have defected from the tabloids describe

'creative' sessions in which writers and editors dream up stories

and headlines out of whole cloth, the more outrageous the better. Out of their immense readership, are there not many who take

the stories at face value, who believe the tabloids 'couldn't' print it

if it wasn't so?

Some readers I talk to insist they read them only for

entertainment, just as they watch 'wrestling' on television, that

they're not in the least taken in, that the tabloids are understood

by publisher and reader alike to be whimsies that explore the

absurd. They merely exist outside any universe burdened by rules

of evidence. But my mail suggests that large numbers of Ameri-

cans take the tabloids very seriously indeed. In the 1990s the tabloid universe is expanding, voraciously

gobbling up other media. Newspapers, magazines or television

programmes that labour under prissy restraints imposed by what is

actually known are outsold by media outlets with less scrupulous

standards. We can see this in the new generation of acknowledged

tabloid television, and increasingly in what passes for news and

information programmes. Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell. And they

sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to

be jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense of

wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a few of the

stories, to be able, really and truly, to believe in Someone older,

smarter and wiser who is looking out for us. Faith is clearly not

enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific

proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are

unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that

impart credibility to that seal. What a relief it would be: doubt

reliably abolished!

Then, the irksome burden of looking after

ourselves would be lifted. We're worried - and for good reason -

about what it means for the human future if we have only

ourselves to rely upon. These are the modern miracles, shamelessly vouched for by

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

those who make them up from scratch, bypassing any formal

sceptical scrutiny, and available at low cost in every supermarket,

grocery store and convenience outlet in the land. One of the

pretences of the tabloids is to make science, the very instrument of

our disbelief, confirm our ancient faiths and effect a convergence

of pseudoscience and pseudoreligion. By and large, scientists' minds are open when exploring new

worlds. If we knew beforehand what we'd find, it would be

unnecessary to go. In future missions to Mars or to the other

fascinating worlds in our neck of the cosmic woods, surprises -

even some of mythic proportions - are possible, maybe even

likely. But we humans have a talent for deceiving ourselves. Scepticism must be a component of the explorer's toolkit, or we

will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without

our inventing any. 60

Aliens

'Truly, that which makes me believe there is no inhabitant

on this sphere, is that it seems to me that no sensible being

would be willing to live here.'

'Well, then!' said Micromegas, 'perhaps the beings that

inhabit it do not possess good sense.'

One alien to another,

on approaching the Earth,

in Voltaire's Micromegas:

A Philosophical Histoiy (1752)

I t's still dark out. You're lying in bed, fully awake. You discover

you're utterly paralysed. You sense someone in the room. You

try to cry out. You cannot. Several small grey beings, less than

four feet tall, are standing at the foot of the bed. Their heads are

pear-shaped, bald, and large for their bodies. Their eyes are

enormous, their faces expressionless and identical. They wear

tunics and boots. You hope this is only a dream. But as nearly as

you can tell it's really happening. They lift you up and, eerily, they

and you slip through the wall of your bedroom. You float out into

the air. You rise high toward a metallic saucer-shaped spacecraft. Once inside, you are escorted into a medical examining room. A

larger but similar being, evidently some kind of physician, takes

over. What follows is even more terrifying. Your body is probed with instruments and machines, especially

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

your sexual parts. If you're a man, they may take sperm

samples; if you're a woman, they may remove ova or foetuses,

or implant semen. They may force you to have sex. Afterwards

you may be ushered into a different room where hybrid babies

or foetuses, partly human and partly like these creatures, stare

back at you. You may be given an admonition about human

misbehaviour, especially in despoiling the environment or in

allowing the AIDS pandemic; tableaux of future devastation

are offered. Finally, these cheerless grey emissaries escort you

out of the spacecraft and ooze you back through the walls into

your bed. By the time you're able to move and talk ...

they're

gone. You may not remember the incident right away. Instead you

might simply find some period of time unaccountably missing, and

puzzle over it. Because all this seems so weird, you're a little

concerned about your sanity. Naturally you're reluctant to talk

about it. At the same time the experience is so disturbing that it's

hard to keep it bottled up. It all pours out when you hear of

similar accounts, or when you're under hypnosis with a sympa-

thetic therapist, or even when you see a picture of an 'alien' in one

of the many popular magazines, books, and TV 'specials' on

UFOs. Some people say they can recall such experiences from

early childhood. Their own children, they think, are now being

abducted by aliens. It runs in families. It's a eugenics programme,

they say, to improve the human breeding stock. Maybe aliens

have always done this. Maybe, some say, that's where humans

came from in the first place. As revealed by repeated polls over the years, most Americans

believe that we're being visited by extraterrestrial beings in UFOs. In a 1992 Roper opinion poll of nearly 6,000 American adults -

especially commissioned by those who accept the alien abduction

story at face value - 18 per cent reported sometimes waking up

paralysed, aware of one or more strange beings in the room. About 13 per cent reported odd episodes of missing time, and 10

per cent claimed to have flown through the air without mechanical

assistance. From nothing more than these results, the poll's

sponsors conclude that two per cent of all Americans have been

abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from other worlds. The

Aliens

question of whether respondents had been abducted by aliens was

never actually put to them. If we believed the conclusion drawn by those who bankrolled

and interpreted the results of this poll, and if aliens are not partial

to Americans, then the number for the whole planet would be

more than a hundred million people. This means an abduction

every few seconds over the past few decades. It's surprising more

of the neighbours haven't noticed. What's going on here?

When you talk with self-described

abductees, most seem very sincere, although caught in the grip of

powerful emotions. Some psychiatrists who've examined them say

they find no more evidence of psychopathology in them than in

the rest of us. Why should anyone claim to have been abducted by

alien creatures if it never happened?

Could all these people be

mistaken, or lying, or hallucinating the same (or a similar) story?

Or is it arrogant and contemptuous even to question the good

sense of so many?

On the other hand, could there really be a massive alien

invasion; repugnant medical procedures performed on millions of

innocent men, women and children; humans apparently used as

breeding stock over many decades - and all this not generally

known and dealt with by responsible media, physicians, scientists

and the governments sworn to protect the lives and well-being of

their citizens?

Or, as many have suggested, is there a massive

government conspiracy to keep the citizens from the truth?

Why should beings so advanced in physics and engineering -

crossing vast interstellar distances, walking like ghosts through

walls - be so backward when it comes to biology?

Why, if the

aliens are trying to do their business in secret, wouldn't they

perfectly expunge all memories of the abductions?

Too hard for

them to do?

Why are the examining instruments macroscopic and

so reminiscent of what can be found at the neighbourhood medical

clinic?

Why go to all the trouble of repeated sexual encounters

between aliens and humans?

Why not steal a few egg and sperm

cells, read the full genetic code, and then manufacture as many

copies as you like with whatever genetic variations happen to suit

your fancy?

Even we humans, who as yet cannot quickly cross

interstellar space or slither through walls, are able to clone cells. 63

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

How could humans be the result of an alien breeding programme

if we share 99.6 per cent of our active genes with the chimpan-

zees?

We're more closely related to chimps than rats are to mice. The preoccupation with reproduction in these accounts raises a

warning flag, especially considering the uneasy balance between

sexual impulse and societal repression that has always character-

ized the human condition, and the fact that we live in a time

fraught with numerous ghastly accounts, both true and false, of

childhood sexual abuse. Contrary to many media reports,* the Roper pollsters and

those who wrote the 'official' report never asked whether their

subjects had been abducted by aliens. They deduced it: those

who've ever awakened with strange presences around them,

who've ever unaccountably seemed to fly through the air, and

so on, have therefore been abducted. The pollsters didn't even

check to see if sensing presences, flying etc. were part of the

same or separate incidents. Their conclusion - that millions of

Americans have been so abducted - is spurious, based on

careless experimental design. Still, at least hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, claiming

they have been abducted, have sought out sympathetic therapists

or joined abductee support groups. Others may have similar

complaints but, fearing ridicule or the stigma of mental illness,

have refrained from speaking up or getting help. Some abductees are also said to be reluctant to talk for fear of

hostility and rejection by hardline sceptics (although many will-

ingly appear on radio and TV talk shows).

Their diffidence

supposedly extends even to audiences that already believe in alien

abductions. But maybe there's another reason: might the subjects

themselves be unsure - at least at first, at least before many

retellings of their story - whether it was an external event they are

remembering or a state of mind?

'One unerring mark of the love of truth,' wrote John Locke in

* For example, the 4 September 1994 Publisher's Weekly: 'According to a Gallup

[sic] poll, more than three million Americans believe they have been abducted

by aliens.'

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1690, 'is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance

than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.' On the matter of

UFOs, how strong are the proofs?

The phrase 'flying saucer' was coined when 1 was entering high

school. The newspapers were hill of stories about ships from

beyond in the skies of Earth. It seemed pretty believable to me. There were lots of other stars, at least some of which probably had

planetary systems like ours. Many stars were as old or older than

the Sun, so there was plenty of time for intelligent life to evolve. Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had just flown a two-stage

rocket high above the Earth. Clearly we were on our way to the

Moon and the planets. Why shouldn't other, older, wiser beings

be able to travel from their star to ours?

Why not?

This was only a few years after the bombing of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. Maybe the UFO occupants were worried about us, and

sought to help us. Or maybe they wanted to make sure that we

and our nuclear weapons didn't come and bother them. Many

people seemed to see flying saucers - sober pillars of the commu-

nity, police officers, commercial airplane pilots, military person-

nel. And apart from some harumphs and giggles, 1 couldn't find

any counterarguments. How could all these eyewitnesses be

mistaken?

What's more, the saucers had been picked up on radar,

and pictures had been taken of them. You could see the photos in

newspapers and glossy magazines. There were even reports about

crashed flying saucers and little alien bodies with perfect teeth

stiffly languishing in Air Force freezers in the southwest. The prevailing climate was summarized in Life magazine a few

years later, in these words: 'These objects cannot be explained by

present science as natural phenomena - but solely as artificial

devices, created and operated by a high intelligence.' Nothing

'known or projected on Earth could account for the performance

of these devices.'

And yet not a single adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs. I

couldn't figure out why not. Instead they were worried about

Communist China, nuclear weapons, McCarthyism and the rent. 1

wondered if they had their priorities straight. In college, in the early 1950s, 1 began to learn a little about how

science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something

is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human

thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of the

evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported

by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be

not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong. 1 came upon a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions

and the Madness of Crowds written by Charles Mackay in 1841

and still in print. In it could be found the histories of boom-and-

bust economic crazes, including the Mississippi and South Sea

'Bubbles' and the extravagant run on Dutch tulips, scams that

bamboozled the wealthy and titled of many nations; a legion of

alchemists, including the poignant tale of Mr Kelly and Dr Dee

(and Dee's 8-year-old son Arthur, impressed by his desperate

father into communicating with the spirit world by peering into a

crystal); dolorous accounts of unfulfilled prophecy, divination and

fortune-telling; the persecution of witches; haunted houses;

'popular admiration of great thieves'; and much else. Entertain-

ingly portrayed was the Count of St Germain, who dined out on

the cheerful pretension that he was centuries old if not actually

immortal. (When, at dinner, incredulity was expressed at his

recounting of his conversations with Richard the Lion-Heart, he

turned to his man-servant for confirmation. 'You forget, sir,' was

the reply, '1 have been only five hundred years in your service.'

'Ah, true,' said St Germain, 'it was a little before your time.')

A riveting chapter on the Crusades began

Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or

phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love

of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of

imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is

goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined. The edition 1 first read was adorned by a quote from the financier

and adviser of Presidents, Bernard M. Baruch, attesting that

reading Mackay had saved him millions. There had been a long history of spurious claims that magnet-

ism could cure disease. Paracelsus, for example, used a magnet to

Aliens

suck diseases out of the human body and dispose of them into the

Earth. But the key figure was Franz Mesmer. 1 had vaguely

understood the word 'mesmerize' to mean something like hypno-

tize. But my first real knowledge of Mesmer came from Mackay. The Viennese physician had thought that the positions of the

planets influenced human health, and was caught up in the

wonders of electricity and magnetism. He catered to the declining

French nobility on the eve of the Revolution. They crowded into a

darkened room. Dressed in a gold-flowered silk robe and waving

an ivory wand, Mesmer seated his marks around a vat of dilute

sulphuric acid. The Magnetizer and his young male assistants

peered deeply into the eyes of their patients, and rubbed their

bodies. They grasped iron bars protruding into the solution or

held each other's hands. In contagious frenzy, aristocrats -

especially young women - were cured left and right. Mesmer became a sensation. He called it 'animal magnetism'.

For the more conventional medical practitioner, though, this was

bad for business, so French physicians pressured King Louis XVI

to crack down. Mesmer, they said, was a menace to public health. A commission was appointed by the French Academy of Sciences

that included the pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and the

American diplomat and expert on electricity, Benjamin Franklin. They performed the obvious control experiment: when the mag-

netizing effects were performed without the patient's knowledge,

no cures were effected. The cures, if any, the commission

concluded, were all in the mind of the beholder. Mesmer and his

followers were undeterred. One of them later urged the following

attitude of mind for best results:

Forget for a while all of your knowledge of physics ...

Remove from your mind all objections that may occur ...

Never reason for six weeks ...

Be very credulous; be very

persevering; reject all past experience, and do not listen to

reason. Oh, yes, a final piece of advice: 'Never magnetize before inquisi-

tive persons.'

Another eye-opener was Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the Name of Science. Here was Wilhelm Reich uncovering the key

to the structure of galaxies in the energy of the human orgasm;

Andrew Crosse creating microscopic insects electrically from

salts; Hans Horbiger under Nazi aegis announcing that the Milky

Way was made not of stars, but of snowballs; Charles Piazzi

Smyth discovering in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of

Gizeh a world chronology from the Creation to the Second

Coming; L. Ron Hubbard writing a manuscript able to drive its

readers insane (was it ever proofed?

1 wondered); the Bridey

Murphy case, which led millions into concluding that at last there

was serious evidence of reincarnation; Joseph Rhine's 'demon-

strations' of ESP; appendicitis cured by cold water enemas,

bacterial diseases by brass cylinders, and gonorrhoea by green

light - and amid all these accounts of self-deception and charla-

tanry, to my surprise a chapter on UFOs. Of course, merely by writing books cataloguing spurious

beliefs, Mackay and Gardner came across, at least a little, as

grumpy and superior. Was there nothing they accepted?

Still, it

was stunning how many passionately argued and defended claims

to knowledge had amounted to nothing. It slowly dawned on me

that, human fallibility being what it is, there might be other

explanations for flying saucers. I had been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life

from childhood, from long before I ever heard of flying saucers. I've remained fascinated long after my early enthusiasm for UFOs

waned - as I understood more about that remorseless taskmaster

called the scientific method: everything hinges on the matter of

evidence. On so important a question, the evidence must be

airtight. The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have

to be. No witness's say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or

attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what

they're seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren't

there. Essentially all the UFO cases were anecdotes, something

asserted. UFOs were described variously as rapidly moving or

hovering; disc-shaped, cigar-shaped, or ball-shaped; moving

silently or noisily; with a fiery exhaust, or with no exhaust at all;

Aliens

accompanied by flashing lights, or uniformly glowing with a

silvery cast, or self-luminous. The diversity of the observations

hinted that they had no common origin, and that the use of such

terms as UFOs or 'flying saucers' served only to confuse the issue

by grouping generically a set of unrelated phenomena. There was something odd about the very invention of the

phrase 'flying saucer'.

As 1 write this chapter, 1 have before me a

transcript of a 7 April 1950 interview between Edward R. Murrow, the celebrated CBS newsman, and Kenneth Arnold, a

civilian pilot who saw something peculiar near Mount Rainier in

the state of Washington on 24 June 1947 and who in a way coined

the phrase. Arnold claims that the newspapers

did not quote me properly ...

When 1 told the press they

misquoted me, and in the excitement of it all, one newspaper

and another one got it so ensnarled up that nobody knew just

exactly what they were talking about ...

These objects more

or less fluttered like they were, oh, I'd say, boats on very

rough water ...

And when I described how they flew, I said

that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the

water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted

that, too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I

said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion. Arnold thought he saw a train of nine objects, one of which

produced a 'terrific blue flash'.

He concluded they were a new

kind of winged aircraft. Murrow summed up: 'That was an

historic misquote. While Mr Arnold's original explanation has

been forgotten, the term "flying saucer" has become a house-

hold word.' Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers looked and

behaved quite differently from what in only a few years would

be rigidly particularized in the public understanding of the

term: something like a very large and highly manoeuverable

frisbee. Most people honestly reported what they saw, but what they

saw were natural, if unfamiliar, phenomena. Some UFO sightings

turned out to be unconventional aircraft, conventional aircraft

with unusual lighting patterns, high-altitude balloons, luminescent

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

insects, planets seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, opti-

cal mirages and looming, lenticular clouds, ball lightning, sun-

dogs, meteors including green fireballs, and satellites, nosecones,

and rocket boosters spectacularly re-entering the atmosphere.*

Just conceivably, a few might be small comets dissipating in the

upper air. At least some radar reports were due to 'anomalous

propagation' - radio waves travelling curved paths due to atmos-

pheric temperature inversions. Traditionally, they were also

called radar 'angels' - something that seems to be there but isn't. You could have simultaneous visual and radar sightings without

there being any 'there' there. When we notice something strange in the sky, some of us

become excitable and uncritical, bad witnesses. There was the

suspicion that the field attracted rogues and charlatans. Many

UFO photos turned out to be fakes - small models hanging by thin

threads, often photographed in a double exposure. A UFO seen

by thousands of people at a football game turned out to be a

college fraternity prank - a piece of cardboard, some candles and

a thin plastic bag that dry cleaning comes in, all cobbled together

to make a rudimentary hot air balloon. The original crashed saucer account (with the little alien men

and their perfect teeth) turned out to be a straight hoax. Frank

Scully, columnist for Variety, passed on a story told by an oilman

friend; it played a central dramatic role in Scully's best-selling

1950 book. Behind the Flying Saucers. Sixteen dead aliens from

Venus, each three feet high, had been found in one of three

crashed saucers. Booklets with alien pictograms had been recov-

ered. The military was covering up. The implications were pro-

found. The hoaxers were Silas Newton, who said he used radio waves

to prospect for gold and oil, and a mysterious 'Dr Gee' who

turned out to be a Mr GeBauer. Newton produced a gear from the

UFO machinery and flashed close-up saucer photos. But he did

not allow close inspection. When a prepared sceptic, through

* There are so many artificial satellites up there that they're always making

garish displays somewhere in the world. Two or three decay every day in the

Earth's atmosphere, the flaming debris often visible to the naked eye. 70

Aliens

sleight of hand, switched gears and sent the alien artefact away for

analysis, it turned out to be made of kitchen-pot aluminium. The crashed saucer scam was a small interlude in a quarter-

century of frauds by Newton and GeBauer, chiefly selling worth-

less oil leases and prospecting machines. In 1952 they were

arrested by the FBI, and the following year found guilty of

conducting a confidence game. Their exploits, chronicled by the

historian Curtis Peebles, ought to have made UFO enthusiasts

cautious forever about crashed saucer stories from the American

Southwest around 1950.

No such luck. On 4 October 1957, Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting artificial

satellite, was launched. Of 1,178 recorded UFO sightings in

America that year, 701 or 60 per cent - rather than the 25 per cent

you'd expect - occurred between October and December. The

clear implication is that Sputnik and its attendant publicity some-

how generated UFO reports. Perhaps people were looking at the

night sky more and saw more natural phenomena they didn't

understand. Or could it be they looked up more and saw more of

the alien spacecraft that are there all the time?

The idea of flying saucers had dubious antecedents, tracing

back to a conscious hoax entitled I Remember Lemuria!,

written by Richard Shaver, and published in the March 1945

number of the pulp fiction periodical Amazing Stories. It was

exactly the sort of stuff 1 devoured as a child. Lost continents

were settled by space aliens 150,000 years ago, I was informed,

leading to the creation of a race of demonic underground beings

responsible for human tribulations and the existence of evil. The editor of the magazine, Ray Palmer - who was, like the

subterranean beings he warned about, roughly four feet high -

promoted the notion, well before Arnold's sighting, that the

Earth is being visited by disc-shaped alien spacecraft and that

the government is covering up its knowledge and complicity. Merely from the newsstand covers of such magazines, millions

of Americans were exposed to the idea of flying saucers well

before the term was coined. All in all, the alleged evidence seemed thin, most often

devolving into gullibility, hoax, hallucination, misunderstanding

of the natural world, hopes and fears disguised as evidence, and a

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

craving for attention, fame and fortune. Too bad, I remember

thinking. Since then. I've been lucky enough to be involved in sending

spacecraft to other planets to look for life, and in listening for

possible radio signals from alien civilizations, if any, on planets

of distant stars. We've had a few tantalizing moments. But if

the suspected signal isn't available for every grumpy sceptic to

pick over, we cannot call it evidence of extraterrestrial life - no

matter how appealing we find the notion. We'll just have to

wait until, if such a time ever comes, better data are available. We've not yet found compelling evidence for life beyond the

Earth. We're only at the very beginning of the search, though. New and better information might emerge, for all we know,

tomorrow. 1 don't think anyone could be more interested than I am in

whether we're being visited. It would save me so much time and

effort to be able to study extraterrestrial life directly and nearby,

rather than at best indirectly and at great distance. Even if the

aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed - if they're here, I

want to know about them. How modest our expectations are about 'aliens', and how shoddy

the standards of evidence that many of us are willing to accept,

can be found in the saga of the crop circles. Originating in Britain

and spreading throughout the world was something surpassing

strange. Farmers or passers-by would discover circles (and, in later

years, much more complex pictograms) impressed upon fields of

wheat, oats, barley, and rapeseed. Beginning with simple circles

in the middle 1970s, the phenomenon progressed year by year,

until by the late 1980s and early 1990s the countryside, especially

in southern England, was graced by immense geometrical figures,

some the size of football fields, imprinted on cereal grain before

the harvest - circles tangent to circles, or connected by axes,

parallel lines drooping off, 'insectoids'.

Some of the patterns

showed a central circle surrounded by four symmetrically placed

smaller circles - clearly, it was concluded, caused by a flying

saucer and its four landing pods. 72

Aliens

A hoax?

Impossible, almost everyone said. There were hun-

dreds of cases. It was done sometimes in only an hour or two in

the dead of night, and on such a large scale. No footprints of

pranksters leading towards or away from the pictograms could be

found. And besides, what possible motive could there be for a

hoax?

Many less conventional conjectures were offered. People with

some scientific training examined sites, spun arguments, instituted

whole journals devoted to the subject. Were the figures caused by

strange whirlwinds called 'columnar vortices', or even stranger

ones called 'ring vortices'?

What about ball lightning?

Japanese

investigators tried to simulate, in the laboratory and on a small

scale, the plasma physics they thought was working its way on

far-off Wiltshire. But especially as the crop figures became more complex,

meteorological or electrical explanations became more strained. Plainly it was due to UFOs, the aliens communicating to us in a

geometrical language. Or perhaps it was the devil, or the long-

suffering Earth complaining about the depredations visited upon

it by the hand of Man. New Age tourists came in droves. All-night

vigils were undertaken by enthusiasts equipped with audio record-

ers and infrared vision scopes. Print and electronic media from all

over the world tracked the intrepid cerealogists. Best-selling

books on extraterrestrial crop distorters were purchased by a

breathless and admiring public. True, no saucer was actually seen

settling down on the wheat, no geometrical figure was filmed in

the course of being generated. But dowsers authenticated their

alien origin, and channellers made contact with the entities

responsible. 'Orgone energy' was detected within the circles. Questions were asked in Parliament. The royal family called in

for special consultation Lord Solly Zuckerman, former principal

scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence. Ghosts were said to

be involved; also, the Knights Templar of Malta and other secret

societies. Satanists were implicated. The Defence Ministry was

covering the matter up. A few inept and inelegant circles were

judged attempts by the military to throw the public off the track. The tabloid press had a field day. The Daily Mirror hired a farmer

and his son to make five circles in hope of tempting a rival tabloid. 73

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the Daily Express, into reporting the story. The Express was, in

this case at least, not taken in. 'Cerealogical' organizations grew and splintered. Competing

groups sent each other intimidating doggerel. Accusations were

made of incompetence or worse. The number of crop 'circles' rose

into the thousands. The phenomenon spread to the United States,

Canada, Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands. The picto-

grams - especially the more complex of them - began to be quoted

increasingly in arguments for alien visitation. Strained connec-

tions were drawn to the 'Face' on Mars. One scientist of my

acquaintance wrote to me that extremely sophisticated mathemat-

ics was hidden in these figures; they could only be the result of a

superior intelligence. In fact, one matter on which almost all of

the contending cerealogists agreed is that the later crop figures

were much too complex and elegant to be due to mere human

intervention, much less to some ragged and irresponsible hoaxers. Extraterrestrial intelligence was apparent at a glance ...

In 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two blokes from

Southampton, announced they had been making crop figures for

fifteen years. They dreamed it up over stout one evening in their

regular pub, The Percy Hobbes. They had been amused by UFO

reports and thought it might be fun to spoof the UFO gullibles. At

first they flattened the wheat with the heavy steel bar that Bower

used as a security device on the back door of his picture framing

shop. Later on they used planks and ropes. Their first efforts took

only a few minutes. But, being inveterate pranksters as well as

serious artists, the challenge began to grow on them. Gradually,

they designed and executed more and more demanding figures. At first no one seemed to notice. There were no media reports. Their artforms were neglected by the tribe of UFOlogists. They

were on the verge of abandoning crop circles to move on to some

other, more emotionally rewarding hoax. Suddenly crop circles caught on. UFOlogists fell for it hook,

line and sinker. Bower and Chorley were delighted - especially

when scientists and others began to announce their considered

judgement that no merely human intelligence could be responsi-

ble. Carefully they planned each nocturnal excursion, sometimes

Aliens

following meticulous diagrams they had prepared in watercolours. They closely tracked their interpreters. When a local meteorolo-

gist deduced a kind of whirlwind because all of the crops were

deflected downward in a clockwise circle, they confounded him by

making a new figure with an exterior ring flattened counterclock-

wise. Soon other crop figures appeared in southern England and

elsewhere. Copycat hoaxsters had appeared. Bower and Chorley

carved out a responsive message in wheat: 'WEARENO-

TALONE'.

Even this some took to be a genuine extraterrestrial

message (although it would have been better had it read

'YOUARENOTALONE').

Doug and Dave began signing their

artworks with two Ds; even this was attributed to a mysterious

alien purpose. Bower's nocturnal disappearances aroused the

suspicions of his wife Ilene. Only with great difficulty - Ilene

accompanying Dave and Doug one night, and then joining the

credulous in admiring their handiwork next day - was she

convinced that his absences were, in this sense, innocent. Eventually Bower and Chorley tired of the increasingly elabo-

rate prank. While in excellent physical condition, they were both

in their sixties now and a little old for nocturnal commando

operations in the fields of unknown and often unsympathetic

farmers. They may have been annoyed at the fame and fortune

accrued by those who merely photographed their art and

announced aliens to be the artists. And they became worried that

if they delayed much longer, no statement of theirs would be

believed. So they confessed. They demonstrated to reporters how they

made even the most elaborate insectoid patterns. You might think

that never again would it be argued that a sustained hoax over

many years is impossible, and never again would we hear that no

one could possibly be motivated to deceive the gullible into

thinking that aliens exist. But the media paid brief attention. Cerealogists urged them to go easy; after all, they were depriving

many of the pleasure of imagining wondrous happenings. Since then, other crop circle hoaxers have kept at it, but mostly

in a more desultory and less inspired manner. As always, the

confession of the hoax is greatly overshadowed by the sustained

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

initial excitement. Many have heard of the pictograms in cereal

grains and their alleged UFO connection, but draw a blank when

the names of Bower and Chorley or the very idea that the whole

business may be a hoax are raised. An informative expose by the

journalist Jim Schnabel (Round in Circles, 1994), from which

much of my account is taken, is in print. Schnabel joined the

cerealogists early and in the end made a few successful pictograms

himself. (He prefers a garden roller to a wooden plank, and found

that simply stomping grain with one's feet does an acceptable

job.) But Schnabel's work, which one reviewer called 'the funniest

book I've read in ages', had only modest success. Demons sell;

hoaxers are boring and in bad taste. The tenets of scepticism do not require an advanced degree to

master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate. The

whole idea of a democratic application of scepticism is that

everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and con-

structively evaluate claims to knowledge. All science asks is to

employ the same levels of scepticism we use in buying a used car

or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television

commercials. But the tools of scepticism are generally unavailable to the

citizens of our society. They're hardly ever mentioned in the

schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent

practitioner, although scepticism repeatedly sprouts spontane-

ously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics,

economics, advertising and religions (New Age and Old) are

awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who

wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a sceptic might

suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging scepticism. 76

Spoofing and Secrecy

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his

self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the

marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved,

require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the

contravention of probability by the thing testified. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

W hen the mother of celebrity abductee Travis Walton was

informed that a UFO had zapped her son with a bolt of

lightning and then carried him off into space, she replied incuri-

ously, 'Well, that's the way these things happen.' Is it?

To agree that UFOs are in our skies is not committing to very

much: 'UFO' is an abbreviation for 'Unidentified Flying Object'.

It is a more inclusive term than 'flying saucer'.

That there are

things seen which the ordinary observer, or even an occasional

expert, does not understand is inevitable. But why, if we see

something we don't recognize, should we conclude it's a ship from

the stars?

A wide variety of more prosaic possibilities present

themselves. After misapprehended natural events and hoaxes and psycho-

logical aberrations are removed from the data set, is there any

residue of very credible but extremely bizarre cases, especially

ones supported by physical evidence?

Is there a 'signal' hiding in

all that noise?

In my view, no signal has been detected. There are

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

reliably reported cases that are unexotic, and exotic cases that are

unreliable. There are no cases - despite well over a million UFO

reports since 1947 - in which something so strange that it could

only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so reliably that

misapprehension, hoax or hallucination can be reliably excluded. There's still a part of me that says, 'Too bad.'

We're regularly bombarded with extravagant UFO claims

vended in bite-sized packages, but only rarely do we get to hear

about their comeuppance. This isn't hard to understand: which

sells more newspapers and books, which garners higher ratings,

which is more fun to believe, which is more resonant with the

torments of our time - real crashed alien ships, or experienced con

men preying on the gullible; extraterrestrials of immense powers

toying with the human species, or such claims deriving from

human weakness and imperfection?

Over the years I've continued to spend time on the UFO

problem. I receive many letters about it, frequently with detailed

first-hand accounts. Sometimes momentous revelations are prom-

ised if only I will call the letter writer. After I give lectures - on

almost any subject - I often am asked, 'Do you believe in UFOs?'

I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion

that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I'm almost never

asked, 'How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien space-

ships?'

I've found that the going-in attitude of many people is highly

predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is

reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or

hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a

long-standing, high-level government conspiracy to keep the truth

from the rest of us. Gullibility about UFOs thrives on widespread

mistrust of government, arising naturally enough from all those

circumstances where, in the tension between public well-being

and 'national security', the government lies. As government

deceit and conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many

other matters, it's hard to argue that a cover-up on this odd

subject is impossible, that the government would never hide

important information from its citizens. A common explanation

on why there would be a cover-up is to prevent worldwide panic or

Spoofing and Secrecy

erosion of confidence in the government. 1 was a member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board

committee that investigated the Air Force's UFO study - called

'Project Bluebook', but earlier and revealingly called 'Project

Grudge'.

We found the on-going effort to be lackadaisical and

dismissive. In the middle 1960s, 'Project Bluebook' was headquar-

tered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where 'Foreign

Technical Intelligence' (chiefly, understanding what new weapons

the Soviets had) was also based. They had state-of-the-art technol-

ogy in file retrieval. You asked about a given UFO incident and,

somewhat like sweaters and suits at the dry cleaner's today, reams

of files made their way past you, until the engine stopped when

the file you wanted arrived before you. But what was in those files wasn't worth much. For example,

senior citizens reported lights hovering over their small New

Hampshire town for more than an hour, and the case is explained

as a wing of strategic bombers from a nearby Air Force base on a

training exercise. Could the bombers take an hour to pass over the

town?

No. Did the bombers fly over at the time the UFOs were

reported?

No. Can you explain to us, Colonel, how strategic

bombers can be described as 'hovering'?

No. The slipshod Blue-

book investigations played little scientific role, but they did serve

the important bureaucratic purpose of convincing much of the

public that the Air Force was on the job; and that maybe there

was nothing to UFO reports. Of course, this doesn't preclude the possibility that another,

more serious, more scientific study of UFOs was going on

somewhere else, headed, say, by a brigadier general rather than a

lieutenant colonel. I think something like this is even likely, not

because I believe we're being visited by aliens, but because hiding

in the UFO phenomena must be data once considered of signifi-

cant military interest. Certainly if UFOs are as reported - very

fast, very manoeuvrable craft - there is a military duty to find out

how they work. If UFOs were built by the Soviet Union it was the

Air Force's responsibility to protect us. Considering the remark-

able performance characteristics reported, the strategic implica-

tions of Soviet UFOs flagrantly overflying American military and

nuclear facilities were worrisome. If on the other hand the UFOs

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

were built by extraterrestrials, we might copy the technology (if

we could get our hands on just one saucer) and secure a huge

advantage in the Cold War. And even if the military believed that

UFOs were manufactured neither by Soviets nor by extraterres-

trials, there was a good reason to follow the reports closely. In the 1950s balloons were being extensively used by the Air

Force - not just as weather measurement platforms, as promi-

nently advertised, and radar reflectors, as acknowledged, but

also, secretly, as robotic espionage craft, with high-resolution

cameras and signal intelligence devices. While the balloons them-

selves were not very secret, the reconnaissance packages they

carried were. High-altitude balloons can seem saucer-shaped

when seen from the ground. If you misestimate how far away they

are, you can easily imagine them going absurdly fast. Occasion-

ally, propelled by a gust of wind, they make abrupt changes in

direction, uncharacteristic of aircraft and in seeming defiance of

the conservation of momentum - if you don't realize they're

hollow and weigh almost nothing. The most famous of these military balloon systems, widely

tested over the United States in the early 1950s, was called

'Skyhook'.

Other balloon systems and projects were designated

'Mogul', 'Moby Dick', 'Grandson' and 'Genetrix'.

Urner Lidell,

who had some responsibility for these missions at the Naval

Research Laboratory, and who was later a NASA official, once

told me he thought all UFO reports were due to military balloons. While 'all' is going too far, their role has, I think, been insuffi-

ciently appreciated. So far as 1 know there has never been a

systematic and intentional control experiment, in which high-

altitude balloons were secretly released and tracked, and UFO

reports from visual and radar observers noted. In 1956, overflights of the Soviet Union by US reconnaissance

balloons began. At their peak there were dozens of balloon

launches a day. Balloon overflights were then replaced by high-

altitude aircraft, such as the U-2, which in turn were largely

replaced by reconnaissance satellites. Many UFOs dating from

this period were clearly scientific balloons, as are some since. High-altitude balloons are still being launched, including plat-

forms carrying cosmic ray sensors, optical and infrared telescopes,

Spoofing and Secrecy

radio receivers probing the cosmic background radiation, and

other instruments above most of the Earth's atmosphere. A great to-do has been made of one or more alleged crashed

flying saucers near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

Some initial

reports and newspaper photographs of the incident are entirely

consistent with the idea that the debris was a crashed high-altitude

balloon. But other residents of the region - especially decades

later - remember more exotic materials, enigmatic hieroglyphics,

threats by military personnel to witnesses if they didn't keep what

they knew to themselves, and the canonical story that alien

machinery and body parts were packed into an airplane and flown

to the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base. Some, but not all, of the recovered alien body stories are

associated with this incident. Philip Klass, a long-time and dedicated UFO sceptic, has

uncovered a subsequently declassified letter dated 27 July 1948, a

year after the Roswell 'incident', from Major General C. B. Cabell, then Director of Intelligence for the US Air Force (and

later, as a CIA official, a major figure in the abortive US invasion

of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs).

Cabell was inquiring of those who

reported to him on what UFOs might be. He hadn't a clue. In an

11 October 1948 summary response, explicitly including informa-

tion in the possession of the Air Materiel Command, we find the

Director of Intelligence being told that nobody else in the Air

Force had a clue either. This makes it unlikely that UFO

fragments and occupants had made their way to Wright-Patterson

the year before. What the Air Force was mostly worried about was that UFOs

were Russian. Why Russians would be testing flying saucers over

the United States was a puzzle to which the following four answers

were proposed: '(1) To negate US confidence in the atom bomb as

the most advanced and decisive weapon in warfare. (2) To

perform photographic reconnaissance missions. (3) To test US air

defenses. (4) To conduct familiarization flights [for strategic

bombers] over US territory.' We now know that UFOs neither

were nor are Russian, and however dedicated the Soviet interest

may have been to objectives (1) through (4), flying saucers

weren't how they pursued these objectives. 81

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Much of the evidence regarding the Roswell 'incident' seems to

point to a cluster of high-altitude classified balloons, perhaps

launched from nearby Almagordo Army Air Field or White Sands

Proving Ground, that crashed near Roswell, the debris of secret

instruments hurriedly collected by earnest military personnel,

early press reports announcing that it was a spaceship from

another planet ('RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in

Roswell Region'), diverse recollections simmering over the years,

and memories refreshed by the opportunity for a little fame and

fortune. (Two UFO museums in Roswell are leading tourist

stops.)

A 1994 report ordered by the Secretary of the Air Force and the

Department of Defense in response to prodding from a New

Mexico Congressman identifies the Roswell debris as remnants of

a long-range, highly secret, balloon-borne low-frequency acoustic

detection system called 'Project Mogul' - an attempt to sense

Soviet nuclear weapons explosions at tropopause altitudes. The

Air Force investigators, rummaging comprehensively through the

secret fdes of 1947, found no evidence of heightened message

traffic:

There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a

higher tempo of operational activity reported that would be

logically generated if an alien craft, whose intentions were

unknown, entered U. S. territory ...

The records indicate

that none of this happened (or if it did, it was controlled by a

security system so efficient and tight that no one, U. S. or

otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system

had been in effect at the time, it would have also been used to

protect our atomic secrets from the Soviets, which history has

shown obviously was not the case.)

The radar targets carried by the balloons were partly manufac-

tured by novelty and toy companies in New York, whose inven-

tory of decorative icons seems to have been remembered many

years later as alien hieroglyphics. The heyday of UFOs corresponds to the time when the main

delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons was being switched from

Spoofing and Secrecy

aircraft to missiles. An early and important technical problem

concerned re-entry - returning a nuclear-armed nosecone through

the bulk of the Earth's atmosphere without burning it up in the

process (as small asteroids and comets are destroyed in their

passage through the upper air).

Certain materials, nosecone

geometries, and angles of entry are better than others. Observa-

tions of re-entry (or the more spectacular launches) could very

well reveal US progress in this vital strategic technology or, worse,

inefficiencies in the design; such observations might suggest what

defensive measures an adversary should take. Understandably,

the subject was considered highly sensitive. Inevitably there must have been cases in which military person-

nel were told not to talk about what they had seen, or where

seemingly innocuous sightings were suddenly classified top secret

with severely constrained need-to-know criteria. Air Force offic-

ers and civilian scientists thinking back about it in later years

might very well conclude that the government had engineered a

UFO cover-up. If nosecones are judged UFOs, the charge is a fail-

one. Consider spoofing. In the strategic confrontation between the

United States and the Soviet Union, the adequacy of air defences

was a vital issue. It was item (3) on General Cabell's list. If you

could find a weakness, it might be the key to 'victory' in an all-out

nuclear war. The only sure way to test your adversary's defences is

to fly an aircraft over their borders and see how long it takes for

them to notice. The United States did this routinely to test Soviet

air defences. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had state-of-the-art

radar defence systems covering its west and east coasts, and

especially its northern approaches (over which a Soviet bomber or

missile attack would most likely come).

But there was a soft

underbelly - no significant early warning system to detect the

geographically much more taxing southern approach. This is of

course information vital for a potential adversary. It immediately

suggests a spoof: one or more of the adversary's high-performance

aircraft zoom out of the Caribbean, let's say, into US airspace,

penetrating, let's say, a few hundred miles up the Mississippi

River until a US air defence radar locks on. Then the intruders

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

hightail it out of there. (Or, as a control experiment, a unit of US

high-performance aircraft is sequestered and sent in unannounced

sorties to determine how porous American air defences are.) In

such a case, there may be combined visual and radar sightings by

military and civilian observers and large numbers of independent

reports. What is reported corresponds to no known aircraft. The

Air Force and civilian aviation authorities truthfully state that

none of their aircraft was responsible. Even if they've been urging

Congress to fund a southern Early Warning System, the Air Force

is unlikely to admit that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to New

Orleans, much less Memphis, before anybody caught on. Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level

technical investigating team, Air Force and civilian observers told

to keep their mouths shut, and not just the appearance but the

reality of suppression of the data. Again, this conspiracy of silence

need have nothing to do with alien spacecraft. Even decades later,

there are bureaucratic reasons for the Department of Defense to

be close-mouthed about such embarrassments. There is a poten-

tial conflict of interest between parochial concerns of the Depart-

ment of Defense and the solution of the UFO enigma. In addition, something that both the Central Intelligence

Agency and the US Air Force worried about then was UFOs as a

means of clogging communication channels in a national crisis,

and confusing visual and radar sightings of enemy aircraft - a

signal-to-noise problem that in a way is the flip side of spoofing. In view of all this, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that at least

some UFO reports and analyses, and perhaps voluminous files,

have been made inaccessible to the public which pays the bills. The Cold War is over, the missile and balloon technology is

largely obsolete or widely available, and those who would be

embarrassed are no longer on active duty. The worst that would

happen, from the military's point of view, is that there would be

one more acknowledged instance of the American public being

misled or lied to in the interest of national security. It's time for

the fdes to be declassified and made generally available. Another instructive intersection of the conspiracy tempera-

ment and the secrecy culture concerns the National Security

Agency. This organization monitors the telephone, radio and

Spoofing and Secrecy

other communications of both friends and adversaries of the

United States. Surreptitiously, it reads the world's mail. Its daily

intercept traffic is huge. In times of tension, vast arrays ofNSA

personnel fluent in the relevant languages are sitting with ear-

phones, monitoring in real time everything from encrypted com-

mands from the target nation's General Staff to pillow talk. For

other material there are key words by which computers cull out

for human attention specific messages or conversations of current

urgent concern. Everything is stored, so that retrospectively it is

possible to go back to the magnetic tapes and to trace the first

appearance of a codeword, say, or command responsibility in a

crisis. Some of the intercepts are made from listening posts in

nearby countries (Turkey for Russia, India for China), from

aircraft and ships patrolling nearby, or from ferret satellites in

Earth orbit. There is a continuing dance of measures and counter-

measures between the NSA and the security services of other

nations, who understandably do not wish to be listened in on. Now add to this already heady mix the Freedom of Information

Act (FOIA).

A request is made to the NSA for all information it

has available on UFOs. It is required by law to be responsive, but

of course without revealing 'methods and sources'.

NSA also feels

a deep obligation not to alert other nations, friends or foes, in an

obtrusive and politically embarrassing way, to its activities. So a

more or less typical intercept released by NSA in response to an

FOIA request will be a third of a page blacked out, a fragment of

a line saying 'reported a UFO at low altitude', followed by

two-thirds of a page blacked out. The NSA's position is that

releasing the rest of the page would potentially compromise

sources and methods, or at least alert the nation in question to

how readily its aviation radio traffic is being intercepted. (If NSA

released surrounding, seemingly bland, aircraft-to-tower trans-

missions, it would then be possible for the nation in question to

recognize that its military air traffic control dialogues are being

monitored and to switch to communications means - frequency

hopping, for example - that make NSA intercepts more difficult.)

But UFO conspiracy theorists receiving, in response to their

FOIA requests, dozens of pages of material, almost all of it

blacked out, understandably deduce that the NSA possesses

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

extensive information on UFOs and is part of a conspiracy of

silence. In talking not for attribution with NS A officials, I am told the

following story: typical intercepts are of military and civilian

aircraft radioing that they see a UFO, by which they mean an

unidentified object in the surrounding airspace. It may even be

US aircraft on reconnaissance or spoofing missions. In most cases

it is something much more ordinary, and the clarification is also

reported on later NSA intercepts. Similar logic can be used to make NSA seem a part of any

conspiracy. For example, they say, a response was required to an

FOIA request on what the NSA knew about the singer Elvis

Presley. (Apparitions of Mr Presley and resulting miraculous

cures have been reported.) Well, the NSA knew a few things. For

example, a report on the economic health of a certain nation

reported how many Elvis Presley tapes and CDs were sold there. This information also was supplied as a few lines of clear in a vast

ocean of censorship black. Was NSA engaged in an Elvis Presley

cover-up?

While of course I have not personally investigated

NSA's UFO-related traffic, their story seems to me very plausible. If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of

aliens from us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the

military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can

push for declassification of relevant information from decades

ago, of which the July 1994 Air Force report on the 'Roswell

Incident' is a good example. You can catch a flavour of the paranoid style of many UFOlo-

gists, as well as a naivete about the secrecy culture, in a book by a

former New York Times reporter, Howard Blum (Oat There,

Simon and Schuster, 1990):

I could not, no matter how inventively I tried, avoid slamming

into sudden dead ends. The whole story was always lingering,

deliberately, I came to believe, just out of my grasp. Why?

This was the single, practical, impossible question that was

balanced ominously on the tall peak of my mounting suspi-

cions. Why were all these official spokesmen and institutions

Spoofing and Secrecy

doing their collusive best to hinder and obstruct my efforts?

Why were stories true one day, and false the next?

Why all

the tense, unyielding secretiveness?

Why were military intel-

ligence agents spreading disinformation, driving UFO believ-

ers mad?

What had the government found out there?

What

was it trying to hide?

Of course there's resistance. Some information is classified legiti-

mately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in

the national interest. Further, military, political and intelligence

communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of

silencing critics and evading responsibility for incompetence or

worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the

national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass

of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made

secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply

incompatible with democracy and with science. One of the most provocative purported intersections of UFOs and

secrecy are the so-called MJ-12 documents. In late 1984, so the story

goes, an envelope containing a canister of exposed but undeveloped

film was thrust into the home mail slot of a film producer, Jaime

Shandera, interested in UFOs and government cover-up, remark-

ably, just as he was about to go out and have lunch with the author of

a book on the alleged events in Roswell, New Mexico. When

developed, it 'proved to be' page after page of a highly classified

'eyes only' executive order dated 24 September 1947 in which

President Harry S. Truman seemingly established a committee of

twelve scientists and government officials to examine a set of crashed

flying saucers and little alien bodies. The membership of the MJ-12

committee is remarkable because these are just the military, intelli-

gence, science and engineering people who might have been called to

investigate such crashes if they had occurred. In the MJ-12 docu-

ments there are tantalizing references to appendices about the nature

of the aliens, the technology of their ships and so on, but the

appendices were not included in the mysterious film. The Air Force says that the document is bogus. The UFO

expert Philip J. Klass and others find lexicographic and typo-

graphic inconsistencies that suggest that the whole thing is a hoax. 87

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Those who purchase fine art are concerned about the provenance

of their painting - that is, who owned it most recently and who

before that ...

and so on all the way back to the original artist. If

there are breaks in the chain, if a 300-year-old painting can be

tracked back only sixty years and then we have no idea in what

home or museum it was hanging, the forgery warning flags go up. Because the rewards of forgery in fine art are high, collectors must

be very cautious. Where the MJ-12 documents are most vulner-

able and suspect is exactly on this question of provenance - the

evidence miraculously dropped on a doorstep like something out

of a fairy story, perhaps 'The Shoemaker and the Elves'.

There are many cases in human history of a similar character -

where a document of dubious provenance suddenly appears

carrying information of great import which strongly supports the

case of those who have made the discovery. After careful and in

some cases courageous investigation the document is proved to be

a hoax. There is no difficulty in understanding the motivation of

the hoaxers. A more or less typical example is the book of

Deuteronomy - discovered hidden in the Temple in Jerusalem by

King Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reforma-

tion struggle, found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views. Another case is what is called the Donation of Constantine. Constantine the Great is the Emperor who made Christianity the

official religion of the Roman Empire. The city of Constantinople

(now Istanbul), for over a thousand years the capital of the

Eastern Roman Empire, was named after him. He died in the year

335.

In the ninth century, references to the Donation of Constan-

tine suddenly appeared in Christian writings; in it Constantine

wills to his contemporary, Pope Sylvester I, the entire Western

Roman Empire, including Rome. This little gift, so the story

went, was partly in gratitude for Sylvester's cure of Constantine's

leprosy. By the eleventh century, popes were regularly referring

to the Donation of Constantine to justify their claims to be not

only the ecclesiastical but also the secular rulers of central Italy. Through the Middle Ages the Donation was judged genuine both

by those who supported and by those who opposed the temporal

claims of the Church. Lorenzo of Valla was one of the polymaths of the Italian

Spoofing and Secrecy

Renaissance. A controversialist, crusty, critical, arrogant, a ped-

ant, he was attacked by his contemporaries for sacrilege, impu-

dence, temerity and presumption, among other imperfections. After he concluded that the Apostles' Creed could not on

grammatical grounds have actually been written by the Twelve

Apostles, the Inquisition declared him a heretic, and only the

intervention of his patron, Alfonso, King of Naples, prevented his

immolation. Undeterred, in 1440, he published a treatise demon-

strating that the Donation of Constantine is a crude forgery. The

language in which it was written was to fourth century court Latin

as Cockney was to the King's English. Because of Lorenzo of

Valla, the Roman Catholic Church no longer presses its claim to

rule European nations because of the Donation of Constantine. This work, whose provenance has a five-century hole in it, is

generally understood to have been forged by a cleric attached to

the Church's curia around the time of Charlemagne, when the

papacy (and especially Pope Adrian I) was arguing for unification

of church and state. Assuming they both belong to the same category, the MJ-12

documents are a cleverer hoax than the Donation of Constantine. But on matters of provenance, vested interest and lexicographic

inconsistencies, they have much in common. A cover-up to keep knowledge of extraterrestrial life or alien

abductions almost wholly secret for forty-five years, with hun-

dreds if not thousands of government employees privy to it, is a

remarkable notion. Certainly, government secrets are routinely

kept, even secrets of substantial general interest. But the ostensi-

ble point of such secrecy is to protect the country and its citizens. Here, though, it's different. The alleged conspiracy of those with

security clearances is to keep from the citizens knowledge of a

continuing alien assault on the human species. If extraterrestrials

really were abducting millions of us, it would be much more than a

matter of national security. It would affect the security of all

human beings everywhere on Earth. Given such stakes, is it

plausible that no one with real knowledge and evidence, in nearly

200 nations, would blow the whistle, speak out and side with the

humans rather than the aliens?

Since the end of the Cold War NASA has been flailing about,

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

trying to find missions that justify its existence - particularly a

good reason for humans in space. If the Earth were being visited

daily by hostile aliens, wouldn't NASA leap on this opportunity to

augment its funding?

And if an alien invasion were in progress,

why would the Air Force, traditionally led by pilots, step back

from manned spaceflight and launch all its payloads on unmanned

boosters?

Consider the former Strategic Defense Initiative Organization,

in charge of 'Star Wars'.

It's fallen on hard times now, particularly

its objective ofbasing defences in space. Its name and perspective

have been demoted. It's the Ballistic Missile Defense Organiza-

tion these days. It no longer even reports directly to the Secretary

of Defense. The inability of such technology to protect the United

States against a massive attack by nuclear-armed missiles is

manifest. But wouldn't we want at least to attempt deployment of

defences in space if we were facing an alien invasion?

The Department of Defense, like similar ministries in every

nation, thrives on enemies, real or imagined. It is implausible in

the extreme that the existence of such an adversary would be

suppressed by the very organization that would most benefit from

its presence. The entire post-Cold War posture of the military and

civilian space programmes of the United States (and other

nations) speaks powerfully against the idea that there are aliens

among us - unless, of course, the news is also being kept from

those who plan the national defence. Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value,

there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of

hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to

examine the evidence, and 'unscientific' even to contemplate the

issue. 1 once helped to organize a public debate at the annual

meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the propo-

sition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distin-

guished physicist, whose judgement in many other matters I

respected, threatened to set the Vice President of the United

States on me if I persisted in this madness. (Nevertheless, the

debate was held and published, the issues were a little better

Spoofing and Secrecy

clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew.)

A 1969 study by the National Academy of Sciences, while

recognizing that there are reports 'not easily explained', con-

cluded that 'the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis

of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings'.

Think of how

many other 'explanations' there might be: time travellers; demons

from witchland; tourists from another dimension - like Mr

Mxyztplk (or was it Mxyzptlk?

I always forget) from the land of

Zrfffin the Fifth Dimension in the old Superman comic books; the

souls of the dead; or a 'noncartesian' phenomenon that doesn't

obey the rules of science or even of logic. Each of these 'explana-

tions' has in fact been seriously proffered. 'Least likely' is really

saying something. This rhetorical excess is an index of how

distasteful the whole subject has become to many scientists. It's telling that emotions can run so high on a matter about

which we really know so little. This is especially true of the more

recent flurry of alien abduction reports. After all, if true, either

hypothesis - invasion by sexually manipulative extraterrestrials or

an epidemic of hallucinations - teaches us something we certainly

ought to know about. Maybe the reason for strong feelings is that

both alternatives have such unpleasant implications. Aurora

The number of reports and their consistency suggest that

there may be some basis for these sightings other than

hallucinogenic drugs. Mystery Aircraft

report, Federation of American Scientists

20 August, 1992

Aurora is a high-altitude, extremely secret American

/ 1 reconnaissance aircraft, a successor to the U-2 and the

SR-71 Blackbird. It either exists or it doesn't. By 1993, there

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

were reports by observers near California's Edwards Air

Force Base and Groom Lake, Nevada, and particularly a

region of Groom Lake called Area 51 where experimental

aircraft for the Department of Defense are tested, that

seemed by and large mutually consistent. Confirming reports

were filed from all over the world. Unlike its predecessors,

the aircraft is said to be hypersonic, to travel much faster,

perhaps six to eight times faster, than the speed of sound. It

leaves an odd contrail described as 'donuts-on-a-rope'.

Per-

haps it is also a means of launching small secret satellites into

orbit, developed, it is speculated, after the Challenger disas-

ter indicated the shuttle's episodic unreliability for defence

payloads. But the CIA 'swears up and down there's no such

programme', says US Senator and former astronaut John

Glenn. The principal designer of some of the most secret US

aircraft says the same thing. A Secretary of the Air Force has

vehemently denied the existence of such an airplane, or any

programme to build one, in the US Air Force or anywhere

else. Would he lie?

'We have looked into all such sightings, as

we have for UFO reports,' says an Air Force spokesman, in

perhaps carefully chosen words, 'and we cannot explain

them.' Meanwhile, in April 1995 the Air Force seized 4,000

more acres near Area 51.

The area to which public access is

denied is growing. Consider then the two possibilities: that Aurora exists, and

that it does not. If it exists, it's striking that an official

cover-up of its very existence has been attempted, that

secrecy could be so effective, and that the aircraft could be

tested or refuelled all over the world without a single

photograph of it or any other hard evidence being published. On the other hand, if Aurora does not exist, it's striking that a

myth has been propagated so vigorously and gone so far. Why should insistent official denials have carried so little

weight?

Could the very existence of a designation -Aurora in

this case - serve to pin a common label on a range of diverse

phenomena?

Either way, Aurora seems relevant to UFOs. 92

Hallucinations

[A]s children tremble and fear everything in the blind

darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more

to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in

terror ...

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

(c. 60 BC)

A dvertisers must know their audiences. It's a simple matter of

product and corporate survival. So we can learn how com-

mercial, free-enterprise America views UFO buffs by examining

the advertisements in magazines devoted to UFOs. Here are some

(entirely typical) ad headlines from an issue of UFO Universe:

• Senior Research Scientist Discovers 2,000-Year-Old Secret to

Wealth, Power, and Romantic Love. • Classified!

Above Top Secret. The Most Sensational Govern-

ment Conspiracy of Our Time Is Finally Revealed to the World

by a Retired Military Officer. • What Is Your 'Special Mission' While on Earth?

The Cosmic

Awakening of Light Workers, Walk-Ins, & All Star-Born

Representatives Has Begun!

• This Is What You Have Been Waiting For. 24 Superb, Incred-

ible Life-Improving UFO Seals of the Spirits. • I Got a Girl. Do You?

Stop Missing Out!

Get Girls Now!

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

• Subscribe Today to the Most Amazing Magazine in the Uni-

verse. • Bring Miraculous Good Luck, Love, and Money into Your

Life!

These Powers Have Worked for Centuries!

They Can

Work for You. • Amazing Psychic Research Breakthrough. It Takes Only 5

Minutes to Prove that Psychic Magic Powers Really Work!

• Have You the Courage to Be Lucky, Loved and Rich?

Guaranteed Good Fortune Will Come Your Way!

Get

Everything You Want with the Most Powerful Talismans in

the World. • Men in Black: Government Agents or Aliens?

• Increase the Power of Gemstones, Charms, Seals and Symbols. Improve the Effectiveness of Everything You Do. Magnify

Your Mind Power and Abilities with the Mind Power MAGNI-

FIER. • The Famous Money Magnet: Would You Like More Money?

• Testament of Lael, Sacred Scriptures of a Lost Civilization. • A New Book by 'Commander X' from Inner Light: The

Controllers, the Hidden Rulers of Earth Identified. We Are the

Property of an Alien Intelligence!

What is the common thread that binds these ads together?

Not

UFOs. Surely it's the expectation of unlimited audience gullibil-

ity. That's why they're placed in UFO magazines - because by and

large the very act of buying such a magazine so categorizes the

reader. Doubtless, there are moderately sceptical and hilly

rational purchasers of these periodicals who are demeaned by

such expectations of advertisers and editors. But if they're right

even about the bulk of their readers, what might it mean for the

alien abduction paradigm?

Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in 'contact'

with extraterrestrials. I am invited to 'ask them anything'.

And

so over the years I've prepared a little list of questions. The

extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things

like, 'Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem'.

Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what

these are because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last

Hallucinations

Theorem. So 1 write out the simple equation with the exponents. 1

never get an answer. On the other hand, if 1 ask something like

'Should we be good?' 1 almost always get an answer. Anything

vague, especially involving conventional moral judgements, these

aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything

specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know

anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence.*

Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer

questions. In the good old days before the alien abduction paradigm,

people taken aboard UFOs were offered, so they reported,

edifying lectures on the dangers of nuclear war. Nowadays, when

such instruction is given, the extraterrestrials seem fixated on

environmental degradation and AIDS. How is it, 1 ask myself,

that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent

concerns on this planet?

Why not an incidental warning about

CFCs and ozone depletion in the 1950s, or about the HIV virus in

the 1970s, when it might really have done some good?

Why not

alert us now to some public health or environmental threat we

haven't yet figured out?

Can it be that aliens know only as much as

those who report their presence?

And if one of the chief purposes

of alien visitations is admonitions about global dangers, why tell it

only to a few people whose accounts are suspect anyway?

Why not

take over the television networks for a night, or appear with vivid

cautionary audiovisuals before the United Nations Security Coun-

cil?

Surely this is not too difficult for those who wing across the

light years. The earliest commercially successful UFO 'contactee' was George

Adamski. He operated a tiny restaurant at the foot of California's

Mount Palomar, and set up a small telescope out back. At the

summit of the mountain was the largest telescope on Earth, the

* It's a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows

the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as

such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other

than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best

responses in 'Ten Questions to Ask an Alien'.

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

200-inch reflector of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and

the California Institute of Technology. Adamski styled himself

Professor Adamski of Mount Palomar Obsen’atoiy. He published

a book - it caused quite a sensation, I recall - in which he

described how in the desert nearby he had encountered nice-

looking aliens with long blond hair and, if I remember correctly,

white robes who warned Adamski about the dangers of nuclear

war. They hailed from the planet Venus (whose 900° Fahrenheit

surface temperature we can now recognize as a barrier to Adam-

ski's credibility).

In person, he was utterly convincing. The Air

Force officer nominally in charge of UFO investigations at the

time described Adamski in these words:

To look at the man and to listen to his story you had an

immediate urge to believe him. Maybe it was his appearance. He was dressed in well worn, but neat, overalls. He had

slightly graying hair and the most honest pair of eyes I've ever

seen. Adamski's star slowly faded as he aged, but he self-published

other books and was a long-standing fixture at conventions of

flying saucer 'believers'.

The first alien abduction story in the modern genre was that of

Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple, she a social

worker and he a Post Office employee. During a late-night drive

in 1961 through the White Mountains, Betty spotted a bright,

initially star-like UFO that seemed to follow them. Because

Barney feared it might harm them, they left the main highway for

narrow mountain roads, arriving home two hours later than they'd

expected. The experience prompted Betty to read a book that

described UFOs as spaceships from other worlds; their occupants

were little men who sometimes abducted humans. Soon after, she experienced a terrifying, repetitive nightmare in

which she and Barney were abducted and taken aboard the UFO. Barney overheard her describing this dream to friends,

co-workers and volunteer UFO investigators. (It's curious that

Betty didn't discuss it with her husband directly.) By a week or so

after the experience, they were describing a 'pancake'-like UFO

Hallucinations

with uniformed figures seen through the craft's transparent windows. Several years later, Barney's psychiatrist referred him to a

Boston hypnotherapist, Benjamin Simon, MD. Betty came to be

hypnotized as well. Under hypnosis they separately filled in

details of what had happened during the 'missing' two hours: they

watched the UFO land on the highway and were taken, partly

immobilized, inside the craft where short, grey, humanoid crea-

tures with long noses (a detail discordant with the current

paradigm) subjected them to unconventional medical examina-

tions, including a needle in her navel (before amniocentesis had

been invented on Earth).

There are those who now believe that

eggs were taken from Betty's ovaries and sperm from Barney,

although that isn't part of the original story.* The captain showed

Betty a map of interstellar space with the ship's routes marked. Martin S. Kottmeyer has shown that many of the motifs in the

Hills' account can be found in a 1953 motion picture, Invaders

from Mars. And Barney's story of what the aliens looked like,

especially their enormous eyes, emerged in a hypnosis session just

twelve days after the airing of an episode of the television series

'The Outer Limits' in which such an alien was portrayed. The Hill case was widely discussed. It was made into a 1975 TV

movie that introduced the idea that short, grey alien abductors are

among us into the psyches of millions of people. But even the few

scientists of the time who thought that some UFOs might in fact

be alien spaceships were wary. The alleged encounter was con-

spicuous by its absence from the list of suggestive UFO cases

compiled by James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona atmos-

pheric physicist. In general, those scientists who have taken UFOs

seriously have tended to keep the alien abduction accounts at

arm's length, while those who take alien abductions at face value

see little reason to analyse mere lights in the sky. McDonald's view on UFOs was based, he said, not on irrefuta-

ble evidence, but was a conclusion of last resort: all the alternative

* In more recent times, Ms Hill has written that in real abductions, 'no sexual

interest is shown. However, frequently they help themselves to some of [the

abductee's] belongings, such as fishing rods, jewelry of different types,

eyeglasses or a cup of laundry soap.'

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

explanations seemed to him even less credible. In the middle

1960s 1 arranged for McDonald to present his best cases in a

private meeting with leading physicists and astronomers who had

not before staked a claim on the UFO issue. Not only did he fail to

convince them that we were being visited by extraterrestrials; he

failed even to excite their interest. And this was a group with a

very high wonder quotient. It was simply that where McDonald

saw aliens, they saw much more prosaic explanations. 1 was glad to have an opportunity to spend several hours with

Mr and Mrs Hill and with Dr Simon. There was no mistaking the

earnestness and sincerity of Betty and Barney, and their mixed

feelings about becoming public figures under such odd and

awkward circumstances. With the Hills' permission. Dr Simon

played for me (and, at my invitation, McDonald) some of the

audiotapes of their sessions under hypnosis. By far my most

striking impression was the absolute terror in Barney's voice as he

described - 're-lived' would be a better word - the encounter. Dr Simon, while a leading proponent of the virtues of hypnosis

in war and peace, had not been caught up in the public frenzy

about UFOs. He shared handsomely in the royalties of John

Fuller's best-seller, Interrupted Journey, about the Hills' experi-

ence. If Dr Simon had pronounced their account authentic, the

sales of the book might have gone through the roof and his own

financial reward been considerably augmented. But he didn't. He

also instantly rejected the notion that they were lying, or, as

suggested by another psychiatrist, that this was a folie a deux - a

shared delusion in which, generally, the submissive partner goes

along with the delusion of the dominant partner. So what's left?

The Hills, said their psychotherapist, had experienced a species of

'dream'.

Together. There may very well be more than one source of alien abduction

accounts, just as there are for UFO sightings. Let's run through

some of the possibilities. In 1894 The International Census of Waking Hallucinations was

published in London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have

shown that 10 to 25 per cent of ordinary, functioning people have

experienced, at least once in their lifetimes, a vivid hallucination. 98

Hallucinations

hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form when there's no one there. More rarely, people sense a haunting aroma, or hear music, or

receive a revelation that arrives independent of the senses. In some

cases these become transforming personal events or profound reli-

gious experiences. Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the

wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred. Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother

or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name. Of

course they called to me often during my life with them - to do a

chore, to remind me of a responsibility, to come to dinner, to

engage in conversation, to hear about an event of the day. I still

miss them so much that it doesn't seem at all strange that my brain

will occasionally retrieve a lucid recollection of their voices. Such hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people under

perfectly ordinary circumstances. Hallucinations can also be elic-

ited: by a campfire at night, or under emotional stress, or during

epileptic seizures or migraine headaches or high fever, or by

prolonged fasting or sleeplessness* or sensory deprivation (for

example, in solitary confinement), or through hallucinogens such

as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or hashish. (Delirium tremens, the

dreaded alcohol-induced DTs, is one well-known manifestation of

a withdrawal syndrome from alcoholism.) There are also mol-

ecules, such as the phenothiazines (thorazine, for example), that

make hallucinations go away. It is very likely that the normal

human body generates substances - perhaps including the

morphine-like small brain proteins called endorphins - that cause

hallucinations, and others that suppress them. Such celebrated

* Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation

standing for rapid eye movement. (Under the closed eyelids the eyes move,

perhaps following the action in the dream, or perhaps randomly.) The REM

state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been

performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever the REM state

emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each

night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a

little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from

dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a

particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is

capable of hallucinations. 99

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

(and unhysterical) explorers as Admiral Richard Byrd, Captain

Joshua Slocum and Sir Ernest Shackleton all experienced vivid

hallucinations when coping with unusual isolation and loneliness. Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallu-

cinations feel real. They are sought out in many cultures and

considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment. Among the Native

Americans of the Western Plains, for example, or many indig-

enous Siberian cultures, a young man's future was foreshadowed

by the nature of the hallucination he experienced after a successful

'vision quest'; its meaning was discussed with great seriousness

among the elders and shamans of the tribe. There are countless

instances in the world's religions where patriarchs, prophets or

saviours repair themselves to desert or mountain and, assisted by

hunger and sensory deprivation, encounter gods or demons. Psychedelic-induced religious experiences were a hallmark of the

western youth culture of the 1960s. The experience, however

brought about, is often described respectfully by words such as

'transcendent', 'numinous', 'sacred' and 'holy'.

Hallucinations are common. If you have one, it doesn't mean

you're crazy. The anthropological literature is replete with hallu-

cination ethnopsychiatry, REM dreams and possession trances,

which have many common elements transculturally and across the

ages. The hallucinations are routinely interpreted as possession by

good or evil spirits. The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre

goes so far as to argue that 'a surprisingly good case could be made

that much of culture is hallucination' and that 'the whole intent

and function of ritual appears to be ...

[a] group wish to

hallucinate reality'.

Here is a description of hallucinations as a signal-to-noise

problem by Louis J. West, former medical director of the Neu-

ropsychiatric Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is taken from the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia

Britannica:

[I]magine a man standing at a closed glass window opposite

his fireplace, looking out at his garden in the sunset. He is so

absorbed by the view of the outside world that he fails to

visualize the interior of the room at all. As it becomes darker

100

Hallucinations

outside, however, images of the objects in the room behind

him can be seen reflected dimly in the window glass. For a

time he may see either the garden (if he gazes into the

distance) or the reflection of the room's interior (if he focuses

on the glass a few inches from his face).

Night falls, but the

fire still burns brightly in the fireplace and illuminates the

room. The watcher now sees in the glass a vivid reflection of

the interior of the room behind him, which appears to be

outside the window. This illusion becomes dimmer as the fire

dies down, and, finally, when it is dark both outside and

within, nothing more is seen. If the fire flares up from time to

time, the visions in the glass reappear. In an analogous way, hallucinatory experiences such as those

of normal dreams occur when the 'daylight' (sensory input) is

reduced while the 'interior illumination' (general level of brain

arousal) remains 'bright', and images originating within the

'rooms' of our brains maybe perceived (hallucinated) as though

they came from outside the 'windows' of our senses. Another analogy might be that dreams, like the stars, are

shining all the time. Though the stars are not often seen by day,

since the sun shines too brightly, if, during the day, there is an

eclipse of the sun, or if a viewer chooses to be watchful awhile

after sunset or awhile before sunrise, or if he is awakened from

time to time on a clear night to look at the sky, then the stars,

like dreams, though often forgotten, may always be seen. A more brain-related concept is that of a continuous

information-processing activity (a kind of 'preconscious

stream') that is influenced continually by both conscious and

unconscious forces and that constitutes the potential supply

of dream content. The dream is an experience during which,

for a few minutes, the individual has some awareness of the

stream of data being processed. Hallucinations in the waking

state also would involve the same phenomenon, produced by

a somewhat different set of psychological or physiological

circumstances ...

It appears that all human behaviour and experience (normal

as well as abnormal) is well attended by illusory and hallucina-

tory phenomena. While the relationship of these phenomena to

101

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

mental illness has been well documented, their role in everyday

life has perhaps not been considered enough. Greater under-

standing of illusions and hallucinations among normal people

may provide explanations for experiences otherwise relegated

to the uncanny, 'extrasensory', or supernatural. We would surely be missing something important about our own

nature if we refused to face up to the fact that hallucinations are

part of being human. However, none of this makes hallucinations

part of an external rather than an internal reality. Five to ten per

cent of us are extremely suggestible, able to move at a command

into a deep hypnotic trance. Roughly ten per cent of Americans

report having seen one or more ghosts. This is more than the

number who allegedly remember being abducted by aliens, about

the same as the number who've reported seeing one or more

UFOs, and less than the number who in the last week of Richard

Nixon's Presidency, before he resigned to avoid impeachment,

thought he was doing a good-to-excellent job as President. At

least one per cent of all of us is schizophrenic. This amounts to

over 50 million schizophrenics on the planet, more than the

population of, say, England. In his 1970 book on nightmares, the psychiatrist John Mack -

about whom I will have more to say - writes:

There is a period in early childhood in which dreams are

regarded as real and in which the events, transformations,

gratifications, and threats of which they are composed are

regarded by the child as if they were as much a part of his

actual daily life as his daytime experiences. The capacity to

establish and maintain clear distinctions between the life of

dreams and life in the outside world is hard-won and requires

several years to accomplish, not being completed even in

normal children before ages eight to ten. Nightmares,

because of their vividness and compelling effective intensity,

are particularly difficult for the child to judge realistically. When a child tells a fabulous story - a witch was grimacing in the

darkened room; a tiger is lurking under the bed; the vase was

102

Hallucinations

broken by a multi-coloured bird that flew in the window and

not because, contrary to family rules, a football was being

kicked inside the house - is he or she consciously lying?

Surely

parents often act as if the child cannot fully distinguish between

fantasy and reality. Some children have active imaginations;

others are less well endowed in this department. Some families

may respect the ability to fantasize and encourage the child,

while at the same time saying something like 'Oh, that's not

real; that's just your imagination.' Other families may be

impatient about confabulating - it makes running the house-

hold and adjudicating disputes at least marginally more difficult

- and discourage their children from fantasizing, perhaps even

teaching them to think it's something shameful. A few parents

may be unclear about the distinction between reality and

fantasy themselves, or may even seriously enter into the

fantasy. Out of all these contending propensities and child-

rearing practices, some people emerge with an intact ability to

fantasize, and a history, extending well into adulthood, of

confabulation. Others grow up believing that anyone who

doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy is

crazy. Most of us are somewhere in between. Abductees frequently report having seen 'aliens' in their child-

hood - coming in through the window or from under the bed or

out of the closet. But everywhere in the world children report

similar stories, with fairies, elves, brownies, ghosts, goblins,

witches, imps and a rich variety of imaginary 'friends'.

Are we to

imagine two different groups of children, one that sees imaginary

earthly beings and the other that sees genuine extraterrestrials?

Isn't it more reasonable that both groups are seeing, or hallucinat-

ing, the same thing?

Most of us recall being frightened at the age of two and older by

real-seeming but wholly imaginary 'monsters', especially at night

or in the dark. 1 can still remember occasions when 1 was

absolutely terrified, hiding under the bedclothes until I could

stand it no longer, and then bolting for the safety of my parents'

bedroom - if only I could get there before falling into the clutches

of ...

The Presence. The American cartoonist Gary Larson who

draws in the horror genre dedicates one of his books as follows:

103

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

When 1 was a boy, our house was filled with monsters. They

lived in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the

basement, and - when it was dark - just about everywhere. This book is dedicated to my father, who kept me safe from

all of them. Maybe the abduction therapists should be doing more of that. Part of the reason that children are afraid of the dark may be

that, in our entire evolutionary history up until just a moment

ago, they never slept alone. Instead, they nestled safely,

protected by an adult, usually Mum. In the enlightened west we

stick them alone in a dark room, say goodnight, and have

difficulty understanding why they're sometimes upset. It makes

good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary

monsters. In a world stalked by lions and hyenas, such fantasies

help prevent defenceless toddlers from wandering too far from

their guardians. How can this safety machinery be effective for

a vigorous, curious young animal unless it delivers industrial

strength terror?

Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not

to leave descendants. Eventually, I imagine, over the course of

human evolution, almost all children become afraid of mon-

sters. But if we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters

in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be

able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying,

a shared delusion, as adults?

It is telling that alien abductions occur mainly on falling

asleep or when waking up, or on long automobile drives where

there is a well-known danger of falling into some autohypnotic

reverie. Abduction therapists are puzzled when their patients

describe crying out in terror while their spouses sleep leadenly

beside them. But isn't this typical of dreams, our shouts for

help unheard?

Might these stories have something to do with

sleep and, as Benjamin Simon proposed for the Hills, a kind of

dream?

A common, although insufficiently well-known, psychological

syndrome rather like alien abduction is called sleep paralysis. Many people experience it. It happens in that twilight world

between being fully awake and hilly asleep. For a few minutes,

104

Hallucinations

maybe longer, you're immobile and acutely anxious. You feel a

weight on your chest as if some being is sitting or lying there. Your

heartbeat is quick, your breathing laboured. You may experience

auditory or visual hallucinations of people, demons, ghosts,

animals or birds. In the right setting, the experience can have 'the

full force and impact of reality', according to Robert Baker, a

psychologist at the University of Kentucky. Sometimes there's a

marked sexual component to the hallucination. Baker argues that

these common sleep disturbances are behind many if not most of

the alien abduction accounts. (He and others suggest that there

are other classes of abduction claims as well, made by fantasy-

prone individuals, say, or hoaxers.)

Similarly, the Harvard Mental Health Letter (September 1994)

comments,

Sleep paralysis may last for several minutes, and is sometimes

accompanied by vivid dreamlike hallucinations that give rise

to stories about visitations from gods, spirits, and extraterres-

trial creatures. We know from early work of the Canadian neurophysiologist

Wilder Penfield that electrical stimulation of certain regions of

the brain elicits full-blown hallucinations. People with temporal

lobe epilepsy - involving a cascade of naturally generated

electrical impulses in the part of the brain beneath the forehead

- experience a range of hallucinations almost indistinguishable

from reality: including the presence of one or more strange

beings, anxiety, floating through the air, sexual experiences,

and a sense of missing time. There is also what feels like

profound insight into the deepest questions and a need to

spread the word. A continuum of spontaneous temporal lobe

stimulation seems to stretch from people with serious epilepsy

to the most average among us. In at least one case reported by

another Canadian neuroscientist, Michael Persinger, adminis-

tration of the antiepileptic drug, carbamazepine, eliminated a

woman's recurring sense of experiencing the standard alien

abduction scenario. So such hallucinations, generated sponta-

neously, or with chemical or experiential assists, may play a

105

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

role, perhaps a central role, in the UFO accounts. But such a view is easy to burlesque: UFOs explained away as

'mass hallucinations'.

Everyone knows there's no such thing as a

shared hallucination. Right?

As the possibility of extraterrestrial life began to be widely

popularized - especially around the turn of the last century by

Percival Lowell with his Martian canals - people began to

report contact with aliens, mainly Martians. The psychologist

Theodore Flournoy's 1901 book. From India to the Planet Mars,

describes a French-speaking medium who in a trance state drew

pictures of the Martians (they look just like us) and presented

their alphabet and language (remarkably like French).

The

psychiatrist Carl Jung in his 1902 doctoral dissertation

described a young Swiss woman who was agitated to discover,

sitting across from her on the train, a 'star-dweller' from Mars. Martians are innocent of science, philosophy and souls, she was

told, but have advanced technology. 'Flying machines have

long been in existence on Mars; the whole of Mars is covered

with canals' and so on. Charles Fort, a collector of anomalous

reports who died in 1932, wrote, 'Perhaps there are inhabitants

of Mars, who are secretly sending reports upon the ways of this

world to their governments.' In the 1950s there was a book by

Gerald Heard that revealed the saucer occupants to be intelli-

gent Martian bees. Who else could survive the fantastic right

angle turns reported for UFOs?

But after the canals were shown to be illusory by Mariner 9 in

1971, and after no compelling evidence even for microbes was

found on Mars by Vikings 1 and 2 in 1976, popular enthusiasm for

the Lowellian Mars waned and we heard little about visiting

Martians. Aliens were then reported to come from somewhere

else. Why?

Why no more Martians?

And after the surface of

Venus was found to be hot enough to melt lead, there were no

more visiting Venusians. Does some part of these stories adjust to

the current canons of belief?

What does that imply about their

origin?

There's no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There's

considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist, frequent

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Hallucinations

our planet, or abduct and molest us. We might argue about

details, but the one category of explanation is surely much better

supported than the other. The main reservation you might then

have is: why do so many people today report this particular set of

hallucinations?

Why sombre little beings, and flying saucers, and

sexual experimentation?

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The Demon-Haunted World

There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness. The ISA Upanishad

(India, c. 600 BC)

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which

every one in himself calleth religion. Thomas Hobbes,

Leviathan (1651)

T he gods watch over us and guide our destinies, many human

cultures teach; other entities, more malevolent, are responsi-

ble for the existence of evil. Both classes of beings, whether

considered natural or supernatural, real or imaginary, serve

human needs. Even if they're wholly fanciful, people feel better

believing in them. So in an age when traditional religions have

been under withering fire from science, is it not natural to wrap up

the old gods and demons in scientific raiment and call them aliens?

Belief in demons was widespread in the ancient world. They were

thought of as natural rather than supernatural beings. Hesiod

casually mentions them. Socrates described his philosophical

inspiration as the work of a personal, benign demon. His teacher,

Diotima of Mantineia, tells him (in Plato's Symposium) that

'Everything demonic is intermediate between God and mortal. 108

The Demon-Haunted World

God has no contact with man,' she continues; 'only through the

demonic is there intercourse and conversation between man and

gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.'

Plato, Socrates' most celebrated student, assigned a high role to

demons: 'No human nature invested with supreme power is able

to order human affairs,' he said, 'and not overflow with insolence

and wrong ...'

We do not appoint oxen to be the lords of oxen, or goats of

goats, but we ourselves are a superior race and rule over them. In like manner God, in his love of mankind, placed over us the

demons, who are a superior race, and they with great ease and

pleasure to themselves, and no less to us, taking care of us and

giving us peace and reverence and order and justice never

failing, made the tribes of men happy and united. He stoutly denied that demons were a source of evil, and

represented Eros, the keeper of sexual passions, as a demon, not a

god, 'neither mortal nor immortal', 'neither good nor bad'.

But all

later Platonists, including the Neo-Platonists who powerfully

influenced Christian philosophy, held that some demons were

good and others evil. The pendulum was swinging. Aristotle,

Plato's famous student, seriously considered the contention that

dreams are scripted by demons. Plutarch and Porphyry proposed

that the demons, who filled the upper air, came from the Moon. The early Church Fathers, despite having imbibed Neo-

Platonism from the culture they swam in, were anxious to separate

themselves from 'pagan' belief systems. They taught that all of

pagan religion consisted of the worship of demons and men, both

misconstrued as gods. When St Paul complained (Ephesians vi,

12) about wickedness in high places, he was referring not to

government corruption, but to demons, who lived in high places:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against

principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the dark-

ness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a

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mere poetic metaphor for the evil in the hearts of men. St Augustine was much vexed with demons. He quotes the

pagan thinking prevalent in his time: 'The gods occupy the loftiest

regions, men the lowest, the demons the middle region ...

They

have immortality of body, but passions of the mind in common

with men.' In Book VIII of The City of God (begun in 413),

Augustine assimilates this ancient tradition, replaces gods by

God, and demonizes the demons, arguing that they are, without

exception, malign. They have no redeeming virtues. They are the

fount of all spiritual and material evil. He calls them 'aerial

animals ...

most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from right-

eousness, swollen with pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit.'

They may profess to carry messages between God and man,

disguising themselves as angels of the Lord, but this pose is a snare

to lure us to our destruction. They can assume any form, and

know many things - 'demon' means 'knowledge' in Greek* -

especially about the material world. However intelligent, they are

deficient in charity. They prey on 'the captive and outwitted minds

of men,' wrote Tertullian. 'They have their abode in the air, the

stars are their neighbours, their commerce is with the clouds.'

In the eleventh century, the influential Byzantine theologian,

philosopher and shady politician, Michael Psellus, described

demons in these words:

These animals exist in our own life, which is hill of passions, for

they are present abundantly in the passions, and their dwelling-

place is that of matter, as is their rank and degree. For this

reason they are also subject to passions and fettered to them. One Richalmus, abbot of Schonthal, around 1270 penned an

entire treatise on demons, rich in first-hand experience: he sees

(but only when his eyes are shut) countless malevolent demons,

like motes of dust, buzzing around his head - and everyone else's. Despite successive waves of rationalist, Persian, Jewish, Christian

and Muslim world views, despite revolutionary social, political

* 'Science' means 'knowledge' in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even

if we look no further. 110

The Demon-Haunted World

and philosophical ferment, the existence, much of the character,

and even the name of demons remained unchanged from Hesiod

to the Crusades. Demons, the 'powers of the air', come down from the skies and

have unlawful sexual congress with women. Augustine believed

that witches were the offspring of these forbidden unions. In the

Middle Ages, as in classical antiquity, nearly everyone believed

such stories. The demons were also called devils, or fallen angels. The demonic seducers of women were labelled incubi; of men,

succubi. There are cases in which nuns reported, in some befud-

dlement, a striking resemblance between the incubus and the

priest-confessor, or the bishop, and awoke the next morning, as

one fifteenth-century chronicler put it, to 'find themselves pol-

luted just as if they had commingled with a man'.

There are

similar accounts, but in harems not convents, in ancient China. So

many women reported incubi, argued the Presbyterian religious

writer Richard Baxter (in his Certainty of the World of Spirits,

1691), 'that 'tis impudence to deny it'.*

As they seduced, the incubi and succubi were perceived as a

weight bearing down on the chest of the dreamer. Mare, despite

its Latin meaning, is the Old English word for incubus, and

nightmare meant originally the demon that sits on the chests of

sleepers, tormenting them with dreams. In Athanasius' Life of St

Anthony (written around 360) demons are described as coming

and going at will in locked rooms; 1400 years later, in his work De

Daemonialitae, the Franciscan scholar Ludovico Sinistrari assures

us that demons pass through walls. The external reality of demons was almost entirely unques-

tioned from antiquity through late medieval times. Maimonides

denied their reality, but the overwhelming majority of rabbis

believed in dybbuks. One of the few cases I can find where it is

even hinted that demons might be internal, generated in our

* Likewise, in the same work, 'The raising of storms by witches is attested by so

many, that I think it needless to recite them.' The theologian Meric Casaubon

argued - in his 1668 book. Of Credulity and Incredulity, that witches must exist

because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of

people believe must be true. Ill

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

minds, is when Abba Poemen - one of the desert fathers of the

early Church - was asked,

'How do the demons fight against me?'

'The demons fight against you?' Father Poemen asked in turn. 'Our own wills become the demons, and it is these which attack us.'

The medieval attitudes on incubi and succubi were influenced

by Macrobius' fourth-century Commentary on the Dream of

Scipio, which went through dozens of editions before the Euro-

pean Enlightenment. Macrobius described phantoms (phantasma)

seen 'in the moment between wakefulness and slumber'.

The

dreamer 'imagines' the phantoms as predatory. Macrobius had a

sceptical side which his medieval readers tended to ignore. Obsession with demons began to reach a crescendo when, in his

famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared,

It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not

avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and

succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations,

charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and

cause to perish the births of women

as well as generate numerous other calamities. With this Bull,

Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture and execu-

tion of countless 'witches' all over Europe. They were guilty of

what Augustine had described as 'a criminal tampering with the

unseen world'.

Despite the evenhanded 'members of both sexes'

in the language of the Bull, unsurprisingly it was mainly girls and

women who were so persecuted. Many leading Protestants of the following centuries, their differ-

ences with the Catholic Church notwithstanding, adopted nearly

identical views. Even humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and

Thomas More believed in witches. 'The giving up of witchcraft,' said

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, 'is in effect the giving up of

the Bible.' William Blackstone, the celebrated jurist, in his Com-

mentaries on the Laws of England (1765), asserted:

To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft

and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word

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The Demon-Haunted World

of God in various passages of both the Old and New

Testament. Innocent commended 'Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James

Sprenger' who 'have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as

Inquisitors of these heretical [depravities'.

If 'the abominations

and enormities in question remain unpunished,' the souls of

multitudes face eternal damnation. The Pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a compre-

hensive analysis, using the full academic armoury of the late

fifteenth century. With exhaustive citations of scripture and of

ancient and modem scholars, they produced the Malleus Malefi-

carum, the 'Hammer of Witches', aptly described as one of the

most terrifying documents in human history. Thomas Ady, in A

Candle in the Dark, condemned it as 'villainous Doctrines &

Inventions', 'horrible lyes and impossibilities', serving to hide

'their unparalleled cruelty from the ears of the world'.

What the

Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you're accused of

witchcraft, you're a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to

demonstrate the validity of the accusation. There are no rights of

the defendant. There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be

made for impious purposes - jealousy, say, or revenge, or the

greed of the inquisitors who routinely confiscated for their own

private benefit the property of the accused. This technical manual

for torturers also includes methods of punishment tailored to

release demons from the victim's body before the process kills

her. The Malleus in hand, the Pope's encouragement guaranteed,

Inquisitors began springing up all over Europe. It quickly became an expense account scam. All costs of

investigation, trial and execution were borne by the accused or her

relatives, down to per diem for the private detectives hired to spy

on her, wine for her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel

expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer

from another city, and the faggots, tar and hangman's rope. Then

there was a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch

burned. The convicted witch's remaining property, if any, was

divided between Church and State. As this legally and morally

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, as a

vast bureaucracy arose to serve it, attention was turned from poor

hags and crones to the middle class and well-to-do of both sexes. The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the

harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere

fantasy. Since each 'witch' was made to implicate others, the

numbers grew exponentially. These constituted 'frightful proofs

that the Devil is still alive', as it was later put in America in the

Salem witch trials. In a credulous age, the most fantastic testi-

mony was soberly accepted - that tens of thousands of witches had

gathered for a Sabbath in public squares in France, or that 12,000

of them darkened the skies as they flew to Newfoundland. The

Bible had counselled, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'

Legions of women were burned to death.* And the most horren-

dous tortures were routinely applied to every defendant, young or

old, after the instruments of torture were first blessed by the

priests. Innocent himself died in 1492, following unsuccessful

attempts to keep him alive by transfusion (which resulted in the

deaths of three boys) and by suckling at the breast of a nursing

mother. He was mourned by his mistress and their children. In Britain witch-finders, also called 'prickers', were employed,

receiving a handsome bounty for each girl or woman they turned

over for execution. They had no incentive to be cautious in their

accusations. Typically they looked for 'devil's marks' - scars or

birthmarks or nevi - that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor

bled. A simple sleight of hand often gave the appearance that the

pin penetrated deep into the witch's flesh. When no visible marks

were apparent, 'invisible marks' sufficed. Upon the gallows, one

mid-seventeenth-century pricker 'confessed he had been the death

of above 220 women in England and Scotland, for the gain of

twenty shillings apiece'.*

* This mode of execution was adopted by the Holy Inquisition apparently to

guarantee literal accord with a well-intentioned sentence of canon law (Council

ofTours, 1163): 'The Church abhors bloodshed.'

In the murky territory of bounty hunters and paid informers, vile corruption is

often the rule - worldwide and through all of human history. To take an

example almost at random, in 1994, for a fee, a group of postal inspectors from

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The Demon-Haunted World

In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defence witnesses

were inadmissible. In any case, it was nearly impossible to provide

compelling alibis for accused witches: the rules of evidence had a

special character. For example, in more than one case a husband

attested that his wife was asleep in his arms at the very moment

she was accused of frolicking with the devil at a witch's Sabbath;

but the archbishop patiently explained that a demon had taken the

place of the wife. The husbands were not to imagine that their

powers of perception could exceed Satan's powers of deception. The beautiful young women were perforce consigned to the

flames. There were strong erotic and misogynistic elements, as might be

expected in a sexually repressed, male-dominated society with

inquisitors drawn from the class of nominally celibate priests. The

trials paid close attention to the quality and quantity of orgasm in

the supposed copulations of defendants with demons or the Devil

(although Augustine had been certain 'we cannot call the Devil a

fornicator'), and to the nature of the Devil's 'member' (cold, by

all reports).

'Devil's marks' were found 'generally on the breasts

or private parts' according to Ludovico Sinistrari's 1700 book. As

a result pubic hair was shaved, and the genitalia were carefully

inspected by the exclusively male inquisitors. In the immolation of

the 20-year-old Joan of Arc, after her dress had caught fire the

Hangman of Rouen slaked the flames so onlookers could view 'all

the secrets which can or should be in a woman'.

The chronicle of those who were consumed by fire in the single

German city of Wurzburg in the single year 1598 penetrates the

statistics and lets us confront a little of the human reality:

The steward of the senate, named Gering; old Mrs Kanzler;

the tailor's fat wife; the woman cook of Mr Mengerdorf; a

stranger; a strange woman; Baunach, a senator, the fattest

citizen in Wurtzburg; the old smith of the court; an old

woman; a little girl, nine or ten years old; a younger girl, her

little sister; the mother of the two little aforementioned girls;

Cleveland, USA, agreed to go underground and ferret out wrongdoers; they

then contrived criminal cases against 32 innocent postal workers. 115

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Liebler's daughter; Goebel's child, the most beautiful girl in

Wurtzburg; a student who knew many languages; two boys

from the Minster, each twelve years old; Stepper's little

daughter; the woman who kept the bridge gate; an old

woman; the little son of the town council bailiff; the wife of

Knertz, the butcher; the infant daughter of Dr Schultz; a

blind girl; Schwartz, canon at Hach ...

On and on it goes. Some were given special humane attention:

'The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and

burned.' There were twenty-eight public immolations, each with

four to six victims on average, in that small city in a single year. This was a microcosm of what was happening all across Europe. No one knows how many were killed altogether - perhaps

hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Those responsible for

prosecuting, torturing, judging, burning and justifying were self-

less. Just ask them. They could not be mistaken. The confessions of witchcraft

could not be based on hallucinations, say, or attempts to satisfy

the inquisitors and stop the torture. In such a case, explained the

witch judge Pierre de Lancre (in his 1612 book. Description of the

Inconstancy of Evil Angels), the Catholic Church would be

committing a great crime by burning witches. Those who raise

such possibilities are thus attacking the Church and ipso facto

committing a mortal sin. Critics of witch-burning were punished

and, in some cases, themselves burnt. The inquisitors and tortur-

ers were doing God's work. They were saving souls. They were

foiling demons. Witchcraft of course was not the only offence that merited

torture and burning at the stake. Heresy was a still more serious

crime, and both Catholics and Protestants punished it ruthlessly. In the sixteenth century the scholar William Tyndale had the

temerity to contemplate translating the New Testament into

English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own

language instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own,

independent religious views. They might conceive of their own

private unintermediated line to God. This was a challenge to the

job security of Roman Catholic priests. When Tyndale tried to

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The Demon-Haunted World

publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over

Europe. Eventually he was captured, garrotted, and then, for

good measure, burned at the stake. His copies of the New

Testament (which a century later became the basis of the exquisite

King James translation) were then hunted down house-to-house

by armed posses - Christians piously defending Christianity by

preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ. Such a cast of mind, such a climate of absolute confidence that

knowledge should be rewarded by torture and death were unlikely

to help those accused of witchcraft. Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has,

with occasional political exceptions, declined since the six-

teenth century. In the last judicial execution of witches in

England, a woman and her nine-year-old daughter were

hanged. Their crime was raising a rain storm by taking their

stockings off. In our time, witches and djinns are found as

regular fare in children's entertainment, exorcism of demons is

still practised by the Roman Catholic and other Churches, and

the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic

practices of another. We still use the word 'pandemonium'

(literally, all demons).

A crazed and violent person is still said

to be demonic. (Not until the eighteenth century was mental

illness no longer generally ascribed to supernatural causes;

even insomnia had been considered a punishment inflicted by

demons.) More than half of Americans tell pollsters they

'believe' in the Devil's existence, and ten per cent have

communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did

regularly. In a 1992 'spiritual warfare manual' called Prepare

for War, Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex

outside of marriage 'will almost always result in demonic

infestation'; that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed

so unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshipping

demons; and that 'rock music didn't "just happen", it was a

carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself. Sometimes 'your loved ones are demonically bound and

blinded'.

Demonology is today still part and parcel of many

earnest faiths. And what is it that demons do?

In the Malleus, Kramer and

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Sprenger reveal that 'devils ...

busy themselves by interfering

with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtain-

ing human semen, and themselves transferring it'.

Demonic

artificial insemination in the Middle Ages goes back at least to St

Thomas Aquinas, who tells us in On the Trinity that 'demons can

transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the

bodies of others'.

His contemporary, St Bonaventura, spells it out

in a little more detail: succubi 'yield to males and receive their

semen; by cunning skills, the demons preserve its potency, and

afterwards, with the permission of God, they become incubi and

pour it out into female repositories'.

The products of these

demon-mediated unions are also, when they grow up, visited by

demons. A multi-generational trans-species sexual bond is forged. And these creatures, we recall, are well known to fly; indeed they

inhabit the upper air. There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central

elements of the alien abduction account are present, including

sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through

walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experi-

ments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really

exist, how can we understand so strange a belief-system,

embraced by the whole Western world (including those consid-

ered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in

every generation, and taught by Church and State?

Is there any

real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain

wiring and chemistry?

In Genesis we read of angels who couple with 'the daughters of

men'.

The culture myths of ancient Greece and Rome told of gods

appearing to women as bulls or swans or showers of gold and

impregnating them. In one early Christian tradition, philosophy

derived not from human ingenuity but out of demonic pillow talk,

the fallen angels betraying the secrets of Heaven to their human

consorts. Accounts with similar elements appear in cultures

around the world. Parallels to incubi include Arabian djinn,

Greek satyrs, Hindu bhuts, Samoan hotua poro, Celtic dusii and

many others. In an epoch of demon hysteria, it was easy enough to

demonize those we feared or hated. So Merlin was said to have

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The Demon-Haunted World

been fathered by an incubus. So were Plato, Alexander the Great,

Augustus and Martin Luther. Occasionally an entire people - for

example the Huns or the inhabitants of Cyprus - were accused by

their enemies of having been sired by demons. In Talmudic tradition the archetypical succubus was Lilith,

whom God made from the dust along with Adam. She was

expelled from Eden for insubordination - not to God, but to

Adam. Ever since, she spends her nights seducing Adam's

descendants. In ancient Iranian and many other cultures, noctur-

nal seminal emissions were believed to be elicited by succubi. St

Teresa of Avila reported a vivid sexual encounter with an angel -

an angel of light, not of darkness, she was sure - as did other

women later sanctified by the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, the

eighteenth-century magician and con man, let it be understood

that he, like Jesus of Nazareth, was a product of the union

'between the children of heaven and earth'.

In 1645 a Cornish teenager, Anne Jefferies, was found groggy,

crumpled on the floor. Much later, she recalled being attacked by

half a dozen little men, carried paralysed to a castle in the air,

seduced and returned home. She called the little men fairies. (For

many pious Christians, as for the inquisitors of Joan of Arc, this

was a distinction without a difference. Fairies were demons, plain

and simple.) They returned to terrify and torment her. The next

year she was arrested for witchcraft. Fairies traditionally have

magical powers and can cause paralysis by the merest touch. The

ordinary passage of time is slowed in fairyland. Fairies are

reproductively impaired, so they have sex with humans and carry

offbabies from their cradles, sometimes leaving a fairy substitute,

a 'changeling'.

Now it seems a fair question: if Anne Jefferies had

grown up in a culture touting aliens rather than fairies, and UFOs

rather than castles in the air, would her story have been distin-

guishable in any significant respect from the ones 'abductees' tell?

In his 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An

Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, David

Hufford describes an executive, university-educated, in his mid-

thirties, who recalled a summer spent as a teenager in his aunt's

house. One night, he saw mysterious lights moving in the harbour. Afterwards, he fell asleep. From his bed he then witnessed a white,

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glowing figure climbing the stairs. She entered his room, paused, and

then said - anticlimactically, it seems to me - 'That is the linoleum.'

Some nights the figure was an old woman; in others, an elephant. Sometimes the young man was convinced the entire business was a

dream; other times he was certain he was awake. He was pressed

down into his bed, paralysed, unable to move or cry out. His heart

was pounding. He was short of breath. Similar events transpired on

many consecutive nights. What is happening here?

These events

took place before alien abductions were widely described. If the

young man had known about alien abductions, would his old woman

have had a large head and bigger eyes?

In several famous passages in The Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described the balance between

credulity and scepticism in late classical antiquity:

Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was per-

mitted to assume the language of inspiration, and the effects

of accident or contrivance were ascribed to supernatural

causes ...

In modern times [Gibbon is writing in the middle eight-

eenth century], a latent and even involuntary scepticism

adheres to the most pious dispositions. Their admission of

supernatural truths is much less an active consent than a cold

and passive acquiescence. Accustomed long since to observe

and to respect the invariable order of Nature, our reason, or

at least our imagination, is not sufficiently prepared to sustain

the visible action of the Deity. But in the first ages of

Christianity the situation of mankind was extremely different. The most curious, or the most credulous, among the pagans

were often persuaded to enter into a society which asserted

an actual claim of miraculous powers. The primitive Chris-

tians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were

exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary

events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they

were incessantly assaulted by daemons, comforted by visions,

instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from dan-

ger, sickness, and from death itself, by the supplications of

the church ...

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It was their firm persuasion that the air which they

breathed was peopled with invisible enemies; with innumer-

able daemons, who watched every occasion, and assumed

every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their

unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses,

were deceived by the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and

the hermit, whose midnight prayer was oppressed by involun-

tary slumber, might easily confound the phantoms of horror

or delight which had occupied his sleeping and his waking

dreams ...

[T]he practice of superstition is so congenial to the multi-

tude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the

loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and

supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and

their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears

beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal

causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. So

urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall

of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded

by the introduction of some other mode of superstition ...

Put aside Gibbon's social snobbery: the devil tormented the upper

classes too, and even a king of England - James I, the first Stuart

monarch - wrote a credulous and superstitious book on demons

(Daemonologie, 1597).

He was also the patron of the great

translation of the Bible into English that still bears his name. It

was King James's opinion that tobacco is the 'devil's weed', and a

number of witches were exposed through their addiction to this

drug. But by 1628, James had become a thoroughgoing sceptic -

mainly because adolescents had been found faking demonic

possession, in which state they had accused innocent people of

witchcraft. If we reckon the scepticism that Gibbon says charac-

terized his time to have declined in ours, and if even a little of the

rampant gullibility he attributes to late classical times is left over

in ours, should we not expect something like demons to find a

niche in the popular culture of the present?

Of course, as enthusiasts for extraterrestrial visitations are

quick to remind me, there's another interpretation of these

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

historical parallels: aliens, they say, have always been visiting us,

poking at us, stealing our sperms and eggs, impregnating us. In

earlier times we recognized them as gods, demons, fairies, or

spirits; only now do we understand that it's aliens who've been

diddling us all these millennia. Jacques Vallee has made such

arguments. But then why are there virtually no reports of flying

saucers prior to 1947?

Why is it that none of the world's major

religions uses saucers as icons of the divine?

Why no warnings

about the dangers of high technology then?

Why isn't this genetic

experiment, whatever its objective, completed by now, thousands

of years or more after its initiation by beings supposedly of vastly

superior technological attainments?

Why are we in such trouble if

the breeding programme is designed to improve our lot?

Following this line of argument, we might anticipate present

adherents of the old beliefs to understand 'aliens' to be fairies,

gods, or demons. In fact, there are several contemporary sects -

the 'Raelians', for example - that hold gods or God to come to

earth in UFOs. Some abductees describe the aliens, however

repulsive, as 'angels', or 'emissaries of God'.

And there are those

who still think it's demons. In Whitley Strieber's Communion, a first-hand account of 'alien

abduction', the author relates

Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy

and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had

to be ...

I still remember that thing crouching there, so

terribly ugly, its arms and legs like the limbs of a great insect,

its eyes glaring at me. Reportedly, Strieber is now open to the possibility that these

night-time terrors were dreams or hallucinations. Articles on UFOs in The Christian News Encyclopedia, a

fundamentalist compilation, include 'Unchristian Fanatic Obses-

sion', and 'Scientist Believes UFOs Work of Devil'.

The Spiritual

Counterfeits Project of Berkeley, California, teaches that UFOs

are of demonic origin; the Aquarian Church of Universal Service

of McMinnville, Oregon, that all aliens are hostile. A 1993

newsletter of 'Cosmic Awareness Communications' informs us

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The Demon-Haunted World

that UFO occupants think of humans as laboratory animals, wish

us to worship them, but tend to be deterred by the Lord's Prayer. Some abductees have been cast out of their evangelical religious

congregations; their stories sound too close to satanism. A 1980

fundamentalist tract. The Cult Explosion, by Dave Hunt, reveals

that

UFOs ...

are clearly not physical and seem to be demonic

manifestations from another dimension calculated to alter

man's way of thinking ...

[T]he alleged UFO entities that

have presumably communicated psychically with humans

have always preached the same four lies that the serpent

introduced to Eve ...

[Tjhese beings are demons and they

are preparing for the Antichrist. A number of sects hold UFOs and alien abductions to be

premonitions of 'end-times'.

If UFOs come from another planet or another dimension, were

they sent by the same God who has been revealed to us in any of

the major religions?

Nothing in the UFO phenomena, the funda-

mentalist complaint goes, requires belief in the one, true God,

while much in it contradicts the God portrayed in the Bible and

Christian tradition. The New Age: A Christian Critique by Ralph

Rath (1990) discusses UFOs, typically for such literature, with

extreme credulity. It serves their purpose to accept UFOs as real

and revile them as instruments of Satan and the Antichrist, rather

than to use the blade of scientific scepticism. That tool, once

honed, might accomplish more than just a limited heresiotomy. The Christian fundamentalist author Hal Lindsey, in his 1994

religious best-seller Planet Earth - 2000 AD, writes,

1 have become thoroughly convinced that UFOs are real ...

They are operated by alien beings of great intelligence and

power ...

I believe these beings are not only extraterrestrial

but supernatural in origin. To be blunt, I think they are

demons ...

part of a Satanic plot. And what is the evidence for this conclusion?

Chiefly, it is the

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

eleventh and twelfth verses of Luke, Chapter 21, in which Jesus

talks about 'great signs from Heaven' - nothing like a UFO is

described - in the last days. Typically, Lindsey ignores verse 32 in

which Jesus makes it very clear he is talking about events in the

first, not the twentieth, century. There is also a Christian tradition according to which

extraterrestrial life cannot exist. In Christian News for 23 May

1994, for example, W. Gary Crampton, Doctor ofTheology, tells

us:

The Bible, either explicitly or implicitly, speaks to every area

of life; it never leaves us without an answer. The Bible

nowhere explicitly affirms or negates intelligent extraterres-

trial life. Implicitly, however. Scripture does deny the exist-

ence of such beings, thus also negating the possibility of flying

saucers ...

Scripture views earth as the center of the uni-

verse ...

According to Peter, a 'planet hopping' Savior is out

of the question. Here is an answer to intelligent life on other

planets. If there were such, who would redeem them?

Certainly not Christ ...

Experiences which are out of line

with the teachings of Scripture must always be renounced as

fallacious. The Bible has a monopoly on the truth. But many other Christian sects - Roman Catholics, for example -

are completely open-minded, with no a priori objections to and no

insistence on the reality of aliens and UFOs. In the early 1960s, 1 argued that the UFO stories were crafted

chiefly to satisfy religious longings. At a time when science has

complicated uncritical adherence to the old-time religions, an

alternative is proffered to the God hypothesis: dressed in scientific

jargon, their immense powers 'explained' by superficially scien-

tific terminology, the gods and demons of old come down from

heaven to haunt us, to offer prophetic visions, and to tantalize us

with visions of a more hopeful future: a space-age mystery religion

aborning. The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard wrote in 1989 that

abduction reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural

124

The Demon-Haunted World

encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of

divine beings. He concludes:

Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs,

but it just as quickly filled the vacancy with aliens having the

same functions. Only the extraterrestrial outer trappings are

new. All the fear and the psychological dramas for dealing

with it seem simply to have found their way home again,

where it is business as usual in the legend realm where things

go bump in the night. Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally

experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual con-

tent, about abduction by strange, telepathic, aerial creatures who

ooze through walls, with the details filled in by the prevailing

cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist?

Others, who have not

personally had the experience, find it stirring and in a way

familiar. They pass the story on. Soon it takes on a life of its own,

inspires others trying to understand their own visions and halluci-

nations, and enters the realm of folklore, myth and legend. The

connection between the content of spontaneous temporal lobe

hallucinations and the alien abduction paradigm is consistent with

such a hypothesis. Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth,

we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's

incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see

fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when

the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial

beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery

tends. Snatches of song or foreign languages, images, events that we

witnessed, stories that we overheard in childhood can be accu-

rately recalled decades later without any conscious memory of

how they got into our heads. '[I]n violent fevers, men, all

ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues,' says Herman Melville

in Moby Dick; 'and ...

when the mystery is probed, it turns out

125

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient

tongues had been really spoken in their hearing.' In our everyday

life, we effortlessly and unconsciously incorporate cultural norms

and make them our own. A similar inhaling of motifs is present in schizophrenic 'com-

mand hallucinations'.

Here people feel they are being told what to

do by an imposing or mythic figure. They are ordered to assassi-

nate a political leader or a folk hero, or defeat the British

invaders, or harm themselves, because it is the wish of God, or

Jesus, or the Devil, or demons, or angels, or - lately - aliens. The

schizophrenic is transfixed by a clear and powerful command from

a voice that no one else can hear, and that the subject must

somehow identify. Who would issue such a command?

Who could

speak inside our heads?

The culture in which we've been raised

offers up an answer. Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising,

especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us

believe almost anything - even that smoking cigarettes is cool. In our time, putative aliens are the subject of innumerable

science fiction stories, novels, TV dramas and films. UFOs are

a regular feature of the weekly tabloids devoted to falsification

and mystification. One of the highest-grossing motion pictures

of all time is about aliens very like those described by abduct-

ees. Alien abduction accounts were comparatively rare until

1975, when a credulous television dramatization of the Hill case

was aired; another leap into public prominence occurred after

1987, when Strieber's purported first-hand account with a

haunting cover painting of a large-eyed 'alien' became a

best-seller. In contrast, we hear very little lately about incubi,

elves and fairies. Where have they all gone?

Far from being global, such alien abduction stories are

disappointingly local. The vast majority emanate from North

America. They hardly transcend American culture. In other

countries, bird-headed, insect-headed, reptilian, robot, and

blond and blue-eyed aliens are reported (the last, predictably,

from northern Europe).

Each group of aliens is said to behave

differently. Clearly cultural factors are playing an important

role. The Demon-Haunted World

Long before the terms 'flying saucer' or 'UFOs' were invented,

science fiction was replete with 'little green men' and 'bug-eyed

monsters'.

Somehow small hairless beings with big heads (and

eyes) have been our staple aliens for a long time. You could see

them routinely in the science fiction pulp magazines of the

twenties and thirties (and, for example, in an illustration of a

Martian sending radio messages to Earth in the December 1937

issue of the magazine Short Wave and Television).

It goes back

perhaps to our remote descendants as depicted by the British

science fiction pioneer, H. G. Wells. Wells argued that humans

evolved from smaller-brained but hairier primates with an athleti-

cism far exceeding that of Victorian academics; extrapolating this

trend into the far future, he suggested that our descendants should

be nearly hairless, with immense heads, although barely able to

walk around on their own. Advanced beings from other worlds

might be similarly endowed. The typical modern extraterrestrial reported in America in the

eighties and early nineties is small, with disproportionately large

head and eyes, undeveloped facial features, no visible eyebrows

or genitals, and smooth grey skin. It looks to me eerily like a

foetus in roughly the twelfth week of pregnancy, or a starving

child. Why so many of us might be obsessing on foetuses or

malnourished children, and imagining them attacking and sexually

manipulating us, is an interesting question. In recent years in America, aliens different from the short grey

motif have been on the rise. One psychotherapist, Richard Boylan

of Sacramento, says:

You've got three-and-a-half-foot to four- foot types; you've

got five- to six-foot types; you've got seven- to eight-foot

types; you've got three-, four-, and five-finger types, pads on

the ends of fingers or suction cups; you've got webbed or

non-webbed fingers; you've got large almond-shape eyes

slanted upward, outward, or horizontally; in some cases large

ovoid eyes without the almond slant; you've got extraterres-

trials with slit pupils; you've got other different body types -

the so-called Praying Mantis type, the reptoid types ...

These are the ones that I keep getting recurrently. There are

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

a few exotic and single case reports that 1 tend to be a little

cautious about until I get a lot more corroborative. Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduc-

tion syndrome portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The

form of the supposed aliens is marked by the failure of the

imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a

single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a

cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird. Any

protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with

wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien

abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their

stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that

they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and

biology. 128

On the Distinction between

True and False Visions

A credulous mind ...

finds most delight in believing

strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass

with him; but never regards those that are plain and

feasible, for every man can believe such. Samuel Butler, Characters (1667-9)

F or just an instant in the darkened room I sense an apparition -

could it be a ghost?

Or there's a flicker of motion; I see it out

of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head there's nothing

there. Is that a telephone ringing, or is it just my 'imagination'?

astonishment, I seem to be smelling the salt air of the Coney

Island summer seashore of my childhood. I turn a corner in the

foreign city I'm visiting for the first time, and before me is a street

so familiar I feel I've known it all my life. In these commonplace experiences, we're generally unsure

what to do next. Were my eyes (or ears, or nose, or memory)

playing 'tricks' on me?

Or did I really and truly witness something

out of the ordinary course of Nature?

Shall I keep quiet about it,

or shall I tell?

The answer depends very much on my environment, friends,

loved ones and culture. In an obsessively rigid, practically ori-

ented society, perhaps 1 would be cautious about admitting to

such experiences. They might mark me as flighty, unsound,

unreliable. But in a society that readily believes in ghosts, say, or

129

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

'apporting', accounts of such experiences might gain approval,

even prestige. In the former, I would be sorely tempted to

suppress the thing altogether; in the latter, maybe even to

exaggerate or elaborate just a little to make it even more

miraculous than it seemed. Charles Dickens, who lived in a flourishing rational culture in

which, however, spiritualism was also thriving, described the

dilemma in these words (from his short story, 'To Be Taken with a

Grain of Salt'):

I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even

among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to

imparting their own psychological experiences when those

have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that

what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or

response in a listener's internal life, and might be suspected

or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some

extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would

have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller having

had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought,

vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental

impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own

to it. To his reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in

which such subjects are involved. In our time, there is still much dismissive chortling and ridicule. But the reticence and obscurity is more readily overcome, for

example, in a 'supportive' setting provided by a therapist or

hypnotist. Unfortunately - and, for some people, unbelievably -

the distinction between imagination and memory is often blurred. Some 'abductees' say they remember the experience without

hypnosis; many do not. But hypnosis is an unreliable way to

refresh memory. It often elicits imagination, fantasy and play as

well as true recollections, with neither patient nor therapist able to

distinguish the one from the other. Hypnosis seems to involve, in

a central way, a state of heightened suggestibility. Courts have

banned its use as evidence or even as a tool of criminal investiga-

tion. The American Medical Association calls memories surfacing

130

On the Distinction between True and False Visions

under hypnosis less reliable than those recalled without it. A

standard medical school text (Harold I. Kaplan, Comprehensive

Textbook of Psychiatry, 1989) warns of 'a high likelihood that the

beliefs of the hypnotist will be communicated to the patient and

incorporated into what the patient believes to be memories, often

with strong conviction'.

So the fact that, when hypnotized, people

sometimes relate alien abduction stories carries little weight. There's a danger that subjects are - at least on some matters - so

eager to please the hypnotist that they sometimes respond to

subtle cues of which even the hypnotist is unaware. In a study by Alvin Lawson of California State University, Long

Beach, eight subjects, pre-screened to eliminate UFO buffs, were

hypnotized by a physician and informed that they had been

abducted, brought to a spaceship and examined. With no further

prompting, they were asked to describe the experience. Their

accounts, most of which were easily elicited, were almost indistin-

guishable from the accounts that self-described abductees present. True, Lawson had cued his subjects briefly and directly; but in

many cases the therapists who routinely deal with alien abductions

cue their subjects, some in great detail, others more subtly and

indirectly. The psychiatrist George Ganaway (as related by Lawrence

Wright) once proposed to a highly suggestible patient under

hypnosis that five hours were missing from her memory of a

certain day. When he mentioned a bright light overhead, she

promptly told him about UFOs and aliens. When he insisted she

had been experimented on, a detailed abduction story emerged. But when she came out of the trance, and examined a video of the

session, she recognized that something like a dream had been

caught surfacing. Over the next year, though, she repeatedly

flashed back to the dream material. The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus

has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to

believe they saw something they didn't. In a typical experiment,

subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being

questioned about what they saw, they're casually given false

information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to,

although there wasn't one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some

vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remember the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given

the false information, the more people allow their memories to be

tampered with. Loftus argues that 'memories of an event more

closely resemble a story undergoing constant revision than a

packet of pristine information'.

There are many other examples, some - a spurious memory of

being lost as a child in a shopping mall, for instance - of greater

emotional impact. Once the key idea is suggested, the patient

often plausibly fleshes out the supporting details. Lucid but wholly

false recollections can easily be induced by a few cues and

questions, especially in the therapeutic setting. Memory can be

contaminated. False memories can be implanted even in minds

that do not consider themselves vulnerable and uncritical. Stephen Ceci of Cornell University, Loftus and their colleagues

have found, unsurprisingly, that preschoolers are exceptionally

vulnerable to suggestion. The child who, when first asked, cor-

rectly denies having caught his hand in a mousetrap later remem-

bers the event in vivid, self-generated detail. When more directly

told about 'some things that happened to you when you were

little', over time they easily enough assent to the implanted

memories. Professionals watching videotapes of the children can

do no better than chance in distinguishing false memories from

true ones. Is there any reason to think that adults are wholly

immune to the fallibilities exhibited by children?

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War Two in

Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi

concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he

apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had

not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr

Reagan told an epic story of World War Two courage and

sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it

was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer - that made

quite an impression on me, too, when I saw it at age 9.

Many

other instances of this sort can be found in Reagan's public

statements. It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers

emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific

On the Distinction between True and False Visions

or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid

fiction. In preparing for courtroom testimony, witnesses are coached by

their lawyers. Often, they are made to repeat the story over and

over again, until they get it 'right'.

Then, on the stand what they

remember is the story they've been telling in the lawyer's office. The nuances have been shaded. Or it may no longer correspond,

even in its major features, to what really happened. Conveniently,

the witnesses may have forgotten that their memories were

reprocessed. These facts are relevant in evaluating the societal effects of

advertising and of national propaganda. But here they suggest

that on alien abduction matters - where interviews typically take

place years after the alleged event - therapists must be very

careful that they do not accidentally implant or select the stories

they elicit. Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory frag-

ments stitched on to a fabric of our own devising. If we sew

cleverly enough, we have made ourselves a memorable story easy

to recall. Fragments by themselves, unencumbered by association,

are harder to retrieve. The situation is rather like the method of

science itself where many isolated data points can be remem-

bered, summarized and explained in the framework of a theory. We then much more easily recall the theory and not the data. In science the theories are always being reassessed and con-

fronted with new facts; if the facts are seriously discordant -

beyond the error bars - the theory may have to be revised. But in

everyday life it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts

about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never

challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how

flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision. More than gods and demons, the best-attested apparitions are

those of saints, especially the Virgin Mary in Western Europe

from late medieval to modern times. While alien abduction stories

have much more the flavour of profane, demonic apparitions,

insight into the UFO myth can also be gained from visions

described as sacred. Perhaps best known are those of Jeanne

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

d'Arc in France, St Bridget in Sweden, and Girolamo Savonarola

in Italy. But more appropriate for our purpose are the apparitions

seen by shepherds and peasants and children. In a world plagued

by uncertainty and horror, these people longed for contact with

the divine. A detailed record of such events in Castile and

Catalonia is provided by William A. Christian Jr in his book

Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (1981).

In a typical case, a rural woman or child reports encountering

a girl or an oddly tiny woman - perhaps three or four feet tall -

who reveals herself to be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. She requests the awestruck witness to go to the village fathers

or the local Church authorities and order them to say prayers

for the dead, or obey the Commandments, or build a shrine at

this very spot in the countryside. If they do not comply, dire

penalties are threatened, perhaps the plague. Alternatively, in

plague-infested times, Mary promises to cure the disease but

only if her request is satisfied. The witness tries to do as she is told. But when she informs her

father or husband or priest, she is ordered to repeat the story to no

one; it is mere female foolishness or frivolity or demonic halluci-

nation. So she keeps quiet. Days later she is confronted again by

Mary, a little put out that her request has not been honoured. 'They will not believe me,' the witness complains. 'Give me a

sign.' Evidence is needed. So Mary - who seems to have had no foreknowledge that

evidence would have to be provided - provides a sign. The

villagers and priests are promptly convinced. The shrine is built. Miraculous cures occur in its vicinity. Pilgrims come from far and

wide. Priests are busy. The economy of the region booms. The

original witness is appointed keeper of the sacred shrine. In most of the cases we know of, there was a commission of

inquiry, comprising leaders civic and ecclesiastic, who attested to

the genuineness of the apparition, despite initial, almost exclu-

sively male, scepticism. But the standards of evidence were not

generally high. In one case the testimony of a delirious eight-year-

old boy, taken two days before his death from plague, was soberly

accepted. Some of these commissions deliberated decades or even

a century after the event. 134

On the Distinction between True and False Visions

In On the Distinction between True and False Visions, an expert

on the subject, Jean Gerson, in around 1400, summarized the

criteria for recognizing a credible witness of an apparition: one

was the willingness to accept advice from the political and

religious hierarchy. Thus anyone seeing a vision disturbing to

those in power was ipso facto an unreliable witness, and saints and

virgins could be made to say whatever the authorities wanted to

hear. The 'signs' allegedly provided by Mary, the evidence offered

and considered compelling, included an ordinary candle, a piece

of silk, and a magnetic stone; a piece of coloured tile; footprints;

the witness's unusually quick gathering of thistles; a simple

wooden cross inserted in the ground; welts and wounds on the

witness; and a variety of contortions - a 12-year-old with her hand

held funny, or legs folded back, or a closed mouth making her

temporarily mute - that are 'cured' the moment her story is

accepted. In some cases accounts may have been compared and coordi-

nated before testimony was given. For example, multiple wit-

nesses in a small town might tell of a tall, glowing woman dressed

all in white carrying an infant son and surrounded by a radiance

that lit up the street the previous night. But in other cases, people

standing directly beside the witness could see nothing, as in this

report of a 1617 apparition from Castile:

'Aye, Bartolome, the lady who came to me these past days is

coming through the meadow, and she is kneeling and embrac-

ing the cross there - look at her, look at her!' The youth

though he looked as hard as he could saw nothing except

some small birds flying around above the cross. Possible motives for inventing and accepting such stories are

not hard to find: jobs for priests, notaries, carpenters and

merchants, and other boosts to the original economy in a time

of depression; augmented social status of the witness and her

family; prayers once again offered for relatives buried in

graveyards later abandoned because of plague, drought and

war; rousing public spirit against enemies, especially Moors;

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

improving civility and obedience to canon law; and confirming

the faith of the pious. The fervour of pilgrims in such shrines

was impressive; it was not uncommon for rock scrapings or dirt

from the shrine to be mixed with water and drunk as medicine. But I'm not suggesting that most witnesses made the whole

business up. Something else was going on. Almost all the urgent requests by Mary were remarkable for

their prosaicness - for example, in this 1483 apparition from

Catalonia:

1 charge you by your soul to charge the souls of the men of the

parishes of El Torn, Milleras, El Salent, and Sant Miquel de

Campmaior to charge the souls of the priests to ask the

people to pay up the tithes and all the duties of the church

and restore other things that they hold covertly or openly

which are not theirs to their rightful owners within thirty

days, for it will be necessary, and observe well the holy

Sunday. And second that they should cease and desist from blas-

pheming and they should pay the usual charitas mandated by

their dead ancestors. Often the apparition is seen just after the witness awakes. Francisca la Brava testified in 1523 that she had gotten out ofbed

'without knowing if she was in control of her senses', although in

later testimony she claimed to be hilly awake. (This was in

response to a question which allowed a gradation of possibilities:

fully awake, dozing, in a trance, asleep.) Sometimes details are

wholly missing, such as what the accompanying angels looked

like; or Mary is described as both tall and short, both mother and

child, characteristics that unmistakably suggest themselves as

dream material. In the Dialogue on Miracles written around 1223

by Caesarius of Heisterbach, clerical visions of the Virgin Mary

often occurred during matins, which took place at the sleepy

midnight hour. It is natural to suspect that many, perhaps all, of these

apparitions were a species of dream, waking or sleeping, com-

pounded by hoaxes (and by forgeries; there was a thriving

136

On the Distinction between True and False Visions

business in contrived miracles: religious paintings and statues dug

up by accident or divine command).

The matter was addressed in

the Siete Partidas, the codex of canon and civil law compiled under

the direction of Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile, around 1248.

it we can read the following:

Some men fraudulently discover or build altars in fields or in

towns, saying that there are relics of certain saints in those

places and pretending that they perform miracles, and, for

this reason, people from many places are induced to go there

as on a pilgrimage, in order to take something away from

them; and there are others who influenced by dreams or

empty phantoms which appear to them, erect altars and

pretend to discover them in the above named localities. In listing the reasons for erroneous beliefs, Alfonso lays out a

continuum from sect, opinion, fantasy and dream to hallucination. A kind of fantasy named antoianca is defined as follows:

Antoianca is something that stops before the eyes and then

disappears, as one sees or hears it in a trance, and so is

without substance. A 1517 papal bull distinguishes between apparitions that appear

'in dreams or divinely'.

Clearly, the secular and ecclesiastical

authorities, even in times of extreme credulity, were alert to the

possibilities of hoax and delusion. Nevertheless, in most of medieval Europe, such apparitions

were greeted warmly by the Roman Catholic clergy, especially

because the Marian admonitions were so congenial to the

priesthood. A pathetic few 'signs' of evidence - a stone or a

footprint and never anything unfakeable - sufficed. But begin-

ning in the fifteenth century, around the time of the Protestant

Reformation, the attitude of the Church changed. Those who

reported an independent channel to Heaven were outflanking

the Church's chain of command up to God. Moreover, a few of

the apparitions - Jeanne d'Arc's, for example - had awkward

political or moral implications. The perils represented by

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Jeanne d' Arc's visions were described by her inquisitors in 1431

in these words:

The great danger was shown to her that comes of someone so

presumptuous to believe they have such apparitions and

revelations, and therefore lie about matters concerning God,

giving out false prophecies and divinations not known from

God, but invented. From which could follow the seduction of

peoples, the inception of new sects, and many other impieties

that subvert the Church and Catholics. Both Jeanne d'Arc and Girolamo Savonarola were burned at the

stake for their visions. In 1516 the Fifth Lateran Council reserved to 'the Apostolic

seat' the right to examine the authenticity of apparitions. For poor

peasants whose visions had no political content, the punishments

fell short of the ultimate severity. The Marian apparition seen by

Francisca la Brava, a young mother, was described by Licenciado

Mariana, the Lord Inquisitor, as 'to the detriment of our holy

Catholic faith and the diminution of its authority'.

Her apparition

'was all vanity and frivolity'.

'By rights we could have treated her

more rigorously', the Inquisitor continued. But in deference to certain just reasons that move us to

mitigate the rigour of the sentences we decree as a punish-

ment to Francisca la Brava and an example to others not to

attempt similar things that we condemn her to be put on an

ass and given one hundred lashes in public through the

accustomed streets of Belmonte naked from the waist up, and

the same number in the town of El Quintanar in the same

manner. And that from now on she not say or affirm in public

or secretly by word or insinuation the things she said in her

confessions or else she will be prosecuted as an impenitent

and one who does not believe in or agree with what is in our

holy Catholic faith. Despite the penalties, it is striking how often the witness stuck to

her guns and, ignoring the encouragements offered her to confess

138

On the Distinction between True and False Visions

that she was lying or dreaming or confused, insisted that she really

and truly had seen the vision. In a time when nearly everyone was illiterate, before news-

papers, radio and television, how could the religious and mono-

graphic detail of these apparitions have been so similar?

William

Christian believes there is a ready answer in cathedral dramaturgy

(especially Christmas plays), in itinerant preachers and pilgrims,

and in church sermons. Legends about nearby shrines spread

quickly. People sometimes came from a hundred miles or more so

that, say, their sick child could be cured by a pebble that had been

trodden on by the Mother of God. Legends influenced apparitions

and vice versa. In a time haunted by drought, plague and war,

with no social or medical services available to the average person,

with public literacy and the scientific method unheard of, sceptical

thinking was rare. Why are the admonitions so prosaic?

Why is a vision of so

illustrious a personage as the Mother of God necessary so, in a

tiny county populated by a few thousand souls, a shrine will be

repaired or the populace will refrain from cursing?

Why not

important and prophetic messages whose significance could be

recognized in later years as something that could have emanated

only from God or the saints?

Wouldn't this have greatly enhanced

the Catholic cause in its mortal struggle with Protestantism and

the Enlightenment?

But we have no apparitions cautioning the

Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centred

Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany - two

matters of considerable moral as well as historical import, on

which Pope John Paul 11, to his credit, has admitted that the

Church has erred. Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and

burning 'witches' and heretics. Why not?

Were they unaware of

what was going on?

Could they not grasp its evil?

And why is

Mary always ordering the poor peasant to inform the authori-

ties?

Why doesn't she admonish the authorities herself?

Or the

King?

Or the Pope?

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

it is true, some of the apparitions have taken on greater import

- at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, where the Virgin was incensed

that a secular government had replaced a government run by

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the Church, and at Garabandal, Spain, in 1961-5, where the

end of the world was threatened unless conservative political

and religious doctrines were adopted forthwith. 1 think 1 can see many parallels between Marian apparitions and

alien abductions, even though the witnesses in the former cases

are not promptly taken to Heaven and don't have their reproduc-

tive organs meddled with. The beings reported are diminutive,

most often about two-and-a-half to four feet high. They come

from the sky. The content of the communication is, despite its

purported celestial origin, mundane. There seems to be a clear

connection with sleep and dreams. The witnesses, often females,

are troubled about speaking out, especially after encountering

ridicule from males in positions of authority. Nevertheless they

persist: they really saw such a thing, they insist. Means of

conveying the stories exist; they are eagerly discussed, permitting

details to be coordinated even among witnesses who have never

met one another. Others present at the time and place of the

apparition see nothing unusual. The purported 'signs' or evidence

are, without exception, nothing that humans couldn't acquire or

fabricate on their own. Indeed, Mary seems unsympathetic to the

need for evidence, and occasionally is willing to cure only those

who had believed the account of her apparition before she

supplied 'signs'.

And while there are no therapists, per se, the

society is suffused by a network of influential parish priests and

their hierarchical superiors who have a vested interest in the

reality of the visions. In our time, there are still apparitions of Mary and other angels,

but also, as summarized by G. Scott Sparrow, a psychotherapist

and hypnotist, of Jesus. In I Am With You Always: True Stories of

Encounters with Jesus (Bantam, 1995), first-hand accounts, some

moving, some banal, of such encounters are laid out. Oddly, most

of them are straightforward dreams, acknowledged as such, and

the ones called visions are said to differ from dreams 'only because

we experience them while we are awake'.

But, for Sparrow,

judging something 'only a dream' does not compromise its exter-

nal reality. For Sparrow, any being you dream of, and any

incident, really exists in the world outside your head. He specifi-

cally denies that dreams are 'purely subjective'.

Evidence doesn't

140

On the Distinction between True and False Visions

enter into it. If you dreamed it, if it felt good, if it elicited wonder,

why then it really happened. There's not a sceptical bone in

Sparrow's body. When Jesus tells a troubled woman in an

'intolerable' marriage to throw the bum out. Sparrow admits that

this poses problems for 'advocates of a scripturally consistent

position'.

In that case, '[ultimately, perhaps, one could say that

virtually all presumed guidance is generated from within'.

What if

someone reported a dream in which Jesus counselled, say, abor-

tion - or vengeance?

And if indeed somewhere, somehow we

must eventually draw the line and conclude that some dreams are

invented by the dreamer, why not all?

Why would people invent abduction stories?

Why, for that

matter, would people appear on TV audience participation pro-

grammes devoted to sexual humiliation of the 'guests' - the

current rage in America's video wasteland?

Discovering that

you're an alien abductee is at least a break from the routine of

everyday life. You gain the attention of peers, therapists, maybe

even the media. There is a sense of discovery, exhilaration, awe. What will you remember next?

You begin to believe that you may

be the harbinger or even the instrument of momentous events now

rolling towards us. And you don't want to disappoint your

therapist. You crave his or her approval. 1 think there can very

well be psychic rewards in becoming an abductee. For comparison, consider product tampering cases, which con-

vey very little of the sense of wonder that surrounds UFOs and

alien abductions: someone claims to find a hypodermic syringe in

a popular soft drink can. Understandably, this is upsetting. It's

reported in newspapers and especially on television news. Soon

there's a spate, a virtual epidemic of similar reports from all over

the country. But it's very hard to see how a hypodermic syringe

could get into a can at the factory, and in none of the cases are

witnesses present when an intact can is opened and a syringe

discovered inside. Slowly the evidence accumulates that this is a 'copycat' crime. People have only been pretending to find syringes in soft drink

cans. Why would anyone do it?

What possible motives could they

have?

Some psychiatrists say that the primary motives are greed

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

(they'll sue the manufacturer for damages), a craving for atten-

tion, and a wish to be portrayed as a victim. Note there are no

therapists touting the reality of needles in cans and urging their

patients, subtly or directly, to go public with the news. Also,

serious penalties are levied for product tampering, and even for

falsely alleging that products have been tampered with. In con-

trast, there are therapists who encourage abductees to tell their

stories to mass audiences, and no legal penalties are exacted for

falsely claiming you've been abducted by a UFO. Whatever your

reason for going down this road, how much more satisfying it must

be to convince others that you've been chosen by higher beings for

their own enigmatic purpose than that by mere happenstance

you've found a hypodermic syringe in your cola. 142

Therapy

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead

of theories to suit facts. Sherlock Holmes,

in Arthur Conan Doyle's

A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)

True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories

were so convincing that they replaced reality. Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

Strange Pilgrims (1992)

J ohn Mack is a Harvard University psychiatrist whom I've

known for many years. 'Is there anything to this UFO busi-

ness?' he asked me long ago. 'Not much,' I replied. 'Except of

course on the psychiatric side.'

He looked into it, interviewed abductees, and was converted. He now accepts the accounts of abductees at face value. Why?

'I wasn't looking for this,' he says. 'There's nothing in my

background that prepared me' for the alien abduction story. 'It's

completely persuasive because of the emotional power of these

experiences.' In his book. Abductions, Mack explicitly proposes

the very dangerous doctrine that 'the power or intensity with

which something is felt' is a guide to whether it's true. 143

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

I can personally attest to the emotional power. But aren't

powerful emotions a routine component of our dreams?

Don't we

sometimes awake in stark terror?

Doesn't Mack, himself the

author of a book on nightmares, know about the emotional power

of hallucinations?

Some of Mack's patients describe themselves as

having hallucinated since childhood. Have the hypnotists and

psychotherapists working with 'abductees' made conscientious

attempts to steep themselves in the body of knowledge on

hallucinations and perceptual malfunctions?

Why do they believe

these witnesses but not those who reported, with comparable

conviction, encounters with gods, demons, saints, angels and

fairies?

And what about those who hear irresistible commands

from a voice within?

Are all deeply felt stories true?

A scientist of my acquaintance says, 'If the aliens would only

keep all the folks they abduct, our world would be a little saner.'

But her judgement is too harsh. It doesn't seem to be a matter of

sanity. It's something else. The Canadian psychologist Nicholas

Spanos and his colleagues concluded that there are no obvious

pathologies in those who report being abducted by UFOs. How-

ever,

intense UFO experiences are more likely to occur in individu-

als who are disposed to esoteric beliefs in general and alien

beliefs in particular and who interpret unusual sensory and

imaginal experiences in terms of the alien hypothesis. Among

UFO believers, those with stronger propensities toward

fantasy production were particularly likely to generate such

experiences. Moreover, such experiences were likely to be

generated and interpreted as real events rather than imagin-

ings when they were associated with restricted sensory envi-

ronments ...

(e. g., experiences that occurred at night and in

association with sleep).

What a more critical mind might recognize as a hallucination or a

dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an

elusive but profound external reality. Some alien abduction accounts may conceivably be disguised

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Therapy

memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father,

stepfather, uncle or mother's boyfriend represented as an alien. Surely it's more comforting to believe that an alien abused you

than that it was done by someone you trusted and loved. Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny

this, saying they would know if their patients were sexually

abused. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one

in four American women and one in six American men have been

sexually abused in childhood (although these estimates are prob-

ably too high).

It would be astonishing if a significant number of

patients who present themselves to alien abduction therapists had

not been so abused, perhaps even a larger proportion than in the

general population. Both sexual abuse therapists and alien abduction therapists

spend months, sometimes years, encouraging their subjects to

remember being abused. Their methods are similar, and their

goals are in a way the same - to recover painful memories, often

of long ago. In both cases the therapist believes the patient to be

suffering from trauma attendant to an event so terrible that it is

repressed. 1 find it striking that alien abduction therapists find so

few cases of sexual abuse and vice versa. Those who have in fact been subjected to childhood sexual

abuse or incest are, for very understandable reasons, sensitive

about anything that seems to minimize or deny their experience. They are angry, and they have every right to be. In the US, at

least one in ten women have been raped, almost two-thirds before

the age of 18.

A recent survey reports that one-sixth of all rape

victims reported to police are under the age of 12.

(And this is the

category of rape least likely to be reported.) One-fifth of these

girls were raped by their fathers. They have been betrayed. I want

to be very clear about this: there are many real cases of ghoulish

sexual predation by parents, or those acting in the role of parents. Compelling physical evidence - photos, for example, or diaries, or

gonorrhoea or chlamydia in the child - have in some cases come to

light. Abuse of children has been implicated as a major probable

cause of social problems. According to one survey, 85 per cent of

all violent prison inmates were abused in childhood. Two-thirds of

all teenage mothers were raped or sexually abused as children or

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

teenagers. Rape victims are ten times more likely than other

women to use alcohol and other drugs to excess. The problem is

real and urgent. Most of these tragic and incontestable cases of

childhood sexual abuse, however, have been continuously remem-

bered into adulthood. There is no hidden memory to be retrieved. While there is better reporting today than in the past, there

does seem to be a significant increase in cases of child abuse

reported each year by hospitals and law enforcement authorities,

rising in the United States ten-fold (to 1.7 million cases) between

1967 and 1985.

Alcohol and other drugs, as well as economic

stresses, are pointed to as the 'reasons' adults are more prone to

abuse children today than in the past. Perhaps increasing publicity

given to contemporary cases of child abuse emboldens adults to

remember and focus on the abuse they once suffered. A century ago, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of

repression, the forgetting of events in order to avoid intense

psychic pain, as a coping mechanism essential for mental health. It

seemed to emerge especially in patients diagnosed with 'hysteria',

the symptoms of which included hallucinations and paralysis. At

first Freud believed that behind every case of hysteria was a

repressed instance of childhood sexual abuse. Eventually Freud

changed his explanation to hysteria being caused by fantasies - not

all of them unpleasant - of having been sexually abused as a child. The burden of guilt was shifted from parent to child. Something

like this debate rages today. (The reason for Freud's change of

heart is still being disputed - the explanations ranging from his

provoking outrage among his Viennese middle-aged male peers,

to his recognition that he was taking the stories of hysterics

seriously.)

Instances in which the 'memory' suddenly surfaces, especially

at the ministrations of a psychotherapist or hypnotist, and

where the first 'recollections' have a ghost- or dreamlike quality

are highly questionable. Many such claims of sexual abuse

appear to be invented. The Emory University psychologist

Ulric Neisser says:

There is child abuse, and there are such things as repressed

memories. But there are also such things as false memories

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Therapy

and confabulations, and they are not rare at all. Misremem-

berings are the rule, not the exception. They occur all the

time. They occur even in cases where the subject is absolutely

confident - even when the memory is a seemingly unforgetta-

ble flashbulb, one of those metaphorical mental photographs. They are still more likely to occur in cases where suggestion is

a lively possibility, where memories can be shaped and

re-shaped to meet the strong interpersonal demands of a

therapy session. And once a memory has been reconfigured

in this way, it is very, very hard to change. These general principles cannot help us to decide with

certainty where the truth lies in any individual case or claim. But

on the average, across a large number of such claims, it is pretty

obvious where we should place our bets. Misremembering and

retrospective reworking of the past are a part of human nature;

they go with the territory and they happen all the time. Survivors of the Nazi death camps provide the clearest imagina-

ble demonstration that even the most monstrous abuse can be

carried continuously in human memory. Indeed, the problem

for many Holocaust survivors has been to put some emotional

distance between themselves and the death camps, to forget. But if in some alternative world of inexpressible evil they were

forced to live in Nazi Germany - let's say a thriving post-Hitler

nation with its ideology intact, except that it's changed its mind

about anti-Semitism - imagine the psychological burden on

Holocaust survivors then. Then perhaps they would be able to

forget, because remembering would make their current lives

unbearable. If there is such a thing as the repression and

subsequent recall of ghastly memories, then perhaps it requires

two conditions: (1) that the abuse actually happened, and (2)

that the victim was required to pretend for long periods of time

that it never happened. The University of California social psychologist Richard Ofshe

explains:

When patients are asked to explain how the memories

returned, they report assembling fragments of images, ideas,

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

feelings, and sensations into marginally coherent stories. As

the so-called memory work stretches out for months, feelings

become vague images, images become figures, and figures

become known persons. Vague discomfort in certain parts of

the body is reinterpreted as childhood rape ...

The original

physical sensations, sometimes augmented by hypnosis, are

then labeled 'body memories'.

There is no conceivable

mechanism by which the muscles of the body could store

memories. If these methods fail to persuade, the therapist

may resort to still more heavy-handed practices. Some

patients are recruited into survivor groups in which peer

pressure is brought to bear, and they are asked to demon-

strate politically correct solidarity by establishing themselves

as members of a survivor subculture. A cautious 1993 statement by the American Psychiatric Associa-

tion accepts the possibility that some of us forget childhood abuse

as a means of coping, but warns,

It is not known how to distinguish, with complete accuracy,

memories based on true events from those derived from other

sources ...

Repeated questioning may lead individuals to

report 'memories' of events that never occurred. It is not

known what proportion of adults who report memories of

sexual abuse were actually abused ...

A strong prior belief

by the psychiatrist that sexual abuse, or other factors, are or

are not the cause of the patient's problems is likely to

interfere with appropriate assessment and treatment. On the one hand, callously to dismiss charges of horrifying sexual

abuse can be heartless injustice. On the other hand, to tamper

with people's memories, to infuse false stories of childhood abuse,

to break up intact families, and even to send innocent parents to

prison is also heartless injustice. Scepticism is essential on both

sides. Picking our way between these two extremes can be very

tricky. Early editions of the influential book by Ellen Bass and

Laura David (The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women

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Therapy

Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 1988) give illuminating advice

to therapists:

Believe the survivor. You must believe your client was

sexually abused, even if she doubts it herself ...

Your client

needs you to stay steady in the belief that she was abused. Joining a client in doubt would be like joining a suicidal client

in her belief that suicide is the best way out. If a client is

unsure that she was abused but thinks she might have been,

work as though she was. So far, among the hundreds of

women we've talked to and the hundreds more we've heard

about, not one has suspected that she might have been

abused, explored it, and determined that she wasn't. But Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the

Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit of the FBI

Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a leading expert on the sexual

victimization of children, wonders: 'Are we making up for centu-

ries of denial by now blindly accepting any allegation of child

abuse, no matter how absurd or unlikely?' '1 don't care if it's true,'

replies one California therapist reported by The Washington Post. 'What actually happened is irrelevant to me ...

We all live in a

delusion.'

The existence of any false accusation of childhood sexual abuse

- especially those created under the ministrations of an authority

figure - has, it seems to me, relevance to the alien abduction issue. If some people can with great passion and conviction be led to

falsely remember being abused by their own parents, might not

others, with comparable passion and conviction, be led to falsely

remember being abused by aliens?

The more 1 look into claims of alien abduction, the more

similar they seem to reports of 'recovered memories' of child-

hood sexual abuse. And there's a third class of related claims,

repressed 'memories' of satanic ritual cults - in which sexual

torture, coprophilia, infanticide and cannibalism are said to be

prominently featured. In a survey of 2,700 members of the

American Psychological Association, 12 per cent replied that

they had treated cases of satanic ritual abuse (while 30 per cent

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

reported cases of abuse done in the name of religion).

Some-

thing like 10,000 cases are reported annually in the United

States in recent years. A significant number of those touting the

peril of rampant satanism in America, including law enforce-

ment officers who organize seminars on the subject, turn out to

be Christian fundamentalists; their sects explicitly require a

literal devil to be meddling in everyday human life. The

connection is neatly drawn in the saying 'No Satan, no God'.

Apparently, there is a pervasive police gullibility problem on

this matter. Here are some excerpts from FBI expert Lanning's

analysis of 'Satanic, Occult and Ritualistic Crime', based on bitter

experience, and published in the October 1989 issue of the

professional journal. The Police Chief:

Almost any discussion of satanism and witchcraft is inter-

preted in the light of the religious beliefs of those in the

audience. Faith, not logic and reason, governs the religious

beliefs of most people. As a result, some normally sceptical

law enforcement officers accept the information disseminated

at these conferences without critically evaluating it or ques-

tioning the sources ...

For some people satanism is any

religious belief system other than their own. Lanning then offers a long list of belief systems he has

personally heard described as satanism at such conferences. It

includes Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Churches, Islam,

Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, rock and roll music, chan-

nelling, astrology and New Age beliefs in general. Is there not a

hint here about how witch hunts and pogroms get started?

continues:

Within the personal religious belief system of a law enforce-

ment officer, Christianity may be good and satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an

important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement

officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code,

not the Ten Commandments ...

The fact is that far more

crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the

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Therapy

name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been

committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that

statement, but few can argue with it. Many of those alleging satanic abuse describe grotesque orgiastic

rituals in which infants are murdered and eaten. Such claims have

been made about reviled groups by their detractors throughout

European history, including the Cataline conspirators in Rome,

the Passover 'blood libel' against the Jews, and the Knights

Templar as they were being dismantled in fourteenth-century

France. Ironically, reports of cannibalistic infanticide and incestu-

ous orgies were among the particulars used by Roman authorities

to persecute the early Christians. After all, Jesus himself is quoted

as saying (John vi, 53) 'Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,

and drink his blood, ye have no life in you'.

Although the next line

makes it clear Jesus is talking about eating his own flesh and

drinking his own blood, unsympathetic critics might have misun-

derstood the Greek 'Son of man' to mean 'child' or 'infant'.

Tertullian and other early Church fathers defended themselves

against these grotesque accusations as best they could. Today, the lack of corresponding numbers of lost infants and

young children in police files is explained by the claim that all over

the world babies are being bred for this purpose, surely reminis-

cent of abductee claims that alien/human breeding experiments

are rampant. Also similar to the alien abduction paradigm, satanic

cult abuse is said to pass down from generation to generation in

certain families. To the best of my knowledge, as in the alien

abduction paradigm, no physical evidence has ever been offered

in a court of law to support such claims. Their emotional power,

though, is evident. The mere possibility that such things are going

on rouses us mammals to action. When we give credence to

satanic ritual, we also raise the social status of those who warn us

of the supposed danger. Consider these five cases: (1) Myra Obasi, a Louisiana school-

teacher, was - she and her sisters believed after consultation with

a hoodoo practitioner - possessed by demons. Her nephew's

nightmares were part of the evidence. So they left for Dallas,

abandoned their five children, and the sisters then gouged out Ms

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Obasi's eyes. At the trial, she defended her sisters. They were

trying to help her, she said. But hoodoo is not devil-worship; it is a

cross between Catholicism and African-Haitian nativist religion. (2) Parents beat their child to death because she would not

embrace their brand of Christianity. (3) A child molester justifies

his acts by reading the Bible to his victims. (4) A 14-year-old boy

has his eyeball plucked out of his head in an exorcism ceremony. His assailant is not a satanist, but a Protestant fundamentalist

minister engaged in religious pursuits. (5) A woman thinks her

12-year-old son is possessed by the devil. After an incestuous

relationship with him, she decapitates him. But there is no satanic

ritual content to the 'possession'.

The second and third cases come from FBI files. The last two

come from a 1994 study by Dr Gail Goodman, a psychologist at

the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues, done for

the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. They examined

over 12,000 claims of sexual abuse involving satanic ritual cults,

and could not find a single one that held up to scrutiny. Therapists

reported satanic abuse based only on, for instance, 'patient's

disclosure via hypnotherapy' or children's 'fear of satanic sym-

bols'.

In some cases diagnosis was made on the basis of behaviour

common to many children. 'In only a few cases was physical

evidence mentioned - usually, "scars".' But in most cases the

'scars' were very faint or non-existent. 'Even when there were

scars, it was not determined whether the victims themselves had

caused them.' This also is very similar to alien abduction cases, as

described below. George K. Ganaway, Professor of Psychiatry at

Emory University, proposes that 'the most common likely cause

of cult-related memories may very well turn out to be a mutual

deception between the patient and the therapist'.

One of the most troublesome cases of 'recovered memory' of

satanic ritual abuse has been chronicled by Lawrence Wright in a

remarkable book. Remembering Satan (1994).

It concerns Paul

Ingram, a man who may have had his life ruined because he was

too gullible, too suggestible, too unpractised in scepticism. Ingram

was, in 1988, Chairman of the Republican Party in Olympia,

Washington, the chief civil deputy in the local sheriffs depart-

ment, well regarded, highly religious, and responsible for warning

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children in social assemblies of the dangers of drugs. Then came

the nightmare moment when one of his daughters - after a highly

emotional session at a fundamentalist religious retreat - levelled

the first of many charges, each more ghastly than the previous,

that Ingram had sexually abused her, impregnated her, tortured

her, made her available to other sheriffs deputies, introduced her

to satanic rites, dismembered and ate babies ...

This had gone

on since her childhood, she said, almost to the day she began to

'remember' it all. Ingram could not see why his daughter should lie about this,

although he himself had no recollection of it. But police investiga-

tors, a consulting psychotherapist, and his minister at the Church

of Living Water all explained that sex offenders often repressed

memories of their crimes. Strangely detached but at the same time

eager to cooperate, Ingram tried to recall. After a psychologist

employed a closed-eye hypnotic technique to induce trance,

Ingram began to visualize something similar to what the police

were describing. What came to mind were not like real memories,

but something like snatches of images in a fog. Every time he

produced one - the more so the more odious the content - he was

encouraged and reinforced. His pastor assured him that God

would permit only genuine memories to surface in his reveries. 'Boy, it's almost like I'm making it up,' Ingram said, 'but I'm not.'

He suggested that a demon might be responsible. Under the same

sort of influences, with the Church grapevine circulating the latest

horrors that Ingram was confessing, and the police pressuring them,

his other children and his wife also began 'remembering'.

Prominent

citizens were accused of participating in the orgiastic rites. Law

enforcement officers elsewhere in America began paying attention. This was only the tip of the iceberg, some said. When Berkeley's Richard Ofshe was called in by the prosecu-

tion, he performed a control experiment. It was a breath of fresh

air. Merely suggesting to Ingram that he had forced his son and

daughter to commit incest and asking him to use the 'memory

recovery' technique he had learned, promptly elicited just such a

'memory'.

It required no pressure, no intimidation - just the

suggestion and the technique were enough. But the alleged

participants, who had 'remembered' so much else, denied it ever

153

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

happened. Confronted with this evidence, Ingram vehemently

denied he was making anything up or was influenced by others. His memory of this incident was as clear and 'real' as all his other

recollections. One of the daughters described the terrible scars on her body

from torture and forced abortions. But when she finally received a

medical examination, there were no corresponding scars to be

seen. The prosecution never tried Ingram on charges of satanic

abuse. Ingram hired a lawyer who had never tried a criminal case. On his pastor's advice, he did not even read Ofshe's report: it

would only confuse him, he was told. He pleaded guilty to six

counts of rape, and ultimately was sent to prison. In jail, while

awaiting sentencing, away from his daughters, his police col-

leagues and his pastor, he reconsidered. He asked to withdraw his

guilty plea. His memories had been coerced. He had not distin-

guished real memories from a kind of fantasy. His plea was

rejected. He is serving a twenty-year sentence. If it was the

sixteenth century instead of the twentieth, perhaps the whole

family would have been burned at the stake, along with a good

fraction of the leading citizens of Olympia, Washington. The existence of a highly sceptical FBI report on the general

subject of satanic abuse (Kenneth V. Lanning, 'Investigator's

Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse', January 1992) is

widely ignored by enthusiasts. Likewise, a 1994 study by the

British Department of Health into claims of satanic abuse there

concluded that, of 84 alleged instances, not one stood up to

scrutiny. What then is all the furore about?

The study explains,

The Evangelical Christian campaign against new religious

movements has been a powerful influence encouraging the

identification of satanic abuse. Equally, if not more, impor-

tant in spreading the idea of satanic abuse in Britain are the

'specialists', American and British. They may have few or

even no qualifications as professionals, but attribute their

expertise to 'experience of cases'.

Those convinced that devil cults represent a serious danger to our

society tend to be impatient with sceptics. Consider this analysis

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Therapy

by Corydon Hammond, PhD, past President of the American

Society for Clinical Hypnosis:

1 will suggest to you that these people [sceptics] are either,

one, naive and of limited clinical experience; two, have a kind

of naivete that people have of the Holocaust, or they're just

such intellectualizers and sceptics that they'll doubt every-

thing; or, three, they're cult people themselves. And 1 can

assure that there are people who are in that position ...

There are people who are physicians, who are mental health

professionals, who are in the cults, who are raising trans-

generational cults ...

1 think the research is real clear: We

got three studies, one found 25 percent, one found 20 percent

of out-patient multiples [multiple personality disorders]

appear to be cult-abuse victims, and another on a specialized

in-patient unit found 50 percent. In some of his statements, he seems to believe that satanic Nazi

mind control experiments have been performed by the CIA on

tens of thousands of unsuspecting American citizens. The over-

arching motive, Hammond believes, is to 'create a satanic order

that will rule the world'.

In all three classes of 'recovered memories', there are specialists

- alien abduction specialists, satanic cult specialists, and specialists

in recalling repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. As is

common in mental health practice, patients select or are referred

to a therapist whose specialist seems relevant to their complaint. In all three classes, the therapist helps to draw forth images of

events alleged to have occurred long ago (in some cases from

decades past); in all three, therapists are profoundly moved by the

unmistakably genuine agony of their patients; in all three, at least

some therapists are known to ask leading questions - which are

virtually orders by authority figures to suggestible patients insist-

ing that they remember (1 almost wrote 'confess'); in all three,

there are networks of therapists who trade client histories and

therapeutic methods; in all three, practitioners feel the necessity

of defending their practice against more sceptical colleagues; in all

three, the iatrogenic hypothesis is given short shrift; in all three,

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the majority of those who report abuse are women. And in all

three classes - with the exceptions mentioned - there is no

physical evidence. So it's hard not to wonder whether alien

abductions might be part of some larger picture. What could this larger picture be?

I posed this question to Dr

Fred H. Frankel, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical

School, Chief of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and

a leading expert on hypnosis. His answer:

If alien abductions are a part of a larger picture, what indeed

is the larger picture?

I fear to rush in where angels fear to

tread; however, the factors you outline all feed what was

described at the turn of the century as 'hysteria'.

The term,

sadly, became so widely used that our contemporaries in their

dubious wisdom ...

not only dropped it, but also lost sight of

the phenomena it represented: high levels of suggestibility,

imaginal capacity, sensitivity to contextual cues and expecta-

tions, and the element of contagion ...

Little of all of this

seems to be appreciated by a large number of practicing

clinicians. In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve

forgotten memories of 'past lives', Frankel notes that therapists

can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can

'remember' their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as

in regression or in Mack's abductee hypnosis. 'These people are

not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,'

Frankel says. 'They cannot distinguish their confabulations from

their experiences.'

If we fail to cope, if we're saddled with a burden of guilt for not

having made more of ourselves, wouldn't we welcome the profes-

sional opinion of a therapist with a diploma on the wall that it's

not our fault, that we're off the hook, that satanists, or sexual

abusers, or aliens from another planet are the responsible parties?

Wouldn't we be willing to pay good money for this reassurance?

And wouldn't we resist smart-ass sceptics telling us that it's all in

our heads, or that it's implanted by the very therapists who have

made us happier about ourselves?

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Therapy

How much training in scientific method and sceptical scrutiny, in

statistics, or even in human fallibility have these therapists received?

Psychoanalysis is not a very self-critical profession, but at least

many of its practitioners have MD degrees. Most medical curricula

include significant exposure to scientific results and methods. But

many of those dealing with abuse cases seem to have at best a

casual acquaintance with science. Mental health providers in

America are more likely by about two-to-one to be social workers

than either psychiatrists or PhD psychologists. Most of these therapists contend that their responsibility is to

support their patients, not to question, to be sceptical, or to raise

doubts. Whatever is presented, no matter how bizarre, is accepted. Sometimes the prompting by therapists is not at all subtle. Here

[from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's FMS Newsletter,

vol. 4, no. 4, p. 3, 1995] is a hardly atypical report:

My former therapist has testified that he still believes that my

mother is a satanist, [and] that my father molested me ...

was my therapist's delusional belief system and techniques

involving suggestion and persuasion that led me to believe

the lies were memories. When 1 doubted the reality of the

memories he insisted they were true. Not only did he insist

they were true, he informed me that in order to get well 1

must not only accept them as real, but remember them all. In a 1991 case in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, a teenager, Nicole

Althaus, encouraged by a teacher and a social worker, accused her

father of having sexually abused her, resulting in his arrest. Nicole also

reported that she had given birth to three children, who her relatives

had killed, that she had been raped in a crowded restaurant, and that

her grandmother flew about on a broom. Nicole recanted her allega-

tions the following year, and all charges against her father were

dropped. Nicole and her parents brought a civil suit against the

therapist and psychiatric clinic to whom Nicole had been referred

shortly after she began making her accusations. The jury found that

the doctor and the clinic had been negligent and awarded almost a

quarter of a million dollars to Nicole and her parents. There are

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Might the competition among therapists for patients, and the

obvious financial interest of therapists in prolonged therapy, make

them less likely to offend patients by evincing some scepticism

about their stories?

How aware are they of the dilemma of a naive

patient walking into a professional office and being told that the

insomnia or obesity is due (in increasing order of bizarreness) to

wholly forgotten parental abuse, satanic ritual, or alien abduction?

While there are ethical and other constraints, we need something

like a control experiment: perhaps the same patient sent to special-

ists in all three fields. Does any of them say, 'No, your problem isn't

due to forgotten childhood abuse' (or forgotten satanic ritual, or

alien abduction, as appropriate)?

How many of them say, 'There's a

much more prosaic explanation'?

Instead, Mack goes so far as to

tell one of his patients admiringly and reassuringly that he is on a

'hero's journey'.

One group of 'abductees' - each having a separate

but similar experience - writes

[Sjeveral of us had finally summoned enough courage to

present our experiences to professional counselors, only to

have them nervously avoid the subject, raise an eyebrow in

silence or interpret the experience as a dream or waking

hallucination and patronizingly 'reassure' us that such things

happen to people, 'but don't worry, you're basically mentally

sound.' Great!

We're not crazy, but if we take our experiences

seriously, then we might become crazy!

With enormous relief, they found a sympathetic therapist who not

only accepted their stories at face value, but was hill of stories of

alien bodies and high-level government cover-up of UFOs. A typical UFO therapist finds his subjects in three ways: they

write letters to him at an address given in the back of his books;

they are referred to him by other therapists (mainly those who also

specialize in alien abductions); or they come up to him after he

presents a lecture. 1 wonder if any patient arrives at his portal

wholly ignorant of popular abduction accounts and the therapist's

own methods and beliefs. Before any words are exchanged, they

know a great deal about one another. Another prominent therapist gives his patients his own articles on

158

Therapy

alien abductions to help them 'remember' their experiences. He is

gratified when what they eventually recall under hypnosis resembles

what he describes in his papers. The similarity of the cases is one of

his chief reasons for believing that abductions really occur. A leading UFO scholar comments that 'When the hypnotist does

not have an adequate knowledge of the subject [of alien abductions],

the true nature of the abduction may never be revealed'.

Can we

discern in this remark how the patient might be led without the

therapist realizing that he's leading?

Sometimes when 'falling' asleep we have the sense of toppling from

a height, and our limbs suddenly flail on their own. The startle

reflex, it's called. Perhaps it's left over from when our ancestors slept

in trees. Why should we imagine we recollect (a wonderful word)

any better than we know when we're on firm ground?

Why should

we suppose that, of the vast treasure of memories stored in our

heads, none of it could have been implanted after the event, by how

a question is phrased when we're in a suggestible frame of mind, by

the pleasure of telling or hearing a good story, by confusion with

something we once read or overheard?

159

The Dragon in My Garage

[MJagic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands

collaboration between the artist and his public. E.M. Butler,

The Myth of the Magus (1948)

A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.' Suppose (I'm

following a group therapy approach by the psychologist

Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have

been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no

real evidence. What an opportunity!

'Show me,' you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and

see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle - but no dragon. 'Where's the dragon?' you ask. 'Oh, she's right here,' 1 reply, waving vaguely. '1 neglected to

mention that she's an invisible dragon.'

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to

capture the dragon's footprints. 'Good idea,' 1 say, 'but this dragon floats in the air.'

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. 'Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.'

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible. 'Good idea, except she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint

won't stick.'

160

The Dragon in My Garage

An so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a

special explanation of why it won't work. Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal,

floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?

there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experi-

ment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my

dragon exists?

Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at

all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested,

assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever

value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of

wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in

the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that

there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on

inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what

convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucina-

tion would certainly enter your mind. But then why am 1 taking it

so seriously?

Maybe 1 need help. At the least, maybe I've

seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish

to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the

notion that there's a fire -breathing dragon in my garage. You merely

put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new

body of data emerges you're prepared to examine it and see if it

convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being

believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative,

merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of 'not proved'.

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible,

all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a

jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how

sceptical you might have been about the existence of dragons - to

say nothing about invisible ones - you must now acknowledge that

there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consist-

ent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon. Now another scenario: suppose it's not just me. Suppose that

several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're

pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you they have dragons

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in their garages, but in every case the evidence is maddeningly

elusive: All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd

a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us

is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible

dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with

us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But

maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about

dragons weren't myths at all ...

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now

reported. But they're never made when a sceptic is looking. An

alternative explanation presents itself: on close examination it

seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another

dragon enthusiast shows up with a burned finger and attributes it

to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But

again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other

ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such

'evidence' - no matter how important the dragon advocates

consider it - is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible

approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open

to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be

that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same

strange delusion. Magic requires tacit cooperation of the audience with the magi-

cian - an abandonment of scepticism, or what is sometimes

described as the willing suspension of disbelief. It immediately

follows that to penetrate the magic, to expose the trick, we must

cease collaborating. How can further progress be made in this emotionally laden,

controversial and vexing subject?

Patients might exercise caution

about therapists quick to deduce or confirm alien abductions. Those treating abductees might explain to their patients that

hallucinations are normal, and that childhood sexual abuse is

disconcertingly common. They might bear in mind that no client

can be wholly uncontaminated by the aliens in popular culture. They might take scrupulous care not subtly to lead the witness. They might teach their clients scepticism. They might recharge

their own dwindling reserves of the same commodity. 162

The Dragon in My Garage

Purported alien abductions trouble many people and in more

ways than one. The subject is a window into the internal lives of

our fellows. If many falsely report being abducted, this is cause for

worry. But much more worrisome is that so many therapists

accept these reports at face value, with inadequate attention given

to the suggestibility of clients and to unconscious cuing by their

interlocutors. I'm surprised that there are psychiatrists and others with at least

some scientific training, who know the imperfections of the

human mind, but who dismiss the idea that these accounts might

be some species of hallucination, or some kind of screen memory. I'm even more surprised by claims that the alien abduction story

represents true magic, that it is a challenge to our grip on reality,

or that it constitutes support for a mystical view of the world. Or,

as the matter is put by John Mack, 'There are phenomena

important enough to warrant serious research, and the metaphys-

ics of the dominant Western scientific paradigm may be inad-

equate hilly to support this research.' In an interview with Time

magazine, he goes on to say:

I don't know why there's such a zeal to find a conventional

physical explanation. I don't know why people have such

trouble simply accepting the fact that something unusual is

going on here ...

We've lost all that ability to know a world

beyond the physical.*

But we know that hallucinations arise from sensory deprivation,

drugs, illness and high fever, a lack of REM sleep, changes in

brain chemistry and so on, And even if, with Mack, we took the

cases at face value, their remarkable aspects (slithering through

walls and so on) are more readily attributable to something well

within the realm of 'the physical' - advanced alien technology -

than to witchcraft. A friend of mine claims that the only interesting question in the

* And then, in a sentence that reminds us how close the alien abduction

paradigm is to messianic and chiliastic religion, Mack concludes, 'I am a bridge

between those two worlds.'

163

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alien abduction paradigm is 'Who's conning who?' Is the client

deceiving the therapist, or vice versa?

I disagree. For one thing,

there are many other interesting questions about claims of alien

abduction. For another, those two alternatives aren't mutually

exclusive. Something about the alien abduction cases tugged at my memory

for years. Finally, I remembered. It was a 1954 book I had read in

college, The Fifty-Minute Hour. The author, a psychoanalyst named

Robert Lindner, had been called by the Los Alamos National

Laboratory to treat a brilliant young nuclear physicist whose delu-

sional system was beginning to interfere with his secret government

research. The physicist (given the pseudonym Kirk Allen) had, it

turned out, another life besides making nuclear weapons: in the far

future, he confided, he piloted (or will pilot - the tenses get a little

addled) interstellar spacecraft. He enjoyed rousing, swashbuckling

adventures on planets of other stars. He was 'lord' of many worlds. Perhaps they called him Captain Kirk. Not only could he 'remember'

this other life; he could also enter into it whenever he chose. By

thinking in the right way, by wishing, he could transport himself

across the light years and the centuries. In some way I could not comprehend, by merely desiring it to

be so, I had crossed the immensities of space, broken out of

time, and merged with - literally became - that distant and

future self ...

Don't ask me to explain. 1 can't, although

God knows I've tried. Lindner found him intelligent, sensitive, pleasant, polite and

perfectly able to deal with everyday human affairs. But, in

reflecting on the excitement of his life among the stars, Allen had

found himself a little bored with his life on Earth, even if it did

involve building weapons of mass destruction. When admonished

by his laboratory supervisors for distraction and dreaminess, he

apologized; he would try, he assured them, to spend more time on

this planet. That's when they contacted Lindner. Allen had written 12,000 pages on his experiences in the future,

and dozens of technical treatises on the geography, politics, architec-

ture, astronomy, geology, life forms, genealogy and ecology of the

164

The Dragon in My Garage

planets of other stars. A flavour of the material is given by these

monograph titles: 'The Unique Brain Development of the Chrysto-

peds of Srom Norba X', 'Fire Worship and Sacrifice on Srom Sodrat

IT, "The History of the Intergalactic Scientific Institute', and 'The

Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the

Stardrive to Space Travel'.

(That last is the one I'd like to see; after

all, Allen was said to have been a first-rate physicist.) Fascinated,

Lindner pored over the material. Allen was not in the least shy about presenting his writings to

Lindner or discussing them in detail. Unflappable and intellectu-

ally formidable, he seemed not to be yielding an inch to Lindner's

psychiatric ministrations. When everything else failed, the psy-

chiatrist attempted something different:

I tried ...

to avoid giving in any way the impression that I

was entering the lists with him to prove that he was psychotic,

that this was to be a tug of war over the question of his sanity. Instead, because it was obvious that both his temperament

and training were scientific, I set myself to capitalize on the

one quality he had demonstrated throughout his life ...

the

quality that urged him toward a scientific career: his curios-

ity ...

This meant ...

that at least for the time being I

'accepted' the validity of his experiences ...

In a sudden

flash of inspiration it came to me that in order to separate

Kirk from his madness it was necessary for me to enter his

fantasy and, from that position, to pry him loose from the

psychosis. Lindner highlighted certain apparent contradictions in the docu-

ments and asked Allen to resolve them. This required the

physicist to re-enter the future to find the answers. Dutifully,

Allen would arrive at the next session with a clarifying document

written in his neat hand. Lindner found himself eagerly awaiting

each interview, so he could be once more captivated by the vision

of abundant life and intelligence in the galaxy. Between them,

they were able to resolve many problems of consistency. Then a strange thing happened: 'The materials of Kirk's

psychosis and the Achilles heel of my personality met and meshed

165

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

like the gears of a clock.' The psychoanalyst became a

co-conspirator in his patient's delusion. He began to reject

psychological explanations of Allen's story. How sure are we that

it couldn't really be true?

He found himself defending the notion

that another life, that of a spacefarer in the far future, could be

entered into by a simple effort of the will. At a startlingly rapid rate ...

larger and larger areas of my

mind were being taken over by the fantasy ...

With Kirk's

puzzled assistance 1 was taking part in cosmic adventures,

sharing the exhilaration of the sweeping extravaganza he had

plotted. But eventually, an even stranger thing happened: concerned for

the well-being of his therapist, and mustering admirable reserves

of integrity and courage, Kirk Allen confessed: he had made the

whole thing up. It had roots in his lonely childhood and his

unsuccessful relationships with women. He had shaded, and then

forgotten, the boundary between reality and imagination. Filling

in plausible details and weaving a rich tapestry about other worlds

was challenging and exhilarating. He was sorry he had led Lindner

down this primrose path. 'Why,' the psychiatrist asked, 'why did you pretend?

Why did

you keep on telling me ...?'

'Because I felt I had to,' the physicist replied. 'Because I felt

you wanted me to. '

'Kirk and I reversed roles,' Lindner explained,

and, in one of those startling denouements that make my

work the unpredictable, wonderful and rewarding pursuit it

is, the folly we shared collapsed ...

I employed the rationali-

zation of clinical altruism for personal ends and thus fell into

a trap that awaits all unwary therapists of the mind ...

Until

Kirk Allen came into my life, I had never doubted my own

stability. The aberrations of mind, so I had always thought,

were for others ...

I am ashamed by this smugness. But

now, as 1 listen from my chair behind the couch, I know

better. I know that my chair and the couch are separated only

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The Dragon in My Garage

by a thin line. I know that it is, after all, but a happier

combination of accidents that determines, finally, who shall

lie on the couch, and who shall sit behind it. I'm not sure from this account that Kirk Allen was truly delu-

sional. Maybe he was just suffering from some character disorder

which delighted in inventing charades at the expense of others. I

don't know to what extent Lindner may have embellished or

invented part of the story. While he wrote of 'sharing' and of

'entering' Allen's fantasy, there is nothing to suggest that the

psychiatrist imagined he himself voyaged to the far future and

partook of interstellar high adventure. Likewise, John Mack and

the other alien abduction therapists do not suggest that they have

been abducted; only their patients. What if the physicist hadn't confessed?

Might Lindner have

convinced himself, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it really was

possible to slip into a more romantic era?

Would he have said he

started out as a sceptic, but was convinced by the sheer weight of

the evidence?

Might he have advertised himself as an expert who

assists space travellers from the future who are stranded in the

twentieth century?

Would the existence of such a psychiatric

speciality encourage others to take fantasies or delusions of this

sort seriously?

After a few similar cases, would Lindner have

impatiently resisted all arguments of the 'Be reasonable, Bob'

variety, and deduced he was penetrating some new level of

reality?

His scientific training helped to save Kirk Allen from his

madness. There was a moment when therapist and patient had

exchanged roles. I like to think of it as the patient saving the

therapist. Perhaps John Mack was not so lucky. Consider a very different approach to finding aliens - the radio

search for extraterrestrial intelligence. How is this different from

fantasy and pseudoscience?

In Moscow in the early 1960s, Soviet

astronomers held a press conference in which they announced that

the intense radio emission from a mysterious distant object called

CTA-102 was varying regularly, like a sine wave, with a period of

about 100 days. No periodic distant source had ever before been

167

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

found. Why did they convene a press conference to announce so

arcane a discovery?

Because they thought they had detected an

extraterrestrial civilization of immense powers. Surely, that's worth

calling a press conference for. The report was briefly a media

sensation, and the rock group, The Byrds, even composed and

recorded a song about it. ('CTA-102, we're over here receiving you./

Signals tell us that you're there./ We can hear them loud and

clear...')

Radio emission from CTA-102?

Certainly. But what is CTA-102?

Today we know that CTA-102 is a distant quasar. At the time, the

word 'quasar' had not even been coined. We still don't know very

well what quasars are; and there is more than one mutually exclu-

sive explanation for them in scientific literature. Nevertheless, no

astronomers today, including those involved in that Moscow press

conference, seriously contend that a quasar like CTA-102 is some

extraterrestrial civilization billions of light years away with access

to immense power levels. Why not?

Because we have alternative

explanations of the properties of quasars that are consistent with

known physical laws and that do not invoke alien life. Extraterres-

trials represent a hypothesis of last resort. You reach for it only if

everything else fails. In 1967, British scientists found a much nearer intense radio

source turning on and off with astonishing precision, its period

constant to ten or more significant figures. What was it?

Their first

thought was that it was a message intended for us, or maybe an

interstellar navigation and timing beacon for spacecraft that ply the

space between the stars. They even gave it, among themselves at

Cambridge University, the wry designation LGM-1 - LGM stand-

ing for Little Green Men. However, they were wiser than their Soviet counterparts. They

did not call a press conference. It soon became clear that what

they were observing was what is now called a 'pulsar', the first

pulsar to be discovered. So, what's a pulsar?

A pulsar is the end

state of a massive star, a sun shrunk to the size of a city, held up

as no other stars are, not by gas pressure, not by electron

degeneracy, but by nuclear forces. It is in a certain sense an

atomic nucleus a mile or so across. Now that, I maintain, is a

notion at least as bizarre as an interstellar navigation beacon. The

The Dragon in My Garage

answer to what a pulsar is has to be something mighty strange. It

isn't an extraterrestrial civilization. It's something else: but a

something else that opens our eyes and our minds and indicates

unguessed possibilities in Nature. Anthony Hewish won the Nobel

Prize in physics for the discovery of pulsars. The original Ozma experiment (the first intentional radio

search for extraterrestrial intelligence), the Harvard University/

Planetary Society META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay)

programme, the Ohio State University search, the SERENDIP

Project of the University of California, Berkeley, and many other

groups have all detected anomalous signals from space that make

the observer's heart palpitate a little. We think for a moment that

we've picked up a genuine signal of intelligent origin from far

beyond our solar system. In reality, we have not the foggiest idea

what it is, because the signal does not repeat. A few minutes later,

or the next day, or years later you turn the same telescope to the

same spot in the sky with the same frequency, bandpass, polariza-

tion, and everything else, and you don't hear a thing. You don't

deduce, much less announce, aliens. It may have been a statisti-

cally inevitable electronic surge, or a malfunction in the detection

system, or a spacecraft (from Earth), or a military aircraft flying

by and broadcasting on channels that are supposed to be reserved

for radio astronomy. Maybe it's even a garage door opener down

the street or a radio station a hundred kilometres away. There are

many possibilities. You must systematically check out all the

alternatives, and see which ones can be eliminated. You don't

declare that aliens have been found when your only evidence is an

enigmatic non-repeating signal. And if the signal did repeat, would you then announce it to the

press and the public?

You would not. Maybe someone's hoaxing

you. Maybe it's something you haven't been smart enough to

figure out that's happening to your detection system. Maybe it's

some previously unrecognized astrophysical source. Instead, you

would call scientists at other radio observatories and inform them

that at this particular spot in the sky, at this frequency and

bandpass and all the rest, you seem to be getting something funny. Could they please see if they can confirm?

Only if several

independent observers - all of them fully aware of the complexity

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

of Nature and the fallibility of observers - get the same kind of

information from the same spot in the sky do you seriously

consider that you have detected a genuine signal from alien

beings. There's a certain discipline involved. We can't just go off

shouting 'little green men' every time we detect something we

don't at first understand, because we're going to look mighty silly

- as the Soviet radio astronomers did with CTA-102 - when it

turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary

when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our

minds before the evidence is in. It's permitted not to be sure. I'm frequently asked, 'Do you believe there's extraterrestrial

intelligence?' 1 give the standard arguments - there are a lot of

places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the

word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me

if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is

as yet no compelling evidence for it. Often, I'm asked next, 'What do you really think?'

I say, T just told you what 1 really think.'

'Yes, but what's your gut feeling?'

But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about

understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain,

as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in. I would be very happy if flying saucer advocates and alien

abduction proponents were right and real evidence of extraterres-

trial life were here for us to examine. They do not ask us, though,

to believe on faith. They ask us to believe on the strength of their

evidence. Surely it is our duty to scrutinize the purported evidence

at least as closely and sceptically as radio astronomers do who are

searching for alien radio signals. No anecdotal claim - no matter how sincere, no matter how

deeply felt, no matter how exemplary the lives of the attesting

citizens - carries much weight on so important a question. As in

the older UFO cases, anecdotal accounts are subject to irreducible

error. This is not a personal criticism of those who say they've

been abducted or of those who interrogate them. It is not

170

The Dragon in My Garage

tantamount to contempt for purported witnesses." It is not, or

should not be, arrogant dismissal of sincere and affecting testi-

mony. It is merely a reluctant response to human fallibility. If any powers whatever may be ascribed to the aliens - because

their technology is so advanced - then we can account for any

discrepancy, inconsistency or implausibility. For instance, one

academic UFOlogist suggests that both the aliens and the abduct-

ees are rendered invisible during the abduction (although not to

each other); that's why more of the neighbours haven't noticed. Such 'explanations' can explain anything, and therefore in fact

nothing. American police procedure concentrates on evidence and not

anecdotes. As the European witch trials remind us, suspects can

be intimidated during interrogation; people confess to crimes they

never committed; eyewitnesses can be mistaken. This is also the

linchpin of much detective fiction. But real, unfabricated evidence

- powder burns, fingerprints, DNA samples, footprints, hair

under the fingernails of the struggling victim - carry great weight. Criminalists employ something very close to the scientific method,

and for the same reasons. So in the world of UFOs and alien

abductions, it is fair to ask: where is the evidence - the real,

unambiguous physical evidence, the data that would convince a

jury that hasn't already made up its mind?

Some enthusiasts argue that there are 'thousands' of cases of

'disturbed' soil where UFOs supposedly landed, and why isn't that

good enough?

It isn't good enough because there are ways of

disturbing the soil other than by aliens in UFOs - humans with

shovels is a possibility that springs readily to mind. One UFOlo-

gist rebukes me for ignoring '4,400 physical trace cases from 65

countries'.

But not one of these cases, so far as 1 know, has been

analysed with results published in a peer-reviewed journal in

physics or chemistry, metallurgy or soil science, showing that the

'traces' could not have been generated by people. It's a modest

enough scam compared, say, with the crop circles of Wiltshire. *They cannot be called, simply, witnesses - because whether they witnessed

anything (or, at least, anything in the outside world) is often the very point at

issue. 171

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Likewise, not only can photographs easily be faked, but huge

numbers of alleged photographs of UFOs have without a doubt

been faked. Some enthusiasts go out night after night into a field

looking for bright lights in the sky. When they see one, they flash

their flashlights. Sometimes, they say, there's an answering flash. Well, maybe. But low-altitude aircraft make lights in the sky, and

pilots are able, if so inclined, to blink their lights back. None of

this constitutes anything approaching serious evidence. Where is the physical evidence?

As in satanic ritual abuse

claims (and echoing 'Devil's marks' in the witch trials), the most

common physical evidence pointed to are scars and 'scoop marks'

on the bodies of abductees - who say they have no knowledge of

where their scars came from. But this point is key: if the scars are

within human capacity to generate, then they cannot be compel-

ling physical evidence of abuse by aliens. Indeed, there are

well-known psychiatric disorders in which people scoop, scar,

tear, cut and mutilate themselves (or others).

And some of us with

high pain thresholds and bad memories can injure ourselves

accidentally with no recollection of the event. One of John Mack's patients claims to have scars all over her

body that are wholly baffling to her physicians. What do they look

like?

Oh, she can't show them; as in the witch mania, they're in

private places. Mack considers this compelling evidence. Has he

seen the scars?

Can we have photographs of the scars taken by a

sceptical physician?

Mack knows, he says, a quadriplegic with

scoop marks and considers this a reductio ad absurdum of the

sceptical position; how can a quadriplegic scar himself?

The

argument is a good one only if the quadriplegic is hermetically

sealed in a room to which no other human has access. Can we see

his scars?

Can an independent physician examine him?

Another of

Mack's patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from

her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive

system baffles her gynaecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the

case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal

of Medicine?

Apparently it's not that baffling. Then we have the fact that one of his subjects made the whole

thing up, as reported by Time magazine, and Mack didn't have a

clue. He bought it hook, line and sinker. What are his standards of

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The Dragon in My Garage

critical scrutiny?

If he allowed himself to be deceived by one

subject, how do we know the same wasn't true of all?

Mack talks about these cases, the 'phenomena', as posing a

fundamental challenge to western thinking, to science, to logic

itself. Probably, he says, the abducting entities are not alien

beings from our own universe, but visitors from 'another dimen-

sion'.

Here's a typical, and revealing, passage from his book:

When abductees call their experience 'dreams', which they

often do, close questioning can elicit that this may be a

euphemism to cover what they are sure cannot be that,

namely an event from which there was no awakening that

occurred in another dimension. Now the idea of higher dimensions did not arise from the brow of

UFOlogy or the New Age. Instead, it is part and parcel of the

physics of the twentieth century. Since Einstein's general relativ-

ity, a truism of cosmology is that space-time is bent or curved

through a higher physical dimension. Kaluza-Klein theory posits

an eleven-dimensional universe. Mack presents a thoroughly

scientific idea as the key to 'phenomena' beyond the reach of

science. We know something about how a higher-dimensional object

would look in encountering our three-dimensional universe. For

clarity, let's go down one dimension: an apple passing through a

plane must change its shape as perceived by two-dimensional

beings confined to the plane. First it seems to be a point, then

larger apple cross-sections, then smaller ones, a point again, and

finally - poof!

- gone. Similarly, a fourth- or higher-dimensional

object - provided it's not a very simple figure such as a hypercyl-

inder passing through three dimensions along its axis - will wildly

alter its geometry as we witness it passing through our universe. If

aliens were systematically reported as shape-changers, I could

at least see how Mack might pursue the notion of a higher-

dimensional origin. (Another problem is trying to understand

what a genetic cross between a three-dimensional and a four-

dimensional being means. Are the offspring from the 3 !4

dimension?)

173

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

What Mack really means when he talks about beings from other

dimensions is that, despite his patients' occasional descriptions of

their experiences as dreams and hallucinations, he hasn't the

foggiest notion of what they are. But, tellingly, when he tries to

describe them, he reaches for physics and mathematics. He wants

it both ways - the language and credibility of science, but without

being bound by its method and rules. He seems not to realize that

the credibility is a consequence of the method. The main challenge posed by Mack's cases is the old one of

how to teach critical thinking more broadly and more deeply in

a society - conceivably even including Harvard professors of

psychiatry - awash in gullibility. The idea that critical thinking

is the latest western fad is silly. If you're buying a used car in

Singapore or Bangkok, or a used chariot in ancient Susa or

Rome, the same precautions will be useful as in Cambridge,

Massachusetts. When you buy a used car, you might very much want to believe

what the salesman is saying: 'So much car for so little money!'

And anyway, it takes work to be sceptical; you have to know

something about cars, and it's unpleasant to make the salesman

angry at you. Despite all that, though, you recognize that the

salesman might have a motive to shade the truth, and you've

heard of other people in similar situations being taken. So you

kick the tyres, look under the hood, go for a test drive, ask

searching questions. You might even bring along a mechanically

inclined friend. You know that some scepticism is required and

you understand why. There is usually at least a small degree of

hostile confrontation involved in the purchase of a used car and

nobody claims it's an especially cheering experience. But if you

don't exercise some minimal scepticism, if you have an absolutely

untrammelled gullibility, there's a price you'll have to pay later. Then you'll wish you had made a small investment of scepticism

early on. Many homes in America now have moderately sophisticated

burglar alarm systems, including infrared sensors and cameras

triggered by motion. An authentic videotape, with time and date

denoted, showing an alien incursion - especially as they slip

through the walls - might be very good evidence. If millions of

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The Dragon in My Garage

Americans have been abducted, isn't it strange that not one lives

in such a home?

Some women, so the story goes, are impregnated by aliens or

alien sperm; the foetuses are then removed by the aliens. Vast

numbers of such cases are alleged. Isn't it odd that nothing

anomalous has ever been seen in routine sonograms of such

foetuses, or in amniocentesis, and that there has never been a

miscarriage producing an alien hybrid?

Or are medical personnel

so doltish that they idly glance at the half-human, half-alien foetus

and move on to the next patient?

An epidemic of missing foetuses

is something that would surely cause a stir among gynaecologists,

midwives, obstetrical nurses, especially in an age of heightened

feminist awareness. But not a single medical record has been

produced substantiating such claims. Some UFOlogists consider it a telling point that women who

claim to have been sexually inactive wind up pregnant, and

attribute their state to alien impregnation. A goodly number

appear to be teenagers. Taking their stories at face value is not the

only option available to the serious investigator. Surely we can

understand why, in the anguish of an unwanted pregnancy, a

teenager living in a society flooded with accounts of alien visita-

tion might invent such a story. Here, too, there are possible

religious antecedents. Some abductees say that tiny implants, perhaps metallic, were

inserted into their bodies, high up their nostrils, for example. These implants, alien abduction therapists tell us, sometimes

accidentally fall out, but 'in all but a few of the cases the artefact

has been lost or discarded'.

These abductees seem stupefyingly

incurious. A strange object, possibly a transmitter sending tele-

metered data about the state of your body to an alien spaceship

somewhere above the Earth, drops out of your nose; you idly

examine it and then throw it in the garbage. Something like this is

true, we are told, of the majority of abduction cases. A few such 'implants' have been produced and examined by

experts. None has been confirmed as of unearthly manufacture. No components are made of unusual isotopes, despite the fact that

other stars and other worlds are known to be constituted of

different isotopic proportions from the Earth. There are no metals

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

from the transuranic 'island of stability', where physicists think

there should be a new family of non-radioactive chemical ele-

ments unknown on Earth. What abduction enthusiasts considered the best case was that of

Richard Price, who claims that aliens abducted him when he was

eight years old and implanted a small artefact in his penis. A

quarter century later a physician confirmed a 'foreign body'

embedded there. After eight more years, it fell out. Roughly a

millimetre in diameter and four millimetres long, it was carefully

examined by scientists from MIT and Massachusetts General

Hospital. Their conclusion?

Collagen formed by the body at sites

of inflammation plus cotton fibres from Price's underpants. On 28 August 1995, television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch

ran what was purported to be an autopsy of a dead alien, shot on

16-millimetre film. Masked pathologists in vintage radiation-

protection suits (with rectangular glass windows to see out of) cut up

a large-eyed 12-fingered figure and examined the internal organs. While the film was sometimes out of focus, and the view of the

cadaver often blocked by the humans crowding around it, some

viewers found the effect chilling. The Times of London, also owned

by Murdoch, didn't know what to make of it, although it did quote

one pathologist who thought the autopsy performed with unseemly

and unrealistic haste (ideal, though, for television viewing).

It was

said to have been shot in New Mexico in 1947 by a participant, now

in his eighties, who wished to remain anonymous. What appeared to

be the clincher was the announcement that the leader of the film (its

first few feet) contained coded information that Kodak, the manu-

facturer, dated to 1947.

However, it turns out that the full film

magazine was not presented to Kodak, just the cut leader. For all we

know, the leader could have been cut from a 1947 newsreel,

abundantly archived in America, and the 'autopsy' staged and filmed

separately and recently. There's a dragon footprint all right - but a

fakable one. If this is a hoax, as 1 think likely, it requires not much

more cleverness than crop circles and the MJ-12 document. In none of these stories is there anything strongly suggestive of

extraterrestrial origin. There is certainly no retrieval of cunning

machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has

filched a page from the captain's logbook, or an examining

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The Dragon in My Garage

instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of

the ship, or come back with detailed and verifiable scientific

information not hitherto available on Earth. Why not?

These

failures must tell us something. Since the middle of the twentieth century, we've been assured

by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical

evidence - not star maps remembered from years ago, not scars,

not disturbed soil, but real alien technology - was in hand. The

analysis would be released momentarily. These claims go back to

the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and GeBauer. Now

it's decades later and we're still waiting. Where are the articles

published in the refereed scientific literature, in the metallurgical

and ceramics journals, in publications of the Institute of Electrical

and Electronic Engineers, in Science or Nature?

Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real

artefacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the privi-

lege of discovering that there are aliens among us who use, say,

unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or

ductility or conductivity. The practical implications of such a

finding, never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion, would

be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something. Keeping an open mind is a virtue - but, as the space engineer

James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. Of

course we must be willing to change our minds when warranted by

new evidence. But the evidence must be strong. Not all claims to

knowledge have equal merit. The standard of evidence in most of

the alien abduction cases is roughly what is found in cases of the

apparition of the Virgin Mary in medieval Spain. The pioneering psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, had much

that was sensible to say on issues of this sort. He explicitly argued

that UFOs were a kind of projection of the unconscious mind. In a

related discussion of regression and what today is called 'channel-

ling', he wrote

One can very well ...

take it simply as a report of psycho-

logical facts or a continuous series of communications from

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the unconscious ...

They have this in common with dreams;

for dreams, too, are statements about the unconscious ...

The

present state of affairs gives us reason enough to wait quietly

until more impressive physical phenomena put in an appear-

ance. If, after making allowance for conscious and unconscious

falsification, self-deception, prejudice, etc., we should still find

something positive behind them, then the exact sciences will

surely conquer this field by experiment and verification, as has

happened in every other realm of human experience. Of those who accept such testimony at face value, he remarked

These people are lacking not only in criticism but in the most

elementary knowledge of psychology. At bottom they do not

want to be taught any better, but merely to go on believing -

surely the naivest of presumptions in view of our human failings. Perhaps some day there will be a UFO or alien abduction case that

is well attested, accompanied by compelling physical evidence,

and explicable only in terms of extraterrestrial visitation. It's hard

to think of a more important discovery. So far, though, there have

been no such cases, nothing that comes close. So far, the invisible

dragon has left no unfakable footprints. Which, then, is more likely: that we're undergoing a massive

but generally overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that

people are experiencing some unfamiliar internal mental state

they do not understand?

Admittedly, we're very ignorant both

about extraterrestrial beings, if any, and about human psychol-

ogy. But if these really were the only two alternatives, which one

would you pick?

And if the alien abduction accounts are mainly about brain

physiology, hallucinations, distorted memories of childhood, and

hoaxing, don't we have before us a matter of supreme importance,

touching on our limitations, the ease with which we can be misled

and manipulated, the fashioning of our beliefs, and perhaps even

the origins of our religions?

There is genuine scientific paydirt in

UFOs and alien abductions - but it is, I think, of a distinctly

home-grown and terrestrial character. 178

The City of Grief

...

how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief. Rainer Maria Rilke,

'The Tenth Elegy' (1923)

A short summary of the argument in the preceding seven

chapters appeared in Parade magazine on 7 March 1993.

was struck by how many letters it evoked, how passionate were

the responses, and how much agony is associated with this strange

experience whatever its true explanation might be. Alien abduc-

tion accounts provide an unexpected window into the lives of

some of our fellow citizens. Some letter writers reasoned, some

asserted, some harangued, some were frankly perplexed, some

were deeply troubled. The article was also widely misunderstood. A television talk-

show host, Geraldo Rivera, held up a copy of Parade and

announced I thought we were being visited. A Washington Post

video cassette reviewer quoted me as saying there's an abduction

every few seconds, missing the ironical tone and the following

sentence ('It's surprising more of the neighbours haven't

noticed').

My description (Chapter 6) of on rare occasions seem-

ing to hear the voices of my dead parents - what I described as 'a

lucid recollection' - were keynoted by Raymond Moody, in the

New Age Journal and in the Introduction of his book Reunions, as

evidence that we 'survive' death. Dr Moody has spent his life

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

trying to find evidence of life after death. If my testimony is worth

quoting, it seems clear he hasn't found much. Many letter writers

concluded that since I had worked on the possibility of extrater-

restrial life, I must 'believe' in UFOs; or conversely that, if I was

sceptical about UFOs, I must embrace the absurd belief that

humans are the only intelligent beings in the Universe. There's

something about this subject unconducive to clear thinking. Here, without further comment, is a representative sampling of

my mail on the subject:

• I wonder how some of our fellow animals may describe their

encounters with us. They see a large hovering object making a

terrible noise above them. They begin to run and feel a sharp

pain in their side. Suddenly they fall to the ground ...

Several

man-creatures approach them carrying strange-looking instru-

ments. They examine your sexual organs and teeth. They place

a net under you and then let it take you in the air with a strange

device. After all the examinations, they then clamp a strange

metal object on your ear. Then, just as suddenly as they had

appeared, they are gone. Eventually, muscle control returns,

and a poor disoriented creature staggers off into the forest, not

knowing [whether] what just transpired was a nightmare or a

reality. • I was sexually abused as a child. In my recovery 1 have drawn

many 'space beings' and have felt many times 1 was being

overpowered, held down, and the sensation of having left my

body to float around the room. None of the abductee accounts

really come as a surprise to someone who has dealt with

childhood sexual abuse issues ...

Believe me, I would much

rather have blamed my abuse on a space alien than have to face

the truth about what happened to me with the adults I was

supposed to be able to trust. It's been driving me crazy to hear

some of my friends speak of their memories that imply they

have been abducted by aliens ...

I keep saying to them that

this is the ultimate victim role in which we as adults have no

power when these little gray men come to us in our sleep!

This

is not real. The ultimate victim role is the one between an

abusive parent and a victimized child. 180

The City of Grief

1 don't know if these people are some sort of demons, or if they

really don't exist. My daughter said she had sensors put in her

body when she was small. 1 don't know ...

We keep our doors

locked and bolted and it really scares me. 1 don't have the

money to send her to a good doctor, and she can't work on

account of all this ...

My daughter is hearing a voice on a tape. These go out at night and take kids and sexually abuse them, if

you don't do as they say, someone in your family will be hurt. Who in their right mind would harm little children?

They know

everything that is said in the house ...

Somebody said long,

long ago somebody put a curse on our family. If somebody did,

how do you get the curse off?

1 know all this sounds strange and

bizarre, but believe me it's scary. How many human females who had the misfortune of being

raped had the foresight to take from their attacker an ID card,

a picture of the rapist, or anything else which could be used as

evidence as to an alleged rape?

1 for one will be sleeping with my Polaroid from now on, in

hopes that the next time I'm abducted I can provide the proof

needed ...

Why should it be up to the abductees to prove

what's happening?

I am living proof of Carl Sagan's claim of the possibility that

alien abductions occur in the minds of people suffering from

sleep paralysis. They truly believe it's real. In AD 2001 Starships from the 33 planets of the Interplanetary

Confederation will land on earth carrying 33,000 Brothers!

They are extraterrestrial teachers and scientists who will help to

expand our understanding of interplanetary life, as our own

earth planet will become the 33rd member of the Confedera-

tion!

This is a grotesquely challenging arena ...

I studied UFOs for

over 20 years. Finally I became quite disenchanted by the cult

and the cult fringe groups. I am a 47-year-old grandmother who has been the victim of this

phenomena since early childhood. I do not - nor have I ever -

accepted it at face value. 1 do not - nor have I ever - claimed to

understand what it is ...

I would gladly accept a diagnosis of

schizophrenia, or some other understood pathology, in

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

exchange for this unknown ...

The lack of physical evidence

is, 1 fully agree, most frustrating for both victims and research-

ers. Unfortunately, the retrieval of such evidence is made

extremely difficult by the manner in which the victims are

abducted. Often 1 am removed either in my nightgown (which

is later removed) or already naked. This condition makes it

quite impossible to hide a camera ...

1 have awakened with

deep gashes, puncture wounds, scooped out tissue, eye dam-

age, bleeding from the nose and ears, burns, and finger marks

and bruises which persist for days after the event. 1 have had all

of these examined by qualified physicians but none have been

satisfactorily explained. 1 am not into self-mutilation; these are

not stigmata ...

Please be aware that the majority of abduct-

ees claim to have had no interest in UFOs previously (I am

one), have no history of childhood abuses (I am one), have no

desire for publicity or notoriety (1 am one), and, in fact, have

gone to great lengths to avoid acknowledging any involvement

whatsoever, assuming he or she is experiencing a nervous

breakdown or other psychological disorder (I am one).

Agreed,

there are many self-proclaimed abductees (and contactees) who

seek out publicity for monetary gain or to satisfy a need for

attention. 1 would be the last to deny these people exist. What 1

do deny is that ALL abductees are imagining or falsifying these

events to satisfy their own personal agendas. UFOs don't exist. 1 think that requires an external energy

source, and this doesn't exist ...

1 have spoken with Jesus. The commentary on the Parade magazine is very destructive,

and it enjoys scaring society, 1 beg you to think more openly

because our intelligent beings from outer spaces do exist and

they are our creators ...

1 too was an abductee. To be honest,

these dear beings have done me more good than bad. They

have saved my life ...

The trouble with Earth beings is that

they want proof, proof, and proof!

In the Bible it talks about terrestrial and celestial bodies. This is

not to say that God is out for sexual abuse on people or that

we're crazy. 1 have been strongly telepathic for twenty-seven years now. 1

do not receive - 1 transmit ...

Waves are coming from outer

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The City of Grief

space somewhere - beaming through my head and transmitting

thoughts, words, and images into the heads of anybody within

range ...

Images will pop into my head that I did not put there,

and vanish just as suddenly. Dreams are not dreams anymore -

they are more like Hollywood productions ...

They are smart

critters and they won't give up ...

Maybe all these little guys

want to do is communicate ...

If I finally go psychotic from all

this pressure - or have another heart attack - there goes your

last sure evidence that there is life in space. I think I have found a plausible terrestrial scientific explanation

for numerous UFO reports. [The writer then discusses ball

lightning.] If you like my stuff, could you help me get it

published?

Sagan refuses to take seriously the witnesses' reports of any-

thing that twentieth-century science can't explain. Now readers will feel free to treat abductees ...

as if they are

victims of nothing more than an illusion. Abductees suffer the

same sort of trauma a rape victim endures, and to have their

experiences rejected by those closest to them is a second

victimization that leaves them without any support system. Encounters with aliens is hard enough to cope with; victims

need support, not rationalizations. My friend Frankie wants me to bring back an ashtray or a

matchbook, but I think these visitors are probably much too

intelligent to smoke. My own feeling is that the alien abduction phenomena is little

more than a dreamlike sequence vicariously retrieved from

memory storage. There are no more little green men or flying

saucers than there are images of those things already stored in

our brains. When alleged scientists conspire to censor and intimidate those

who endeavor to offer new insightful hypotheses on conven-

tional theories ...

they no longer should be considered scien-

tists, but merely the insecure, self-serving impostors that they

apparently are ...

In the same token, must we all still suppose

that J. Edgar Hoover was a fine FBI director, rather than the

homosexual tool of organized crime he was?

Your conclusion that large numbers of people in this country,

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

perhaps as many as five million, are all victims of an identical

mass hallucination is asinine. Thanks to the Supreme Court ...

America is now wide open

for the Eastern pagan religions, under the aegis of Satan and his

demons, so now we have four-foot gray beings kidnapping

Earthlings and performing all sorts of experiments on them,

and are being propagated by those who are educated beyond

their intelligence and should know better ...

Your question

['Are We Being Visited?'] is no problem for those who know

the word of God, and are born-again Christians, and are

looking for our Redeemer from Heaven, to rapture us out of

this world of sin, sickness, war, AIDS, crime, abortion, homo-

sexuality, New-Age-New-World-Order indoctrination, media

brainwashing, perversion and subversion in government, educa-

tion, business, finance, society, religion, etc. Those who reject the

Creator God of the Bible are bound to fall for the kind of fairy

tales which your article tries to propagate as being truth. If there is no reason to take the matter of alien visitation

seriously, why is it the most highly classified subject in the US

government?

Perhaps some vastly older alien race, from a relatively metal-

deficient star system, is seeking to prolong its existence by

taking over a younger, better world and blending with its

inhabitants. If I were a betting man, 1 would give you odds that your

mailbox will overflow with stories such as I just related. 1

suspect that the psychic [psyche] brings forth these demons and

angels, lights and circles as a part of our development. They are

part of our nature. Science has become the 'magic that works'.

The UFOlogists are

heretics to be excommunicated or burned at the stake. [Several readers wrote to say that aliens were demons sent by

Satan, who is able to cloud our minds. One proposes that the

insidious Satanic purpose is to make us worried about an alien

invasion, so that when Jesus and his angels appear over

Jerusalem we will be frightened rather than glad.] I do hope

you will not dismiss me as another religious crackpot. 1 am

quite normal and well-known in my own little community. 184

The City of Grief

You, sir, are in a position to do one of two things: know about

the abductions and be covering them up, or feel that because

you have not been abducted (perhaps they are not interested in

you) they do not occur. A treason suit [was filed] against the President and Congress of

the United States over a treaty made with aliens in the early

'40s, who had later shown themselves to be hostile ...

The

treaty agreed to protect the secrecy of the aliens in return for

some of their technology [stealth aircraft and fibre optics,

another correspondent reveals].

Some of these beings are capable of intercepting the spiritual

body when it is traveling. 1 am having communication with an alien being. This communi-

cation started early in 1992.

What else can 1 say?

The aliens can stay a step or two ahead of the thinking of

scientists, and know how to leave insufficient clues behind that

would satisfy the Sagan types, until society is better prepared

mentally to face up to it all ...

Perhaps you share the view that

what's going on with respect to UFOs and aliens, if deemed

real, would be too traumatic to think about. However ...

they've shown themselves until back some 5,000-15,000 years

or more ago when they were here for extended periods,

spawning the god/goddess mythology of all cultures. The

bottom line is that in all that time they haven't taken over

Earth; they haven't subjected us or wiped us out. Homo sapiens was genetically fashioned, created initially to be

substitute laborers and domestics for the SKY-LORDS

(DINGIRS/ELOHIM/ANUNNAKI).

The explosion that people saw was hydrogen fuel from a star

cruiser, the landing sight was to be Northern California ...

The people on that star cruiser looked like Mr Spock from the

'Star Trek' TV series. Be the reports from the fifteenth century or the twentieth, a

common thread ties the reports. Individuals who have expe-

rienced sexual trauma have a great deal of difficulty under-

standing and coping with the trauma. The terms used to

describe the [resulting] hallucinations can be incoherent and

incomprehensible. 185

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

We find we are not as intelligent as we thought although we are

still stiff-necked and our greatest sin is our pride. And we do

not even know we are being led to Armageddon. The star

pin-pointed a single shed, moved across the sky leading wise-

men to that shed, frightened shepherds with the words fear not. Its spotlight was Ezekiel's glory of God, Paul's light that

temporarily blinded him ...

It was the ship in which little men

took off old Rip, the little men called brownies, fairies, elves,

these 'creations' of creators given specific duties ...

The God

People are not yet ready to make themselves known to us. First, Armageddon, then, after we KNOW, we can go it alone. When we are humbled, when we do not shoot them down, God

will return. The answer to these aliens from outer-space is simple. It comes

from man. Man using drugs on people. In mental institutions all

over the country, there are people who have no control over

their emotions and behaviour. To control these people, they

are given a variety of antipsychotic drugs ...

If you have been

drugged often ...

you will begin to have what is called

'bleedthroughs'.

This will be flash images popping into your

mind of strange-looking people coming up to your face. This

will begin your search for the answer of what the aliens were

doing to you. You will be one of the thousands of UFO

abductees. People will call you crazy. The reason for the

strange creatures you are seeing is because Thorazine distorts

the vision of your subconscious mind ...

The writer was

laughed at, ridiculed, had his life threatened [because of

presenting these ideas].

Hypnosis prepares the mind for the invasion of demons, devils,

and little gray men. God wants us to be clothed and in our right

minds ...

Anything your 'little gray men' can do, Christ can

do better!

I hope that I never feel so superior that I cannot acknowledge

that Creation is not limited to myself, but encompasses the

Universe and all its entities. In 1977 an heavenly body spoke to me about an injury to my

head that happened in 1968.

[A letter from a man who had twenty-four separate encounters

186

The City of Grief

with] a silent hovering saucer-shaped vehicle [and who has in

consequence] experienced an ongoing development and ampli-

fication of such mental functions as clairvoyance, telepathy,

and the challenging [channelling] of universal life energy for the

purpose of healing. Over the years I have seen and talked to 'ghosts', been visited

(though not yet abducted) by aliens, seen three-dimensional

heads floating by my bed, heard knocks on my door ...

These

experiences seemed as real as life. I have never thought of these

experiences as anything more than what they certainly are: my

mind playing tricks on itself.*

A hallucination might account for 99%, but can it ever account

for 100%?

UFOs are ...

a subject of deep fantasy which has no FAC-

TUAL BASIS WHATSOEVER. I pray you won't lend your

credence to a hoax. Dr Sagan served on the Air Force committee that evaluated

government investigations of UFOs, and yet he wants us to

believe that there's no substantial proof that UFOs exist. Please

explain why the government needed to be evaluated. I'm going to lobby my Representative to try to cancel funds for

this program of listening for alien signals from space, because it

would be a waste of money. They're already among us. The government spends millions of tax dollars for researching

UFOs. The SETI project (search for extraterrestrial intelli-

gence) would be a waste of money if the government truly

believed UFOs were non-existent. I am personally excited

about the SETI project because it shows that we're moving in

the right direction; towards communication with aliens, rather

than being an unwilling observer. The succubi, which I identified more as astral rape, occurred

from '78-'92.

It was hard on a moral and seriously practicing

Catholic, demoralizing, dehumanizing, and quite literally had

me worried by the physical aftermath of disease effects. The space people are coming!

They hope to remove whom they

can, especially children who are the 'seedlings' of the next

From a letter received by The Skeptical Inquirer; courtesy, Kendrick Frazier. 187

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

humanity generation along with their cooperating parents,

grandparents and other adults, to safety before the upcoming

major sunspot/planetary peak, which is just over the horizon. The Space Ship is in sight every night and close in to assist us

when the Major Solar Flares do, before turbulence starts in the

atmosphere. The Polar Shift is due now as it moves to its new

position for the Aquarian Age ...

[The authors also inform

me that they are] working with the Ashtar Command, where

Jesus Christ meets with those aboard for instructions. Many

dignitaries are present, including archangels Michael and

Gabriel. I have extensive experience in therapeutic energy work, which

involves removing grid patterns, negative memory cords, and

alien implants from human bodies and their surrounding energy

fields. My work is primarily utilized as an adjunctive aide to

psychotherapy. My clients range from businessmen, home-

makers, professional artists, therapists, and children ...

The

alien energy is very fluid, both within the body and after it is

removed, and must be contained as soon as possible. The

energy grids are most often locked around the heart or in a

triangular formation across the shoulders. I don't know how, after such an experience, I could have just

turned over and gone back to sleep. I believe in happy endings. I always have. Once you have seen a

figure as tall as the room - with golden hair, and shining like a

lighted Christmas tree, lifting up the little child beside us, how

could you not?

I understood the message the figure was

relaying - to the little child - and it was me. We had always

talked together. How else could life be bearable - in a place

like this?...

Unfamiliar mental states?

You put your finger

right on it. Who is really in charge of this planet?

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The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion

from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which

may be called 'sciences as one would'.

For what a man had

rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects

difficult things from impatience of research; sober things,

because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from

superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride;

things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion

of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and

sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and

infect the understanding. Francis Bacon,

Novum Organon (1620)

M y parents died years ago. 1 was very close to them. 1 still miss

them terribly. I know I always will. 1 long to believe that

their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about

them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I

wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell

them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest

news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no

matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. 'Is

everything all right?' I want to ask. The last words I found myself

saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were 'Take care'.

189

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and sud-

denly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the

overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all

been some kind ofhorrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and

well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising

me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake

up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over

again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe

in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether

there's any sober evidence for it. So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave

and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary

of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties

with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human. More than a third of American adults believe that on some level

they've made contact with the dead. The number seems to have

jumped by 15 per cent between 1977 and 1988.

A quarter of

Americans believe in reincarnation. But that doesn't mean I'd be willing to accept the pretensions of

a 'medium', who claims to channel the spirits of the dear

departed, when I'm aware the practice is rife with fraud. I know

how much I want to believe that my parents have just abandoned

the husks of their bodies, like insects or snakes moulting, and

gone somewhere else. I understand that those very feelings might

make me easy prey even for an unclever con, or for normal people

unfamiliar with their unconscious minds, or for those suffering

from a dissociative psychiatric disorder. Reluctantly, I rouse some

reserves of scepticism. How is it, I ask myself, that channellers never give us verifiable

information otherwise unavailable?

Why does Alexander the

Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat

about his Last Theorem, James Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln

assassination conspiracy, Hermann Goering about the Reichstag

fire?

Why don't Sophocles, Democritus and Aristarchus dictate

their lost books?

Don't they wish future generations to have

access to their masterpieces?

If some good evidence for life after death were announced. I'd

190

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real, scientific data,

not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abduc-

tions, better the hard truth, 1 say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more

comforting than the fantasy. The fundamental premise of 'channelling', spiritualism, and

other forms of necromancy is that when we die we don't. Not

exactly. Some thinking, feeling, and remembering part of us

continues. That whatever-it-is - a soul or spirit, neither matter nor

energy, but something else - can, we are told, re-enter the bodies

of human and other beings in the future, and so death loses much

of its sting. What's more, we have an opportunity, if the spiritual-

ist or channelling contentions are true, to make contact with loved

ones who have died. J.Z. Knight of the State of Washington claims to be in touch

with a 35,000-year-old somebody called 'Ramtha'.

He speaks

English very well, using Knight's tongue, lips and vocal cords,

producing what sounds to me to be an accent from the Indian Raj. Since most people know how to talk, and many - from children or

professional actors - have a repertoire of voices at their command,

the simplest hypothesis is that Ms Knight makes 'Ramtha' speak

all by herself, and that she has no contact with disembodied

entities from the Pleistocene Ice Age. If there's evidence to the

contrary, I'd love to hear it. It would be considerably more

impressive if Ramtha could speak by himself, without the assist-

ance of Ms Knight's mouth. Failing that, how might we test the

claim?

(The actress Shirley MacLaine attests that Ramtha was her

brother in Atlantis, but that's another story.)

Suppose Ramtha were available for questioning. Could we

verify whether he is who he says he is?

How does he know that he

lived 35,000 years ago, even approximately?

What calendar does

he employ?

Who is keeping track of the intervening millennia?

Thirty-five thousand plus or minus what?

What were things like

35,000 years ago?

Either Ramtha really is 35,000 years old, in

which case we discover something about that period, or he's a

phoney and he'll (or rather she'll) slip up. Where did Ramtha live?

(1 know he speaks English with an

Indian accent, but where 35,000 years ago did they do that?) What

191

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

was the climate?

What did Ramtha eat?

(Archaeologists know

something about what people ate back then.) What were the

indigenous languages and social structure?

Who else did Ramtha

live with - wife, wives, children, grandchildren?

What was the life

cycle, the infant mortality rate, the life expectancy?

Did they have

birth control?

What clothes did they wear?

How were the clothes

manufactured?

What were the most dangerous predators?

Hunt-

ing and fishing implements and strategies?

Weapons?

Endemic

sexism?

Xenophobia and ethnocentrism?

And if Ramtha came

from the 'high civilization' of Atlantis, where are the linguistic,

technological, historical and other details?

What was their writing

like?

Tell us. Instead, all we are offered are banal homilies. Here, to take another example, is a set of information chan-

nelled not from an ancient dead person, but from unknown

non-human entities who make crop circles, as recorded by the

journalist Jim Schnabel:

We are so anxious at this sinful nation spreading lies about us. We do not come in machines, we do not land on your earth in

machines ...

We come like the wind. We are Life Force. Life Force from the ground ...

Come here ...

We are but a

breath away ...

a breath away ...

we are not a million

miles away ...

a Life Force that is larger than the energies in

your body. But we meet at a higher level of life ...

We need

no name. We are parallel to your world, alongside your

world ...

The walls are broken. Two men will rise from the

past ...

the great bear ...

the world will be at peace. People pay attention to these puerile marvels mainly because they

promise something like old-time religion, but especially life after

death, even life eternal. A very different prospect for something like eternal life was

once proposed by the versatile British scientist J. B.S. Haldane,

who was, among many other things, one of the founders of

population genetics. Haldane imagined a far future when the stars

have darkened and space is mainly filled with a cold, thin gas. Nevertheless, if we wait long enough statistical fluctuations in the

density of this gas will occur. Over immense periods of time the

192

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

fluctuations will be sufficient to reconstitute a Universe something

like our own. if the Universe is infinitely old, there will be an

infinite number of such reconstitutions, Haldane pointed out. So in an infinitely old universe with an infinite number of

appearances of galaxies, stars, planets and life, an identical Earth

must reappear on which you and all your loved ones will be

reunited. I'll be able to see my parents again and introduce them

to the grandchildren they never knew. And all this will happen not

once, but an infinite number of times. But in this reflection I have underestimated what infinity

means. In Haldane's picture, there will be universes, indeed an

infinite number of them, in which our brains will have full

recollection of many previous rounds. Satisfaction is at hand -

tempered, though, by the thought of all those other universes

which will also come into existence (again, not once but an infinite

number of times) with tragedies and horrors vastly outstripping

anything I've experienced this turn. The Consolation of Haldane depends, though, on what kind of

universe we live in, and maybe on such arcana as whether there's

enough matter eventually to reverse the expansion of the uni-

verse, and the character of vacuum fluctuations. Those with a

deep longing for life after death might, it seems, devote them-

selves to cosmology, quantum gravity, elementary particle phys-

ics, and, especially, transfinite arithmetic. Clement of Alexandria, a Father of the early Church, in his

Exhortations to the Greeks (written around the year 190) dis-

missed pagan beliefs in words that might today seem a little ironic:

Far indeed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such

tales. Even to our own children, when they are crying their

heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling

fabulous stories to soothe them. In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children about

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for reasons we

think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these myths

before they're grown. Why retract?

Because their well-being as

193

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry,

and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus. On doctrinaire religions, 'Men dare not avow, even to their own

hearts', wrote the philosopher David Hume,

the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make

a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real

infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and the most posi-

tive bigotry. This infidelity has profound moral consequences, as the American

revolutionary Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it

consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It

is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if 1 may so

express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When

man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his

mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does

not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of

every other crime. T.H. Huxley's formulation was

The foundation of morality is to ...

give up pretending to

believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating

unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibili-

ties of knowledge. Clement, Hume, Paine and Huxley were all talking about reli-

gion. But much of what they wrote has more general applications

- for example to the pervasive background importunings of our

commercial civilization: there is a class of aspirin commercials in

which actors pretending to be doctors reveal the competing

product to have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that

doctors recommend most - they don't tell you what the mysterious

ingredient is. Whereas their product has a dramatically larger

amount (1.2 to 2 times more per tablet).

So buy their product. But

194

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

why not just take two of the competing tablets?

Or consider the

analgesic that works better than the 'regular-strength' product of

the competition. Why not then take the 'extra-strength' competitive

product?

And of course they do not tell us of the more than a

thousand deaths each year in the United States from the use of

aspirin, or the apparent 5,000 annual cases of kidney failure from

the use of acetaminophen, of which the best-selling brand is

Tylenol. (This, however, may represent a case of correlation without

causation.) Or who cares which breakfast cereal has more vitamins

when we can take a vitamin pill with breakfast?

Likewise, why

should it matter whether an antacid contains calcium if the calcium

is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis?

Commercial culture is

hill of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the

consumer. You're not supposed to ask. Don't think. Buy. Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported

experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray

contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an

insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectiv-

ity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some

of considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that

scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to

lies lays the groundwork for many other evils. 1 have in front of me as 1 write the programme of one of the

annual Whole Life Expos, New Age expositions held in San

Francisco. Typically, tens of thousands of people attend. Highly

questionable experts tout highly questionable products. Here are

some of the presentations: 'How Trapped Blood Proteins Produce

Pain and Suffering'.

'Crystals, Are They Talismans or Stones?' (1

have an opinion myself.) It continues: 'As a crystal focuses sound

and light waves for radio and television' - this is a vapid misunder-

standing of how radio and television work - 'so may it amplify

spiritual vibrations for the attuned human'.

Or here's one: 'Return

of the Goddess, a Presentational Ritual'.

Another: 'Synchronicity,

the Recognition Experience'.

That one is given by 'Brother

Charles'.

Or, on the next page, 'You, Saint-Germain, and Healing

Through the Violet Flame'.

It goes on and on, with plenty of ads

about 'opportunities' - running the short gamut from the dubious

to the spurious - that are available at the Whole Life Expo. 195

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Distraught cancer victims make pilgrimages to the Philippines,

where 'psychic surgeons', having palmed bits of chicken liver or

goat heart, pretend to reach into the patient's innards and

withdraw the diseased tissue, which is then triumphantly dis-

played. Leaders of western democracies regularly consult astrolo-

gers and mystics before making decisions of state. Under public

pressure for results, police with an unsolved murder or a missing

body on their hands consult ESP 'experts' (who never guess better

than expected by common sense, but the police, the ESPers say,

keep calling).

A clairvoyance gap with adversary nations is

announced, and the Central Intelligence Agency, under Congres-

sional prodding, spends tax money to find out whether submarines

in the ocean depths can be located by thinking hard at them. A

'psychic', using pendulums over maps and dowsing rods in air-

planes, purports to find new mineral deposits; an Australian

mining company pays him top dollars up front, none of it

returnable in the event of failure, and a share in the exploitation

of ores in the event of success. Nothing is discovered. Statues of

Jesus or murals of Mary are spotted with moisture, and thousands

of kind-hearted people convince themselves that they have wit-

nessed a miracle. These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A

deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, some-

times with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up

in a powerful emotion - wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous

acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, 'There's a sucker born every

minute'.

But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when

governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking,

the results can be catastrophic, however sympathetic we may be to

those who have bought the baloney. In science we may start with experimental results, data, obser-

vations, measurements, 'facts'.

We invent, if we can, a rich array

of possible explanations and systematically confront each explana-

tion with the facts. In the course of their training, scientists are

equipped with a baloney detection kit. The kit is brought out as a

matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for considera-

tion. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit,

196

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you're so

inclined, if you don't want to buy baloney even when it's

reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken;

there's a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method. What's in the kit?

Tools for sceptical thinking. What sceptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct,

and to understand, a reasoned argument and, especially impor-

tant, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The

question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of

a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the

premises or starting point and whether that premise is true. Among the tools:

• Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of

the 'facts'.

• Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledge-

able proponents of all points of view. • Arguments from authority carry little weight - 'authorities'

have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the

future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are

no authorities; at most, there are experts. • Spin more than one hypothesis. If there's something to be

explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be

explained. Then think of tests by which you might systemati-

cally disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the

hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection

among 'multiple working hypotheses', has a much better

chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with

the first idea that caught your fancy.*

• Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's

yours. It's only a way-station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask

yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the

* This is a problem that affects jury trials. Retrospective studies show that some

jurors make up their minds very early - perhaps during opening arguments -

and then retain the evidence that seems to support their initial impressions and

reject the contrary evidence. The method of alternative working hypotheses is

not running in their heads. 197

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you

don't, others will. • Quantify. If whatever it is you're explaining has some measure,

some numerical quantity attached to it, you'll be much better

able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is

vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course

there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we

are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging. • If there's a chain of argument, eveiy link in the chain must work

(including the premise) - not just most of them. • Occam's Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when

faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to

choose the simpler. • Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle,

falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not

worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and

everything in it is just an elementary particle - an electron, say

- in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire

information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapa-

ble of disproof?

You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate sceptics must be given the chance to follow your

reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the

same result. The reliance on carefully designed and controlled experiments is

key, as 1 tried to stress earlier. We will not learn much from mere

contemplation. It is tempting to rest content with the first

candidate explanation we can think of. One is much better than

none. But what happens if we can invent several?

How do we

decide among them?

We don't. We let experiment do it. Francis

Bacon provided a classic reason:

Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work,

since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the

subtlety of argument. Control experiments are essential. If, for example, a new medi-

cine is alleged to cure a disease 20 per cent of the time, we must

198

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

make sure that a control population, taking a dummy sugar pill

which as far as the subjects know might be the new drug, does not

also experience spontaneous remission of the disease 20 per cent

of the time. Variables must be separated. Suppose you're seasick, and given

both an acupressure bracelet and 50 milligrams of meclizine. You

find the unpleasantness vanishes. What did it - the bracelet or the

pill?

You can tell only if you take the one without the other next

time you're seasick. Now imagine that you're not so dedicated to

science as to be willing to be seasick. Then you won't separate the

variables. You'll take both remedies again. You've achieved the

desired practical result; further knowledge, you might say, is not

worth the discomfort of attaining it. Often the experiment must be done 'double-blind', so that

those hoping for a certain finding are not in the potentially

compromising position of evaluating the results. In testing a

new medicine, for example, you might want the physicians who

determine which patients' symptoms are relieved not to know

which patients have been given the new drug. The knowledge

might influence their decision, even if only unconsciously. Instead the list of those who experienced remission of symp-

toms can be compared with the list of those who got the new

drug, each independently ascertained. Then you can determine

what correlation exists. Or in conducting a police line-up or

photo identification, the officer in charge should not know who

the prime suspect is, so as not consciously or unconsciously to

influence the witness. In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to

knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us

what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and

perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can

be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so

often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions. Among

these fallacies are:

• Ad hominem - Latin for 'to the man', attacking the arguer and

not the argument (e. g., the Reverend Dr Smith is a known

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not

be taken seriously).

Argument from authority (e. g., President Richard Nixon

should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war

in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way

for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument

amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake,

as it turned out).

Argument from adverse consequences (e. g., a God meting out

punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society

would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even

ungovernable.* Or: the defendant in a widely publicized murder

trial must be found guilty; othenvise, it will be an encouragement

for other men to murder their wives).

Appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been

proved false must be true, and vice versa (e. g., there is no

compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth;

therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the

Universe. Or: there may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but

not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so

we're still central to the Universe).

This impatience with ambigu-

ity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not

evidence of absence. Special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetori-

cal trouble (e. g., how can a merciful God condemn future

generations to unending torment because, against orders, one

woman induced one man to eat an apple?

Special plead: you

don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: how can

there be an equally godlike Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the

same Person?

Special plead: you don't understand the Divine

Mysteiy of the Trinity. Or: how could God permit the followers

of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - each in their own way

A more cynical formulation by the Roman historian Polybius: Since the masses

of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of

consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The

ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after

death. 200

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion - to

have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long?

Special plead: yon

don't understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in

mysterious ways).

Begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e. g., we

must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But

does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is

imposed?

Or: the stock market fell yesterday because of a

technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors. But is there

any independent evidence for the causal role of 'adjustment*

and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this

purported explanation?).

Observational selection, also called the enumeration of favourable

circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it,

counting the hits and forgetting the misses* (e. g., a state boasts of

the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers).

Statistics of small numbers - a close relative of observational

selection (e. g., 'they say 1 out of 5 people is Chinese. How is this

possible?

I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly. ’ Or. 'I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can't

lose. ').

My favourite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi,

newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons

project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War Two with US flag

officers:

So-and-so is a great general, he was told. 'What is the definition of a great general?' Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles.'

'How many?'

After some back and forth, they settled on five. 'What fraction of American generals are great?'

After some more back and forth, they settled on a few per cent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that

all armies are equally matched, and that winning a battle is purely a matter of

chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2; two

battles 1/4, three 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32, which is about

three per cent. You would expect a few per cent of American generals to win five

consecutive battles, purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive

battles...?

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e. g., President

Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on

discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average

intelligence).

Inconsistency (e. g., prudently plan for the worst of which a

potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scien-

tific projections on environmental dangers because they're not

'proved'.

Or: attribute the declining life expectancy in the former

Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but

never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States

(now highest in the major industrial nations) to the failures of

capitalism. Or: consider it reasonable for the Universe to

continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the

possibility that it has infinite duration into the past).

Non sequitur - Latin for 'it doesn't follow' (e. g., our nation will

prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends

this to be true; the German formulation was 'Gott mit uns).

Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply

failed to recognize alternative possibilities. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - Latin for 'it happened after, so it

was caused by' (e. g., Jamie Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of

Manila: 7 know of...

a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she

takes [contraceptive] pills.' Or: before women got the vote, there

were no nuclear weapons).

Meaningless question (e. g., What happens when an irresistible

force meets an immovable object?

But if there is such a thing as

an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and

vice versa).

Excluded middle, or false dichotomy - considering only the two

extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e. g.,

'sure, take his side; my husband's perfect; I'm always wrong. '

Or: 'either you love your country or you hate it.' Or: 'if you’re

not part of the solution, you're part of the problem').

Short-term v. long-term - a subset of the excluded middle, but

so important I've pulled it out for special attention (e. g., we

can't afford programmes to feed malnourished children and

educate preschool kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on

the streets. Or: why explore space or pursue fundamental science

202

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

when we have so huge a budget deficit?).

Slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e. g., if we allow

abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to

prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: if the

state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be

telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of

conception).

Confusion of correlation and causation (e. g., a survey shows

that more college graduates are homosexual than those with

lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or:

Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of

the planet Uranus; therefore - despite the absence of any such

correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter - the

latter causes the former. *

Straw man - caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack

(e. g., scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by

chance - a formulation that wilfully ignores the central Darwin-

ian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and

discarding what doesn't. Or - this is also a short-term/long-term

fallacy - environmentalists care more for snail darters and

spotted owls than they do for people).

Suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e. g., an amazingly accurate

and widely quoted 'prophecy' of the assassination attempt on

President Reagan is shown on television; but - an important detail

- was it recorded before or after the event?

Or: these government

abuses demand revolution, even if you can't make an omelette

without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a

revolution in which far more people are killed than under the

Or: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when

they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children

preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes?

Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish

between television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programmes

now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes

young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults

can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in

our children w hen we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they

graduate from elementary school?

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previous regime?

What does the experience of other revolutions

suggest?

Are all possible revolutions against oppressive regimes

desirable and in the interests of the people?).

• Weasel words (e. g., the separation of powers of the US

Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a

war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand. Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct

of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting them-

selves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may there-

fore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and

calling the wars something else - 'police actions', 'armed

incursions', 'protective reaction strikes', 'pacification', 'safe-

guarding American interests', and a wide variety of 'opera-

tions', such as 'Operation Just Cause'.

Euphemisms for war are

one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political

purposes. Talleyrand said, 'An important art of politicians is to

find new names for institutions which under old names have

become odious to the public').

Knowing the existence of such logical and rhetorical fallacies

rounds out our toolkit. Like all tools, the baloney detection kit

can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote

alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the

difference in the world, not least in evaluating our own arguments

before we present them to others. The American tobacco industry grosses some $50 billion per year. There is a statistical correlation between smoking and cancer, the

tobacco industry admits, but not, they say, a causal relation. A

logical fallacy, they imply, is being committed. What might this

mean?

Maybe people with hereditary propensities for cancer also

have hereditary propensities to take addictive drugs - so cancer

and smoking might be correlated, but the cancer would not be

caused by the smoking. Increasingly far-fetched connections of

this sort can be contrived. This is exactly one of the reasons

science insists on control experiments. Suppose you paint the backs of large numbers of mice with

cigarette tar, and also follow the health of large numbers of nearly

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The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

identical mice that have not been painted. If the former get

cancer and the latter do not, you can be pretty sure that the

correlation is causal. Inhale tobacco smoke, and the chance of

getting cancer goes up; don't inhale, and the rate stays at the

background level. Likewise for emphysema, bronchitis and

cardiovascular diseases. When the first work was published in the scientific literature in

1953 showing that the substances in cigarette smoke when painted

on the backs of rodents produce malignancies, the response of the

six major tobacco companies was to initiate a public relations

campaign to impugn the research, sponsored by the Sloan Ketter-

ing Foundation. This is similar to what the Du Pont Corporation

did when the first research was published in 1974 showing that

their Freon product attacks the protective ozone layer. There are

many other examples. You might think that before they denounce unwelcome

research findings, major corporations would devote their consid-

erable resources to checking out the safety of the products they

propose to manufacture. And if they missed something, if inde-

pendent scientists suggest a hazard, why would the companies

protest?

Would they rather kill people than lose profits?

If, in an

uncertain world, an error must be made, shouldn't it be biased

toward protecting customers and the public?

And, incidentally,

what do these cases say about the ability of the free enterprise

system to police itself?

Aren't these instances where government

intrusion is in the public interest?

A 1971 internal report of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco

Corporation lists as a corporate objective 'to set aside in the minds

of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung

cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assump-

tions, fallacious rumours, unsupported claims and the unscientific

statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists'.

They complain of

the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against

the cigarette, constituting the greatest libel and slander

ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free

enterprise; a criminal libel of such major proportions and

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

implications that one wonders how such a crusade of

calumny can be reconciled under the Constitution can be so

flouted and violated [sic].

This rhetoric is only slightly more inflamed than what the tobacco

industry has from time to time uttered for public consumption. There are many brands of cigarettes that advertise low 'tar' (ten

milligrams or less per cigarette).

Why is this a virtue?

Because it is

the refractory tars in which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and

some other carcinogens are concentrated. Aren't the low tar ads a

tacit admission by the tobacco companies that cigarettes indeed

cause cancer?

Healthy Buildings International is a for-profit organization,

recipient of millions of dollars over the years from the tobacco

industry. It performs research on second-hand smoke, and testi-

fies for the tobacco companies. In 1994, three of its technicians

complained that senior executives had faked data on inhalable

cigarette particles in the air. In every case, the invented or

'corrected' data made tobacco smoke seem safer than the techni-

cians' measurements had indicated. Do corporate research

departments or outside research contractors ever find a product to

be more dangerous than the tobacco corporation has publicly

declared?

If they do, is their employment continued?

Tobacco is addictive; by many criteria more so than heroin and

cocaine. There was a reason people would, as the 1940s ad put it,

'walk a mile for a Camel'.

More people have died of tobacco than

in all ofWorld War II. According to the World Health Organiza-

tion, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020, in part because

of a massive advertising campaign to portray smoking as advanced

and fashionable to young women in the developing world. Part of

the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of

addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity

with baloney detection, critical thinking and scientific method. Gullibility kills. 206

Obsessed with Reality

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He

knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first;

that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had

needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that

possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon

his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps

he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted,

even though this should put him to great expense. Before

the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these

melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone

safely through so many voyages and weathered so many

storms, that it was idle to suppose that she would not come

safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in

Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these

unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek

for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind

all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and

contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and

comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe

and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart,

and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their

strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance

money when she went down in mid ocean and told no tales. What shall we say of him?

Surely this, that he was verily

207

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did

sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the

sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because

he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before

him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in

patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts ...

William K. Clifford,

The Ethics of Belief (1874)

A t the borders of science - and sometimes as a carry-over from

prescientific thinking - lurks a range of ideas that are

appealing, or at least modestly mind-boggling, but that have not

been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit, at

least by their advocates: the notion, say, that the Earth's surface is

on the inside, not the outside, of a sphere; or claims that you can

levitate yourself by meditating and that ballet dancers and basket-

ball players routinely get up so high by levitating; or the proposi-

tion that I have something called a soul, made not of matter or

energy, but of something else for which there is no other evidence,

and which after my death might return to animate a cow or a

worm. Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition - this is

merely a representative, not a comprehensive list - are astrology;

the Bermuda Triangle; 'Big Foot' and the Loch Ness monster;

ghosts; the 'evil eye'; multi-coloured halo-like 'auras' said to

surround the heads of everyone (with colour personalized);

extrasensory perception (ESP), such as telepathy, precognition,

telekinesis, and 'remote viewing' of distant places; the belief that

13 is an 'unlucky' number (because of which many no-nonsense

office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the

twelfth to the fourteenth floors - why take chances?); bleeding

statues; the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit

around with you brings good luck; divining rods, dowsing and

water witching; 'facilitated communication' in autism; the belief

that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard

pyramids, and other tenets of 'pyramidology'; phone calls (none

of them collect) from the dead; the prophecies of Nostradamus;

the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by

208

Obsessed with Reality

eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms;

the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is full;

palmistry; numerology; polygraphy; comets, tea leaves and 'mon-

strous' births as prodigies of future events (plus the divinations

fashionable in earlier epochs, accomplished by viewing entrails,

smoke, the shapes of flames, shadows and excrement; listening to

gurgling stomachs, and even, for a brief period, examining tables

of logarithms); 'photography' of past events, such as the crucifix-

ion of Jesus; a Russian elephant that speaks fluently; 'sensitives'

who, when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their finger-

tips; Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the 'lost'

continent of Atlantis would 'rise') and other 'prophets', sleeping

and awake; diet quackery; out-of-body (e. g., near-death) experi-

ences interpreted as real events in the external world; faith-healer

fraud; Ouija boards; the emotional lives of geraniums, uncovered

by intrepid use of a 'lie detector'; water remembering what

molecules used to be dissolved in it; telling character from facial

features or bumps on the head; the 'hundredth monkey' confusion

and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be

true really is true; human beings spontaneously bursting into

flame and being burned to a crisp; 3-cycle biorhythms; perpetual

motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy (but all

of which, for one reason or another, are withheld from close

examination by sceptics); the systematically inept predictions of

Jeane Dixon (who 'predicted' a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran and in

1965 that the USSR would beat the US to put the first human on

the Moon*) and other professional 'psychics'; the Jehovah's

Witnesses' prediction that the world would end in 1917, and many

similar prophecies; dianetics and Scientology; Carlos Castaneda

and 'sorcery'; claims of finding the remains of Noah's Ark; the

'Amityville Horror' and other hauntings; and accounts of a small

brontosaurus crashing through the rain forests of the Congo

Republic of our time. [An in-depth discussion of many such claims

can be found in Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, Gordon Stein,

* Violating the rules for 'Oraclers and Wizards' given by Thomas Ady in 1656:

'In doubtful things, they gave doubtful answers ...

Where were more certain

probabilities, there they gave more certain answers.'

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

ed., Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1996.]

Many of these doctrines are rejected out of hand by fundamen-

talist Christians and Jews because the Bible so enjoins. Deuter-

onomy (xviii, 10, 11) reads (in the King James translation):

There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his

son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth

divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a

witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a

wizard, or a necromancer. Astrology, channelling, Ouija boards, predicting the future and

much else is forbidden. The author of Deuteronomy does not

argue that such practices fail to deliver what they promise. But

they are 'abominations', perhaps suitable for other nations, but

not for the followers of God. And even the Apostle Paul, so

credulous on so many matters, counsels us to 'prove all things'.

The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides

goes further than Deuteronomy, in that he makes explicit that

these pseudosciences don't work:

It is forbidden to engage in astrology, to utilize charms, to

whisper incantations ...

All of these practices are nothing

more than lies and deceptions used by ancient pagan peoples

to deceive the masses and lead them astray ...

Wise and

intelligent people know better. [From the Mishneh Torah,

Avodah Zara, Chapter 11.]

Some claims are hard to test - for example, if an expedition fails to

find the ghost or the brontosaurus, that doesn't mean it doesn't

exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Others are

easier - for example, flatworm cannibalistic learning or the

announcement that colonies of bacteria subjected to an antibiotic

or an agar dish thrive when their prosperity is prayed for

(compared to control bacteria unredeemed by prayer).

A few -

for example, perpetual motion machines - can be excluded on

grounds of fundamental physics. Except for them, it's not that we

know before examining the evidence that the notions are false;

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Obsessed with Reality

stranger things are routinely incorporated into the corpus of

science. The question, as always, is how good is the evidence?

The

burden of proof surely rests on the shoulders of those who

advance such claims. Revealingly, some proponents hold that

scepticism is a liability, that true science is inquiry without

scepticism. They are perhaps halfway there. But halfway doesn't

do it. Parapsychologist Susan Blackmore describes one of the steps in

her transformation to a more sceptical attitude on 'psychic'

phenomena:

A mother and daughter from Scotland asserted they could

pick up images from each other's minds. They chose to use

playing cards for the tests because that is what they used at

home. I let them choose the room in which they would be

tested and insured that there was no normal way for the

'receiver' to see the cards. They failed. They could not get

more right than chance predicted and they were terribly

disappointed. They had honestly believed they could do it

and I began to see how easy it was to be fooled by your own

desire to believe. I had similar experiences with several dowsers, children

who claimed they could move objects psychokinetically, and

several who said they had telepathic powers. They all failed. Even now I have a five-digit number, a word, and a small

object in my kitchen at home. The place and items were

chosen by a young man who intends to 'see' them while

travelling out of his body. They have been there (though

regularly changed) for three years. So far, though, he has had

no success. 'Telepathy' literally means to feel at a distance, just as 'telephone'

is to hear at a distance and 'television' is to see at a distance. The

word suggests the communication not of thoughts but of feelings,

emotions. Around a quarter of all Americans believe they've

experienced something like telepathy. People who know each

other very well, who live together, who are practised in one

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

another's feeling tones, associations and thinking styles can often

anticipate what the partner will say. This is merely the usual five

senses plus human empathy, sensitivity and intelligence in opera-

tion. It may feel extrasensory, but it's not at all what's intended by

the word 'telepathy'.

If something like this were ever conclusively

demonstrated, it would, I think, have discernible physical causes -

perhaps electrical currents in the brain. Pseudoscience, rightly or

wrongly labelled, is by no means the same thing as the supernatural,

which is by definition something somehow outside of Nature. It is barely possible that a few of these paranormal claims might

one day be verified by solid scientific data. But it would be foolish

to accept any of them without adequate evidence. In the spirit of

garage dragons, it is much better, for those claims not already

disproved or adequately explained, to contain our impatience, to

nurture a tolerance for ambiguity, and to await - or, much better,

to seek - supporting or disconfirming evidence. In a far-off land in the South Seas, the word went out about a wise

man, a healer, an embodied spirit. He coidd speak across time. He

was an Ascended Master. He was coming, they said. He was

coming ...

In 1988, Australian newspapers, magazines and television sta-

tions began to receive the good news via press kits and videotape. One broadside read:

CARLOS

TO APPEAR IN AUSTRALIA

Those who have seen it will never forget. The brilliant young

artist who has been talking to them suddenly seems to falter,

his pulse slows dangerously and virtually stops at the point of

death. The qualified medical attendant, who has been

assigned to keep constant watch, is about to sound the alarm. But then, with a heart-stirring burst, the pulse is felt again -

faster and stronger than ever before. The life force clearly has

returned to the body - but the entity inside that body is no

longer Jose Luis Alvarez, the 19-year-old whose unique

painted ceramics are featured in some of the wealthiest

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Obsessed with Reality

homes in America. Instead, the body has been taken over by

Carlos, an ancient soul, whose teachings will come as both a

shock and an inspiration. One being going through a form of

death to make way for another: that is the phenomenon that

has made Carlos, as channelled through Jose Luis Alvarez,

the dominant new figure in New Age consciousness. As even

one sceptical New York critic puts it: 'The first and only case

of a channeller offering tangible, physical proof of some

mysterious change within his human physiology.'

Now Jose, who has gone through more than 170 of these

little deaths and transformations, has been told by Carlos to

visit Australia - in the words of the Master, 'the old new land'

which is to be the source of a special revelation. Carlos

already has foretold that in 1988 catastrophes will sweep the

earth, two major world leaders will die and, later in the year,

Australians will be among the first to see the rising of a great

star which will deeply influence future life on earth. SUNDAY 21ST

— 3 PM—

OPERA HOUSE

DRAMA THEATRE

Following a 1986 motorcycle accident, the press kit explained,

Jose Alvarez, then 17 years old, suffered a mild concussion. After

he recovered, those who knew him could tell that he had changed. A very different voice sometimes emanated from him. Bewil-

dered, Alvarez sought help from a psychotherapist, a specialist in

multiple personality disorders. The psychiatrist 'discovered that

Jose was channelling a distinct entity who was known as Carlos. This entity takes over the body of Alvarez when the body's life

force is relaxed to the right degree.' Carlos, it turns out, is a

two-thousand-year-old spirit disincarnate, a ghost without bodily

form, who last invaded a human body in Caracas, Venezuela, in

1900.

Unfortunately, that body died at age 12 in a fall from a

horse. This may be why, the therapist explained, Carlos could

enter Alvarez's body following the motorcycle accident. When

Alvarez goes into his trance, the spirit of Carlos, focused by a

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

large and rare crystal, enters him and utters the wisdom of the

ages. Included in the press kit was a list of major appearances in

American cities, a videotape of the tumultuous reception that

Alvarez/Carlos received at a Broadway theatre, his interview on

New York radio station WOOP, and other indications that here

was a formidable American New Age phenomenon. Two small

substantiating details: an article from a South Florida newspaper

read, 'THEATER NOTE: The three-day stay of channeler CAR-

LOS has been extended at the War Memorial Auditorium ...

response to the requests for further appearances', and an excerpt

from a television programme guide listed a special on 'THE

ENTITY CARLOS: This in-depth study reveals the facts behind

one of today's most popular and controversial personalities'.

Alvarez and his manager arrived in Sydney first class on

Qantas. They travelled everywhere in an enormous white stretch

limousine. They occupied the Presidential Suite of one of the

city's most prestigious hotels. Alvarez was attired in an elegant

white gown with a golden medallion. In his first press conference,

Carlos quickly emerged. The entity was forceful, literate, com-

manding. Australian television programmes quickly lined up for

appearances by Alvarez, his manager, and his nurse (to check his

pulse and announce the presence of Carlos).

On Australia's Today Show, they were interviewed by the host,

George Negus. When Negus posed a few reasonable and sceptical

questions, the New Agers exhibited very thin skins. Carlos laid a

curse on the anchorman. His manager doused Negus with a glass

of water. Both stalked off the set. It was a sensation in the tabloid

press, its significance rehashed on Australian television. 'TV

Outburst: Water Thrown at Negus', was the front-page headline

in the 16 February 1988 Daily Mirror. Television stations were

flooded with calls. One Sydney citizen advised taking the curse on

Negus very seriously: the army of Satan had already assumed

control of the United Nations, he said, and Australia might be

next. Carlos's next appearance was on the Australian version of A

Current Affair. A sceptic was brought in who described a magi-

cian's trick by which the pulse in one hand is made briefly to stop:

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Obsessed with Reality

you put a rubber ball in your armpit and squeeze. When Carlos's

authenticity was questioned, he was outraged: 'This interview is

terminated!' he thundered. On the appointed day, the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera

House was nearly filled. An excited crowd, young and old, milled

about expectantly. Entrance was free, which reassured those who

vaguely wondered if it might be some sort of scam. Alvarez seated

himself on a low couch. His pulse was monitored. Suddenly it

stopped. Seemingly, he was near death. Low, guttural noises

emanated from deep within him. The audience gasped in wonder

and awe. Suddenly, Alvarez's body took on power. His posture

radiated confidence. A broad, humane, spiritual perspective

flowed out of Alvarez's mouth. Carlos was here!

Interviewed

afterwards, many members of the audience described how they

had been moved and delighted. The following Sunday, Australia's most popular TV programme

- named Sixty Minutes after its American counterpart - revealed

that the Carlos affair was a hoax, front to back. The producers

thought it would be instructive to explore how easily a faith-healer

or guru could be created to bamboozle the public and the media. So naturally, they contacted one of the world's leading experts on

deceiving the public (at least among those not holding or advising

political office) - the magician James Randi. '[T]here being so many disorders which cure themselves and such

a disposition in mankind to deceive themselves and one another',

wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1784 —

...

and living long having given me frequent opportunities

of seeing certain remedies cried up as curing everything, and

yet soon after totally laid aside as useless, I cannot but fear

that the expectation of great advantage from the new method

of treating diseases will prove a delusion. That delusion may

however in some cases be of use while it lasts. He was referring to mesmerism. But 'every age has its peculiar

folly'.

Unlike Franklin, most scientists feel it's not their job to expose

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pseudoscientific bamboozles, much less, passionately held self-

deceptions. They tend not to be very good at it either. Scientists

are used to struggling with Nature, who may surrender her secrets

reluctantly but who fights fair. Often they are unprepared for

those unscrupulous practitioners of the 'paranormal' who play by

different rules. Magicians, on the other hand, are in the deception

business. They practise one of the many occupations - such as

acting, advertising, bureaucratic religion and politics - where what

a naive observer might misunderstand as lying is socially con-

doned as in the service of a higher good. Many magicians pretend

they don't cheat, and hint at powers conferred by mystic sources

or, lately, by alien largesse. Some use their knowledge to expose

charlatans in and out of their ranks. A thief is set to catch a thief. Few rise to this challenge as energetically as James 'The

Amazing' Randi, accurately self-described as an angry man. He is

angry not so much about the survival into our day of antediluvian

mysticism and superstition, but about how uncritical acceptance of

mysticism and superstition works to defraud, to humiliate, and

sometimes even to kill. Like all of us, he is imperfect: sometimes

Randi is intolerant and condescending, lacking in empathy for the

human frailties that underlie credulity. He is routinely paid for his

speeches and performances, but nothing compared to what he

could receive if he declared that his tricks derived from psychic

powers or divine or extraterrestrial influences. (Most professional

conjurors, worldwide, seem to believe in the reality of psychic

phenomena, according to polls of their views.) As a conjuror, he

has done much to expose remote viewers, 'telepaths', and faith-

healers who have bilked the public. He demonstrated the simple

deceptions and misdirections by which some psychic spoonbend-

ers had conned prominent theoretical physicists into deducing new

physical phenomena. He has received wide recognition among

scientists and is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation (so-

called 'genius') Prize Fellowship. One critic castigated him for

being 'obsessed with reality'.

1 wish the same could be said of our

nation and our species. Randi has done more than anyone else in recent times to expose

pretension and fraud in the lucrative business of faith-healing. He

sifts refuse. He reports gossip. He listens in on the stream of

216

Obsessed with Reality

'miraculous' information coming to the itinerant healer - not by

spiritual inspiration from God, but at the radio frequency of 39.17

megahertz, transmitted by his wife backstage.*

He discovers that those who rise from their wheelchairs and are

declared healed had never before been confined to wheelchairs -

they were invited by an usher to sit in them. He challenges the

faith-healers to provide serious medical evidence for the validity

of their claims. He invites local and federal government agencies

to enforce the laws against fraud and medical malpractice. He

chastises the news media for their studied avoidance of the issue. He exposes the profound contempt of these faith-healers for their

patients and parishioners. Many are conscious charlatans, using

Christian evangelical or New Age language and symbols to prey

on human frailty. Perhaps there are some with motives that are

not venal. Or am I being too harsh?

How is the occasional charlatan in

faith-healing different from the occasional fraud in science?

Is it

fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad

apples?

There are at least two important differences, it seems to

me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever

mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any 'miraculous' cures from faith-healing,

beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose of fraud and error in science is made almost

exclusively by science. The discipline polices itself, meaning that

scientists are aware of the potential for charlatanry and mistakes. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost

never done by other faith-healers. Indeed, it is striking how

reluctant the churches and synagogues are in condemning demon-

strable deception in their midst. When conventional medicine fails, when we must confront pain

and death, of course we are open to other prospects for hope. * Whose minions had interviewed the gullible patients only an hour or two

earlier. How, except through God, could the preacher know their symptoms

and street addresses?

This scam by the Christian fundamentalist faith-healer

Peter Popoff, and exposed by Randi, was thinly fictionalized in the 1993 film

Leap of Faith. 217

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

And, after all, some illnesses are psychogenic. Many can be at

least ameliorated by a positive cast of mind. Placebos are dummy

drugs, often sugar pills. Drug companies routinely compare the

effectiveness of their drugs against placebos given to patients with

the same disease who had no way to tell the difference between

the drug and the placebo. Placebos can be astonishingly effective,

especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that

are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins -

the small brain proteins with morphine-like effects - can be

elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it's

an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be

transformed into biochemistry. As a typical example, consider the nausea and vomiting that

frequently accompany the chemotherapy given to cancer and

AIDS patients. Nausea and vomiting can also be caused psycho-

genically, for instance by fear. The drug ondansetron hydrochlo-

ride greatly reduces the incidence of these symptoms; but is it

actually the drug or the expectation of relief?

In a double-blind

study 96 per cent of patients rated the drug effective. So did ten

per cent of the patients taking an identical-looking placebo. In an application of the fallacy of observational selection,

unanswered prayers may be forgotten or dismissed. There is a real

toll, though: some patients who are not cured by faith reproach

themselves - perhaps it's their own fault, perhaps they didn't

believe hard enough. Scepticism, they are rightly told, is an

impediment both to faith and to (placebo) healing. Nearly half of all Americans believe there is such a thing as

psychic or spiritual healing. Miraculous cures have been associ-

ated with a wide variety of healers, real and imagined, throughout

human history. Scrofula, a kind of tuberculosis, was in England

called the 'King's evil', and was supposedly curable only by the

King's touch. Victims patiently lined up to be touched; the

monarch briefly submitted to another burdensome obligation of

high office, and, despite no one, it seems, actually being cured,

the practice continued for centuries. A famous Irish faith-healer of the seventeenth century was

Valentine Greatraks. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he

had the power to cure disease, including colds, ulcers, 'soreness'

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Obsessed with Reality

and epilepsy. The demand for his services became so great that he

had no time for anything else. He was forced to become a healer,

he complained. His method was to cast out the demons responsi-

ble for disease. All diseases, he asserted, were caused by evil

spirits, many of whom he recognized and called by name. A

contemporary chronicler, cited by Mackay, noted that

he boasted of being much better acquainted with the intrigues

of demons than he was with the affairs of men ...

So great

was the confidence in him, that the blind fancied they saw the

light which they did not see - the deaf imagined that they

heard - the lame that they walked straight, and the paralytic

that they had recovered the use of their limbs. An idea of

health made the sick forget for awhile their maladies; and

imagination, which was not less active in those merely drawn

by curiosity than in the sick, gave a false view to the one class,

from the desire of seeing, as it operated a false cure on the

other from the strong desire of being healed. There are countless reports in the world literature of exploration

and anthropology not only of sicknesses being cured by faith in the

healer, but also of people wasting away and dying when cursed by

a sorcerer. A more or less typical example is told by Alvar Nunez

Cabeza de Vaca, who with a few companions and under condi-

tions of terrible privation wandered on land and sea, from Florida

to Texas to Mexico in 1528-36.

The many different communities

of Native Americans he met longed to believe in the supernatural

healing powers of the strange light-skinned, black-bearded for-

eigners and their black-skinned companion from Morocco, Este-

banico. Eventually whole villages came out to meet them,

depositing all their wealth at the feet of the Spaniards and humbly

imploring cures. It began modestly enough:

[T]hey tried to make us into medicine men, without examin-

ing us or asking for credentials, for they cure illnesses by

blowing on the sick person ...

and they ordered us to do the

same and be of some use ...

The way in which we cured was

by making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on

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them and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria ...

[A]s

soon as we made the sign of the cross over them, all those for

whom we prayed told the others that they were well and

healthy ...

Soon they were curing cripples. Cabeza de Vaca reports he raised

a man from the dead. After that,

we were very much hampered by the large number of people

who were following us ...

their eagerness to come and touch

us was very great and their importunity so extreme that three

hours would pass without our being able to persuade them to

leave us alone. When a tribe begged the Spaniards not to leave them, Cabeza de

Vaca and his companions became angry. Then,

a strange thing happened ...

[M]any of them fell ill, and

eight men died the next day. All over the land, in the places

where this became known, they were so afraid of us that it

seemed that the very sight of us made them almost die of fear. They implored us not to be angry, nor to wish for any more

of them to die; and they were altogether convinced that we

killed them simply by wishing to. In 1858, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was reported in

Lourdes, France; the Mother of God confirmed the dogma of her

immaculate conception which had been proclaimed by Pope Pius

IX just four years earlier. Something like a hundred million

people have come to Lourdes since then in the hope of being

cured, many with illnesses that the medicine of the time was

helpless to defeat. The Roman Catholic Church rejected the

authenticity of large numbers of claimed miraculous cures, accept-

ing only sixty-five in nearly a century and a half (of tumours,

tuberculosis, opthalmitis, impetigo, bronchitis, paralysis and

other diseases, but not, say, the regeneration of a limb or a

severed spinal cord).

Of the sixty-five, women outnumber men

ten to one. The odds of a miraculous cure at Lourdes, then, are

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Obsessed with Reality

about one in a million; you are roughly as likely to recover after

visiting Lourdes as you are to win the lottery, or to die in the crash

of a randomly selected regularly scheduled airplane flight -

including the one taking you to Lourdes. The spontaneous remission rate of all cancers, lumped together,

is estimated to be something between one in ten thousand and one

in a hundred thousand. If no more than five per cent of those who

come to Lourdes were there to treat their cancers, there should

have been something between fifty and 500 'miraculous' cures of

cancer alone. Since only three of the attested sixty-five cures are

of cancer, the rate of spontaneous remission at Lourdes seems to

be lower than if the victims had just stayed at home. Of course, if

you're one of the sixty-five, it's going to be very hard to convince

you that your trip to Lourdes wasn't the cause of the remission of

your disease ...

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Something similar

seems true of individual faith-healers. After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith-

healing, a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year

and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there

clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before

the 'cure'?

If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the

cure, or did we just have the healer's or the patient's say-so?

uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in

America of 'psychic surgery'.

But he found not one instance of

cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were

no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were

cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child's

spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical

operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to

a faith-healer and she's dead in a day. Dr Nolen's conclusion:

When [faithj-healers treat serious organic disease, they are

responsible for untold anguish and unhappiness ...

The

healers become killers. Even a recent book advocating the efficacy of prayer in treating

disease (Larry Dossey, Healing Words) is troubled by the fact that

some diseases are more easily cured or mitigated than others. If

221

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

prayer works, why can't God cure cancer or grow back a severed

limb?

Why so much avoidable suffering that God could so readily

prevent?

Why does God have to be prayed to at all?

Doesn't He

already know what cures need to be performed?

Dossey also

begins with a quote from Stanley Krippner, MD (described as

'one of the most authoritative investigators of the variety of

unorthodox healing methods used around the world'):

[T]he research data on distant, prayer-based healing are

promising, but too sparse to allow any firm conclusion to be

drawn. This after many trillions of prayers over the millennia. As Cabeza de Vaca's experience suggests, the mind can cause

certain diseases, even fatal diseases. When blindfolded patients

are deceived into believing they're being touched by a leaf such as

poison ivy or poison oak, they produce an ugly red contact

dermatitis. What faith-healing characteristically may help are

mind-mediated or placebo diseases: some back and knee pains,

headaches, stuttering, ulcers, stress, hay fever, asthma, hysterical

paralysis and blindness, and false pregnancy (with cessation of

menstrual periods and abdominal swelling).

These are all diseases

in which the state of mind may play a key role. In the late

medieval cures associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary,

most were of sudden, short-lived, whole-body or partial paralyses

that are plausibly psychogenic. It was widely held, moreover, that

only devout believers could be so cured. It's no surprise that

appeals to a state of mind called faith can relieve symptoms

caused, at least in part, by another, perhaps not very different

state of mind. But there's something more: the Harvest Moon Festival is an

important holiday in traditional Chinese communities in America. In the week preceding the festival, the death rate in the commu-

nity is found to fall by 35 per cent. In the following week the death

rate jumps by 35 percent. Control groups of non-Chinese show no

such effect. You might think that suicides are responsible, but

only deaths from natural causes are counted. You might think that

stress or overeating might account for it, but this could hardly

222

Obsessed with Reality

explain the fall in death rate before the harvest moon. The largest

effect is for people with cardiovascular disease, which is known to

be influenced by stress. Cancer showed a smaller effect. On more

detailed study, it turned out that the fluctuations in death rate

occurred exclusively among women 75 years old or older. The

Harvest Moon Festival is presided over by the oldest women in

the households. They were able to stave off death for a week or

two to perform their ceremonial responsibilities. A similar effect

is found among Jewish men in the weeks centred on Passover - a

ceremony in which older men play a leading role - and likewise,

worldwide for birthdays, graduation ceremonies and the like. In a more controversial study, Stanford University psychiatrists

divided eighty-six women with metastatic breast cancer into two

groups - one in which they were encouraged to examine their

fears of dying and to take charge of their lives, and the other given

no special psychiatric support. To the surprise of the researchers,

not only did the support group experience less pain, but they also

lived, on average, eighteen months longer. The leader of the Stanford study, David Spiegel, speculates that

the cause may be cortisol and other 'stress hormones' which

impair the body's protective immune system. Severely depressed

people, students during exam periods, and the bereaved all have

reduced white blood cell counts. Good emotional support may not

have much effect on advanced forms of cancer, but it may work to

reduce the chances of secondary infections in a person already

much weakened by the disease or its treatment. In his nearly forgotten 1903 book, Christian Science, Mark

Twain wrote

The power which a man's imagination has over his body to

heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born

without. The first man had it, the last one will possess it. Occasionally, some of the pain and anxiety or other symptoms of

more serious diseases can be relieved by faith-healers - however,

without arresting the progress of the disease. But this is no small

benefit. Faith and prayer may be able to relieve some symptoms

of disease and their treatment, ease the suffering of the afflicted

223

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and even prolong lives a little. In assessing the religion called

Christian Science, Mark Twain - its severest critic of the time -

nevertheless allowed that the bodies and lives it had 'made

whole' by the power of suggestion more than compensated for

those it had killed by withholding medical treatment in favour

of prayer. After his death, assorted Americans reported contact with the

ghost ofPresident John F. Kennedy. Before home shrines bearing

his picture, miraculous cures began to be reported. 'He gave his

life for his people,' one adherent of this stillborn religion

explained. According to the Encyclopedia of American Religions,

'To believers, Kennedy is thought of as a god.' Something similar

can be seen in the Elvis Presley phenomenon, and the heartfelt

cry: 'The King lives.' If such belief systems could arise spontane-

ously, think how much more could be done by a well-organized,

and especially an unscrupulous, campaign. In response to their inquiry, Randi suggested to Australia's Sixty

Minutes that they generate a hoax from scratch, using someone

with no training in magic or public speaking, and no experience in

the pulpit. As he was thinking the scam through, his eye fell upon

Jose Luis Alvarez, a young performance sculptor who was Randi's

tenant. 'Why not?' answered Alvarez, who when 1 met him

seemed bright, good-humoured and thoughtful. He went through

intensive training, including mock TV appearances and press

conferences. He didn't have to think up the answers, though,

because he had a nearly invisible radio receiver in his ear, through

which Randi prompted. Emissaries from Sixty Minutes checked

Alvarez's performance. The Carlos personality was Alvarez'

invention. When Alvarez and his 'manager' - likewise recruited for the job

with no previous experience - arrived in Sydney, there was James

Randi, slouching and inconspicuous, whispering into his transmit-

ter, at the periphery of the action. The substantiating documenta-

tion had all been faked. The curse, the water-throwing and all the

rest were rehearsed to attract media attention. They did. Many of

the people who showed up at the Opera House had done so

because of the television and press attention. One Australian

224

Obsessed with Reality

newspaper chain even printed verbatim handouts from the 'Carlos

Foundation'.

After Sixty Minutes aired, the rest of the Australian media was

furious. They had been used, they complained, lied to. 'Just as

there are legal guidelines concerning the police use of provoca-

teurs,' thundered Peter Robinson in the Australian Financial

Review,

there must be limits to how far the media can go in setting up

a misleading situation ...

I, for one, can simply not accept

that telling a lie is an acceptable way of reporting the

truth ...

Every poll of public opinion shows that there is a

suspicion among the general public that the media do not tell

the whole truth, or that they distort things, or that they

exaggerate, or that they are biased. Mr Robinson feared that Carlos might have lent credence to

this widespread misperception. Headlines ranged from 'How

Carlos Made Fools of Them AH' to 'Hoax Was Just Dumb'.

Newspapers that had not trumpeted Carlos patted themselves

on the back for their restraint. Negus said of Sixty Minutes,

'Even people of integrity can make mistakes,' and denied being

duped. Anyone calling himself a channeller, he said, is 'a fraud

by definition'.

Sixty Minutes and Randi stressed that the Australian media had

made no serious effort to check any of 'Carlos's' bona fides. He

had never appeared in any of the cities listed. The videotape of

Carlos on the stage of a New York theatre had been a favour

granted by the magicians Penn and Teller, who were appearing

there. They asked the audience just to give a big hand of applause;

Alvarez, in smock and medallion, walked on; the audience

dutifully applauded, Randi got his videotape, Alvarez waved

goodbye, the show went on. And there is no New York City radio

station with call letters WOOP. Other reasons for suspicion could readily be mined in Carlos's

writings. But because the intellectual currency has been so

debased, because credulity, New Age and Old, is so rampant,

because sceptical thinking is so rarely practised, no parody is too

225

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

implausible. The Carlos Foundation offered for sale (they were

scrupulously careful not actually to sell anything) an 'Atlantis

crystal':

Five of these unique crystals have so far been found by the

ascended master during his travels. Unexplained by science,

each crystal harnesses almost pure energy ...

[and has]

enormous healing powers. The forms are actually fossilized

spiritual energy and are a great boon to the preparation of the

Earth for the New Age ...

Of the Five, the ascended master

wears one Atlantic crystal at all times close to his body for

protection and to enhance all spiritual activities. Two have

been acquired by kindly supplicants in the United States of

America in exchange for the substantial contribution the

ascended master requests. Or, under the heading 'THE WATERS OF CARLOS':

The ascended master finds occasionally water of such purity

that he undertakes to energize a quantity of it for others to

benefit, an intensive process. To produce what is always too

little, the ascended master purifies himself and a quantity of

pure quartz crystal fashioned into flasks. He then places

himself and the crystals into a large copper bowl, polished

and kept warm. For a twenty-four hour period the ascended

master pours energy into the spiritual repository of the

water ...

The water need not be removed from the flask to

be utilized spiritually. Simply holding the flask and concen-

trating on healing a wound or illness will produce astounding

results. However, if serious mischance befalls you or a close

one, a tiny dab of the energized water will immediately assist

recovery. Or, TEARS OF CARLOS':

The red colour imparted to the holding flasks that the

ascended master has fashioned for the tears is proof enough

of their power, but their affect [sic] during meditation has

226

Obsessed with Reality

been described by those who have experienced it as 'a

glorious Oneness'.

Then there is a little book. The Teachings of Carlos, which begins:

1 AM CARLOS. I HAVE COME TO YOU

FROM MANY PAST

INCARNATIONS. I HAVE A GREAT LESSON TO

TEACH YOU. LISTEN CAREFULLY. READ CAREFULLY. THINK CAREFULLY. THE TRUTH IS HERE. The first teaching asks, 'Why are we here ...?' The answer: 'Who

can say what is the one answer?

There are many answers to any

question, and all the answers are right answers .

It is so. Do you see?'

The book enjoins us not to turn to the next page until we have

understood the page we are on. This is one of several factors that

makes finishing it difficult. 'Of doubters,' it reveals later, 'I can say only this: let them take

from the matter just what they wish. They end up with nothing - a

handful of space, perhaps. And what does the believer have?

EVERYTHING!

All questions are answered, since all and any

answers are correct answers. And the answers are right!

Argue

that, doubter.'

Or: 'Don't ask for explanations of everything. Westerners, in

particular, are always demanding long-winded descriptions of why

this, and why that. Most of what is asked is obvious. Why bother

with probing into these matters?...

By belief, all things become

true.'

The last page of the book displays a single word in large

227

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

letters: we are exhorted to 'THINK!'

The Ml text of The Teachings of Carlos was of course written by

Randi. He dashed it off on his laptop computer in a few hours. The Australian media felt betrayed by one of their own. The

leading television programme in the country had gone out of its

way to expose shoddy standards of fact-checking and widespread

gullibility in institutions devoted to news and public affairs. Some

media analysts excused it on the grounds that it obviously wasn't

important; if it had been important, they would have checked it

out. There were few mea culpas. None who had been taken in

were willing to appear on a retrospective of the 'Carlos Affair'

scheduled for the following Sunday on Sixty Minutes. Of course, there's nothing special about Australia in all of this. Alvarez, Randi, and their co-conspirators could have chosen any

nation on Earth and it would have worked. Even those who gave

Carlos a national television audience knew enough to ask some

sceptical questions - but they couldn't resist inviting him to appear

in the first place. The internecine struggle within the media

dominated the headlines after Carlos's departure. Puzzled com-

mentaries were written about the expose. What was the point?

What was proved?

Alvarez and Randi proved how little it takes to tamper with our

beliefs, how readily we are led, how easy it is to fool the public

when people are lonely and starved for something to believe in. If

Carlos had stayed longer in Australia and concentrated more on

healing - by prayer, by believing in him, by wishing on his bottled

tears, by stroking his crystals - there's no doubt that people would

have reported being cured of many illnesses, especially psycho-

genic ones. Even with nothing more fraudulent than his appear-

ance, sayings and ancillary products, some people would have

gotten better because of Carlos. This, again, is the placebo effect found with almost every

faith-healer. We believe we're taking a potent medicine and the

pain goes away - for a time at least. And when we believe we've

received a potent spiritual cure, the disease sometimes also goes

away - for a time at least. Some people spontaneously announce

that they've been cured even when they haven't. Detailed follow-

ups by Nolen, Randi and many others of those who have been told

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they were cured and agreed that they were - in, say, televised

services by American faith-healers - were unable to find even one

person with serious organic disease who was in fact cured. Even

significant improvement in their condition is dubious. As the

Lourdes experience suggests, you may have to go through ten

thousand to a million cases before you find one truly startling

recovery. A faith-healer may or may not start out with fraud in mind. But

to his amazement, his patients actually seem to be improving. Their emotions are genuine, their gratitude heart-felt. When the

healer is criticized, such people rush to his defence. Several

elderly attendees of the channelling at the Sydney Opera House

were incensed after the Sixty Minutes expose: 'Never mind what

they say,' they told Alvarez, 'we believe in you.'

These successes may be enough to convince many charlatans,

no matter how cynical they were at the beginning, that they

actually have mystical powers. Maybe they're not successful every

time. The powers come and go, they tell themselves. They have to

cover the down time. If they must cheat a little now and then, it

serves a higher purpose, they tell themselves. Their spiel is

consumer-tested. It works. Most of these figures are only after your money. That's the

good news. But what worries me is that a Carlos will come along

with bigger fish to fry - attractive, commanding, patriotic, exuding

leadership. All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismatic

leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to

feel good. Most reporters, editors and producers, swept up with

the rest of us, will shy away from real sceptical scrutiny. He won't

be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he'll be selling

you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing

bundle of beliefs than Carlos's. Whatever it is, it will be accompa-

nied by warnings about the dangers of scepticism. In the celebrated film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Scarecrow,

the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion are intimidated - indeed

awed - by the out-sized oracular figure called the Great Oz. But

Dorothy's little dog Toto snaps at a concealing curtain and reveals

that the Great Oz is in fact a machine run by a small, tubby,

frightened man, as much an exile in this strange land as they. 229

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

I think we're lucky that James Randi is tugging at the curtain. But it would be as dangerous to rely on him to expose all the

quacks, humbugs and bunkum in the world as it would be to

believe those same charlatans. If we don't want to get taken, we

need to do this job for ourselves. One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been

bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the

bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to

acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you

give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So

the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise. Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly

visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little,

so we have a chance to see what's going on, the spirits vanish. They're shy, we're told, and some of us believe it. In twentieth-

century parapsychology laboratories, there is the 'observer effect':

those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish

markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in

the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they

need is darkness and gullibility. A little girl who had been a co-conspirator in a famous

nineteenth-century flimflam - spirit-rapping, in which ghosts

answer questions by loud thumping - grew up and confessed it was

an imposture. She was cracking the joint in her big toe. She

demonstrated how it was done. But the public apology was largely

ignored and, when acknowledged, denounced. Spirit-rapping was

too reassuring to be abandoned merely on the say-so of a

self-confessed rapper, even if she started the whole business in the

first place. The story began to circulate that the confession was

coerced out of her by fanatical rationalists. As I described earlier, British hoaxers confessed to having

made 'crop circles', geometrical figures generated in grain fields. It wasn't alien artists working in wheat as their medium, but two

blokes with a board, a rope and a taste for whimsy. Even when

they demonstrated how they did it, though, believers were

unimpressed. Maybe some of the crop circles are hoaxes, they

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Obsessed with Reality

argued, but there are too many of them, and some of the

pictograms are too complex. Only extraterrestrials could do it. Then others in Britain confessed. But crop circles abroad, it was

objected, in Hungary for example, how can you explain that?

Then copycat Hungarian teenagers confessed. But what

about ...?

To test the credulity of an alien abduction psychiatrist, a woman

poses as an abductee. The therapist is enthusiastic about the

fantasies she spins. But when she announces it was all a fake, what

is his response?

To re-examine his protocols or his understanding

of what these cases mean?

No. On various days he suggests (1)

even if she isn't herself aware of it, she was in fact abducted; or (2)

she's crazy - after all, she went to a psychiatrist, didn't she?; or (3)

he was on top of the hoax from the beginning and just gave her

enough rope to hang herself. If it's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit

that we've been wrong, this is also information about ourselves

worth having. A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free

horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each, as requested,

detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent

the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how

accurate the horoscope had been. Ninety-four per cent of the

respondents (and 90 per cent of their families and friends) reply

that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However,

the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an

astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think

how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly

scrupulous might do. Why are we so easily taken in by fortune-tellers, psychic seers,

palmists, tea-leaf, tarot and yarrow readers, and their ilk?

course, they note our posture, facial expressions, clothing and

answers to seemingly innocuous questions. Some of them are

brilliant at it, and these are areas about which many scientists

seem almost unconscious. There is also a computer network to

which 'professional' psychics subscribe, the details of their cus-

tomers' lives available to their colleagues in an instant. A key tool

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is the so-called 'cold read', a statement of opposing predisposi-

tions so tenuously balanced that anyone will recognize a grain of

truth. Here's an example:

At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other

times you are introverted, wary and reserved. You have

found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and

become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and

limitations. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you

tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. While you

have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to

compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused

capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage. You

have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong

need for other people to like you and for them to admire you. Almost everyone finds this characterization recognizable, and

many feel that it describes them perfectly. Small wonder: we are

all human. The list of 'evidence' that some therapists think demonstrates

repressed childhood sexual abuse (for example, in The Courage to

Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis) is very long and prosaic: it

includes sleep disorders, overeating, anorexia and bulimia, sexual

dysfunction, vague anxieties, and even an inability to remember

childhood sexual abuse. Another book, by the social worker E. Sue Blume, lists, among other telltale signs of forgotten incest:

headaches, suspicion or its absence, excessive sexual passion or its

absence, and adoring one's parents. Among diagnostic items for

detecting 'dysfunctional' families listed by Charles Whitfield, MD,

are 'aches and pains', feeling 'more alive' in a crisis, being anxious

about 'authority figures', and having 'tried counseling or psycho-

therapy', yet feeling 'that "something" is wrong or missing'.

the cold read, if the list is long and broad enough, everyone will

have 'symptoms'.

Sceptical scrutiny is not only the toolkit for rooting out bunkum

and cruelty that prey on those least able to protect themselves and

most in need of our compassion, people offered little other hope. 232

Obsessed with Reality

It is also a timely reminder that mass rallies, radio and television,

the print media, electronic marketing, and mail-order technology

permit other kinds of lies to be injected into the body politic, to

take advantage of the frustrated, the unwary and the defenceless

in a society riddled with political ills that are being treated

ineffectively if at all. Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam and wishes

disguised as facts are not restricted to parlour magic and ambigu-

ous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple

through mainstream political, social, religious and economic

issues in every nation. 233

Antiscience

There's no such thing as objective truth. We make our own

truth. There's no such things as objective reality. We make

our own reality. There are spiritual, mystical, or inner ways

of knowing that are superior to our ordinary ways of

knowing. If an experience seems real, it is real. If an idea

feels right to you, it is right. We are incapable of acquiring

knowledge of the true nature of reality. Science itself is

irrational or mystical. It's just another faith or belief system

or myth, with no more justification than any other. It

doesn't matter whether beliefs are true or not, as long as

they're meaningful to you. a summary of New Age beliefs,

from Theodore Schick Jr and Lewis Vaughn,

How to Think About Weird Things:

Critical Thinking for a New Age

(Mountain View, CA:

Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995)

I f the established framework of science is plausibly in error (or

arbitrary, or irrelevant, or unpatriotic, or impious, or mainly

serving the interests of the powerful), then perhaps we can save

ourselves the trouble of understanding what so many people think

of as a complex, difficult, highly mathematical, and counterintui-

tive body of knowledge. Then all the scientists would have their

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Antiscience

comeuppance. Science envy could be transcended. Those who

have pursued other paths to knowledge, those who have secretly

harboured beliefs that science has scorned, could now have their

place in the Sun. The rate of change in science is responsible for some of the fire

it draws. Just when we've finally understood something the

scientists are talking about, they tell us it isn't any longer true. And even if it is, there's a slew of new things - things we never

heard of, things difficult to believe, things with disquieting

implications - that they claim to have discovered recently. Scien-

tists can be perceived as toying with us, as wanting to overturn

everything, as socially dangerous. Edward U. Condon was a distinguished American physicist, a

pioneer in quantum mechanics, a participant in the development

of radar and nuclear weapons in World War 11, research director

of Corning Glass, director of the National Bureau of Standards,

and president of the American Physical Society (as well as, late in

his life, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, where

he directed a controversial Air Force-funded scientific study of

UFOs).

He was one of the physicists whose loyalty to the United

States was challenged by members of Congress - including

Congressman Richard M. Nixon, who called for the revocation of

his security clearance - in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The

superpatriotic chairman of the House Committee on

Un-American Activities (HCUA), Rep. J. Parnell Thomas,

would call the physicist 'Dr Condom', the 'weakest link' in

American security, and - at one point - the 'missing link'.

His

view on Constitutional guarantees can be gleaned from the

following response to a witness's lawyer: 'The rights you have are

the rights given you by this Committee. We will determine what

rights you have and what rights you have not got before the

Committee.'

Albert Einstein publicly called on all those summoned before

HCUA to refuse to cooperate. In 1948, President Harry Truman

at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science, and with Condon sitting beside him,

denounced Rep. Thomas and HCUA on the grounds that vital

scientific research 'may be made impossible by the creation of an

235

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of

unfounded rumors, gossip and vilification'.

He called HCUA's

activities 'the most un-American thing we have to contend with

today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country.'*

The playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, about the

Salem Witch Trials, in this period. When the drama opened in

Europe, Miller was denied a passport by the State Department on

the grounds that it was not in the best interests of the United

States for him to travel abroad. On opening night in Brussels the

play was greeted with tumultuous applause, whereupon the US

Ambassador stood up and took a bow. Brought before HCUA,

Miller was chastised for the suggestion that Congressional investi-

gations might have something in common with witch trials; he

replied, 'The comparison is inevitable, sir.' Thomas was shortly

afterwards thrown in jail for fraud. One summer in graduate school 1 was a student of Condon's. 1

remember vividly his account of being brought up before some

loyalty review board:

'Dr Condon, it says here that you have been at the forefront of a

revolutionary movement in physics called' - and here the inquisitor

read the words slowly and carefully - 'quantum mechanics. It strikes

this hearing that if you could be at the forefront of one revolutionary

movement...

you could be at the forefront of another.'

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was

untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right

hand: T believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third

century BC. 1 believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion,

discovered in the seventeenth century. 1 believe in Newton's

laws ...' And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of

Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampere, Boltzmann and Maxwell. This physi-

cist's catechism did not gain him much. The tribunal did not

* But Truman's responsibility for the witch-hunt atmosphere of the late 1940s

and early 1950s is considerable. His 1947 Executive Order 9835 authorized

inquiries into the opinions and associates of all federal employees, without the

right to confront the accuser or even, in most cases, to know what the

accusation was. Those found wanting were fired. His Attorney General, Tom

Clark, established a list of 'subversive' organizations so wide that at one time it

included Consumer's Union. 236

Antiscience

appreciate humour in so serious a matter. But the most they were

able to pin on Condon, as I recall, was that in high school he had a

job delivering a socialist newspaper door-to-door on his bicycle. Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechan-

ics is about. There is a mathematical underpinning that you must

first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading

you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithme-

tic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and

integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations,

vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics,

matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this

might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school

- roughly fifteen years. Such a course of study does not actually

involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing

the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply. The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across some

idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has not

gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are

no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opin-

ion, partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are

compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutely

counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching

it. It's no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it is that

way. No one knows why it is that way. That's just the way it is. Now suppose we were to approach some obscure religion or

New Age doctrine or shamanistic belief system sceptically. We

have an open mind; we understand there's something interesting

here; we introduce ourselves to the practitioner and ask for an

intelligible summary. Instead we are told that it's intrinsically too

difficult to be explained simply, that it's replete with 'mysteries',

but if we're willing to become acolytes for fifteen years, at the end

of that time we might begin to be prepared to consider the subject

seriously. Most of us, 1 think, would say that we simply don't have

the time; and many would suspect that the business about fifteen

years just to get to the threshold of understanding is evidence that

the whole subject is a bamboozle: if it's too hard for us to

understand, doesn't it follow that it's too hard for us to criticize

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

knowledgeably?

Then the bamboozle has free rein. So how is shamanistic or theological or New Age doctrine differ-

ent from quantum mechanics?

The answer is that even if we cannot

understand it, we can verify that quantum mechanics works. We can

compare the quantitative predictions of quantum theory with the

measured wavelengths of spectral lines of the chemical elements, the

behaviour of semiconductors and liquid helium, microprocessors,

which kinds of molecules form from their constituent atoms, the

existence and properties of white dwarf stars, what happens in

masers and lasers, and which materials are susceptible to which kinds

of magnetism. We don't have to understand the theory to see what it

predicts. We don't have to be accomplished physicists to read what

the experiments reveal. In every one of these instances, as in many

others, the predictions of quantum mechanics are strikingly, and to

high accuracy, confirmed. But the shaman tells us that his doctrine is true because it too

works - not on arcane matters of mathematical physics but on what

really counts: he can cure people. Very well, then, let's accumulate

the statistics on shamanistic cures, and see if they work better than

placebos. If they do, let's willingly grant that there's something here

- even if it's only that some illnesses are psychogenic, and can be

cured or mitigated by the right attitudes and mental states. We can

also compare the efficacy of alternative shamanistic systems. Whether the shaman grasps why his cures work is another story. In quantum mechanics we have a purported understanding of

Nature on the basis of which, step by step and quantitatively, we

make predictions about what will happen if a certain experiment,

never before attempted, is carried out. If the experiment bears out

the prediction - especially if it does so numerically and precisely -

we have confidence that we knew what we were doing. There are

at best few examples with this character among shamans, priests

and New Age gurus. Another important distinction was suggested in Reason and

Nature, the 1931 book by Morris Cohen, a celebrated philosopher

of science:

To be sure, the vast majority ofpeople who are untrained can

accept the results of science only on authority. But there is

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Antiscience

obviously an important difference between an establishment

that is open and invites every one to come, study its methods,

and suggest improvement, and one that regards the question-

ing of its credentials as due to wickedness of heart, such as

[Cardinal] Newman attributed to those who questioned the

infallibility of the Bible ...

Rational science treats its credit

notes as always redeemable on demand, while non-rational

authoritarianism regards the demand for the redemption of

its paper as a disloyal lack of faith. The myths and folklore of many pre-modern cultures have

explanatory or at least mnemonic value. In stories that everyone

can appreciate and even witness, they encode the environment. Which constellations are rising or the orientation of the Milky

Way on a given day of the year can be remembered by a story

about lovers reunited or a canoe negotiating the sacred river. Since recognizing the sky is essential for planting and reaping and

following the game, such stories have important practical value. They can also be helpful as psychological projective tests or as

reassurances of humanity's place in the Universe. But that doesn't

mean that the Milky Way really is a river or that a canoe really is

traversing it before our eyes. Quinine comes from an infusion of the bark of a particular tree

from the Amazon rain forest. How did pre-modern people ever

discover that a tea made from this tree, of all the plants in the

forest, would relieve the symptoms of malaria?

They must have

tried every tree and every plant - roots, stems, bark, leaves -

tried chewing on them, mashing them up, making an infusion. This constitutes a massive set of scientific experiments continu-

ing over generations, experiments that moreover could not be

duplicated today for reasons of medical ethics. Think of how

many bark infusions from other trees must have been useless,

or made the patient retch or even die. In such a case, the healer

chalks these potential medicines off the list, and moves on to

the next. The data of ethnopharmacology may not be systemati-

cally or even consciously acquired. By trial and error, though,

and carefully remembering what worked, eventually they get

there - using the rich molecular riches in the plant kingdom

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

to accumulate a pharmacopoeia that works. Absolutely essen-

tial, life-saving information can be acquired from folk medicine

and in no other way. We should be doing much more than we

are to mine the treasures in such folk knowledge worldwide. Likewise for, say, predicting the weather in a valley near the

Orinoco: it is perfectly possible that pre-industrial peoples have

noted over the millennia regularities, premonitory indications,

cause-and-effect relationships at a particular geographic locale of

which professors of meteorology and climatology in some distant

university are wholly ignorant. But it does not follow that the

shamans of such cultures are able to predict the weather in Paris

or Tokyo, much less the global climate. Certain kinds of folk knowledge are valid and priceless. Others

are at best metaphors and codifiers. Ethnomedicine, yes; astro-

physics, no. It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are

worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are

equally valid if we're talking not about an internal mindset, but

about understanding the external reality. For centuries, science has been under a line of attack that, rather

than pseudoscience, can be called antiscience. Science, and aca-

demic scholarship in general, the contention these days goes, is

too subjective. Some even allege it's entirely subjective, as is, they

say, history. History generally is written by the victors to justify

their actions, to arouse patriotic fervour, and to suppress the

legitimate claims of the vanquished. When no overwhelming

victory takes place, each side writes self-promotional accounts of

what really happened. English histories castigated the French, and

vice versa; US histories until very recently ignored the de facto

policies of lebensraum and genocide toward Native Americans;

Japanese histories of the events leading to World War 11 minimize

Japanese atrocities, and suggest that their chief purpose was

altruistically to free East Asia from European and American

colonialism; Poland was invaded in 1939, Nazi historians asserted,

because Poland, ruthless and unprovoked, attacked Germany;

Soviet historians pretended that the Soviet troops that put down

the Hungarian (1956) and Czech (1968) Revolutions were invited

in by general acclamation in the invaded nations rather than by

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Antiscience

Russian stooges; Belgian histories tend to gloss over the atrocities

committed when the Congo was a private fiefdom of the King of

Belgium; Chinese historians are strangely oblivious of the tens of

millions of deaths caused by Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward';

that God condones and even advocates slavery was repeatedly

argued from the pulpit and in the schools in Christian slave-

holding societies, but Christian polities that have freed their slaves

are mostly silent on the matter; as brilliant, widely read and sober

a historian as Edward Gibbon would not meet with Benjamin

Franklin when they found themselves at the same English country

inn, because of the late unpleasantness of the American Revolu-

tion. (Franklin then volunteered source material to Gibbon when

he turned, as Franklin was sure he soon would, from the decline

and fall of the Roman Empire to the decline and fall of the British

Empire. Franklin was right about the British Empire, but his

timetable was about two centuries early.)

These histories have traditionally been written by admired

academic historians, often pillars of the establishment. Local

dissent is given short shrift. Objectivity is sacrificed in the service

of higher goals. From this doleful fact, some have gone so far as to

conclude that there is no such thing as history, no possibility of

reconstructing the actual events; that all we have are biased

self-justifications; and that this conclusion stretches from history

to all of knowledge, science included. And yet who would deny that there were actual sequences of

historical events, with real causal threads, even if our ability to

reconstruct them in their full weave is limited, even if the signal is

awash in an ocean of self-congratulatory noise?

The danger of

subjectivity and prejudice has been apparent from the beginning

of history. Thucydides warned against it. Cicero wrote

The first law is that the historian shall never dare to set down

what is false; the second, that he shall never dare to conceal

the truth; the third, that there shall be no suspicion in his

work of either favouritism or prejudice. Lucian of Samosata, in How Histoiy Should Be Written, published

in the year 170, urged 'The historian should be fearless and

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth'.

It is the responsibility of those historians with integrity to try to

reconstruct that actual sequence of events, however disappointing

or alarming it may be. Historians learn to suppress their natural

indignation about affronts to their nations and acknowledge,

where appropriate, that their national leaders may have commit-

ted atrocious crimes. They may have to dodge outraged patriots as

an occupational hazard. They recognize that accounts of events

have passed through biased human filters, and that historians

themselves have biases. Those who want to know what actually

happened will become fully conversant with the views of histori-

ans in other, once adversary, nations. All that can be hoped for is

a set of successive approximations: by slow steps, and through

improving self-knowledge, our understanding of historical events

improves. Something similar is true in science. We have biases; we breathe

in the prevailing prejudices from our surroundings like everyone

else. Scientists have on occasion given aid and comfort to a variety

of noxious doctrines (including the supposed 'superiority' of one

ethnic group or gender over another from measurements of brain

size or skull bumps or IQ tests).

Scientists are often reluctant to

offend the rich and powerful. Occasionally, a few of them cheat

and steal. Some worked - many without a trace of moral regret -

for the Nazis. Scientists also exhibit biases connected with human

chauvinisms and with our intellectual limitations. As I've dis-

cussed earlier, scientists are also responsible for deadly technolo-

gies - sometimes inventing them on purpose, sometimes being

insufficiently cautious about unintended side-effects. But it is also

scientists who, in most such cases, have blown the whistle alerting

us to the danger. Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the

scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range

of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective

enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running

smoothly. It has an overwhelming advantage over history,

because in science we can do experiments. If you are unsure of the

negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris in 1814-15, replaying

the events is an unavailable option. You can only dig into old

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Antiscience

records. You cannot even ask questions of the participants. Every

one of them is dead. But for many questions in science, you can rerun the event as

many times as you like, examine it in new ways, test a wide range

of alternative hypotheses. When new tools are devised, you can

perform the experiment again and see what emerges from your

improved sensitivity. In those historical sciences where you cannot

arrange a rerun, you can examine related cases and begin to

recognize their common components. We can't make stars

explode at our convenience, nor can we repeatedly evolve through

many trials a mammal from its ancestors. But we can simulate

some of the physics of supernova explosions in the laboratory, and

we can compare in staggering detail the genetic instructions of

mammals and reptiles. The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or

irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is

an illusion. The American revolutionary, Ethan Allen - leader of

the Green Mountain Boys in their capture of Fort Ticonderoga -

had some words on this subject:

Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider

whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if

with reason, then they establish the principle that they are

laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason

(which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must

do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they

deserve a rational argument. The reader can judge the depth of this argument. Anyone who witnesses the advance of science first-hand sees an

intensely personal undertaking. There are always a few - driven by

simple wonder and great integrity, or by frustration with the inad-

equacies of existing knowledge, or simply upset with themselves for

their imagined inability to understand what everyone else can - who

proceed to ask the devastating key questions. A few saintly person-

alities stand out amidst a roiling sea of jealousies, ambition, backbit-

ing, suppression of dissent, and absurd conceits. In some fields,

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highly productive fields, such behaviour is almost the norm. I think all that social turmoil and human weakness aids the

enterprise of science. There is an established framework in which

any scientist can prove another wrong and make sure everyone

else knows about it. Even when our motives are base, we keep

stumbling on something new. The American chemistry Nobel laureate Harold C. Urey once

confided to me that as he got older (he was then in his seventies),

he experienced increasingly concerted efforts to prove him wrong. He described it as 'the fastest gun in the West' syndrome: the

young man who could outdraw the celebrated old gunslinger

would inherit his reputation and the respect paid to him. It was

annoying, he grumbled, but it did help direct the young whipper-

snappers into important areas of research that they would never

have entered on their own. Being human, scientists also sometimes engage in observational

selection: they like to remember those cases when they've been

right and forget when they've been wrong. But in many instances,

what is 'wrong' is partly right, or stimulates others to find out

what's right. One of the most productive astrophysicists of our

time has been Fred Hoyle, responsible for monumental contribu-

tions to our understanding of the evolution of stars, the synthesis

of the chemical elements, cosmology and much else. Sometimes

he's succeeded by being right before anyone else even understood

that there was something that needed explaining. Sometimes he's

succeeded by being wrong - by being so provocative, by suggest-

ing such outrageous alternatives that the observers and experi-

mentalists feel obliged to check it out. The impassioned and

concerted effort to 'prove Fred wrong' has sometimes failed and

sometimes succeeded. In almost every case, it has pushed forward

the frontiers of knowledge. Even Hoyle at his most outrageous -

for example, proposing that the influenza and HIV viruses are

dropped down on Earth from comets, and that interstellar dust

grains are bacteria - has led to significant advances in knowledge

(although turning up nothing to support those particular notions.)

It might be useful for scientists now and again to list some of their

mistakes. It might play an instructive role in illuminating and

244

Antiscience

demythologizing the process of science and in enlightening

younger scientists. Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles

Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Albert Einstein made serious mis-

takes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that team-

work prevails: what one of us, even the most brilliant among us,

misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and

capable, may detect and rectify. For myself. I've tended in past books to recount some of the

occasions when I've been right. Let me here mention a few of the

cases where I've been wrong: at a time when no spacecraft had

been to Venus, I thought at first that the atmospheric pressure was

several times that on Earth, rather than many tens of times. 1

thought the clouds of Venus were made mainly of water, when

they turn out to be only 25 per cent water. 1 thought there might

be plate tectonics on Mars, when close-up spacecraft observations

now show hardly a hint of plate tectonics. 1 thought the highish

infrared temperatures of Titan might be due to a sizeable green-

house effect there; instead, it turns out, it is caused by a

stratospheric temperature inversion. Just before Iraq torched the

Kuwaiti oil wells in January 1991, I warned that so much smoke

might get so high as to disrupt agriculture in much of South Asia;

as events transpired, it was pitch black at noon and the tempera-

tures dropped 4-6°C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke

reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared. I did not

sufficiently stress the uncertainty of the calculations. Different scientists have different speculative styles, some being

much more cautious than others. As long as new ideas are testable

and scientists are not overly dogmatic, no harm is done; indeed,

considerable progress can be made. In the first four instances I've

just mentioned where I was wrong, I was trying to understand a

distant world from a few clues in the absence of thorough

spacecraft investigations. In the natural course of planetary explo-

ration more data come in, and we find an army of old ideas

ploughed down by an armamentarium of new facts. Postmodernists have criticized Kepler's astronomy because it

emerged out of his medieval, monotheistic religious views; Darwin's

evolutionary biology for being motivated by a wish to perpetuate the

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

privileged social class from which he came, or to justify his supposed

prior atheism; and so on. Some of these claims are just. Some are

not. But why does it matter what biases and emotional predisposi-

tions scientists bring to their studies, so long as they are scrupulously

honest and other people with different proclivities check their

results?

Presumably no one would argue that the conservative view

on the sum of fourteen and twenty-seven differs from the liberal

view, or that the mathematical function that is its own derivative is

the exponential in the northern hemisphere but some other function

in the southern. Any regular periodic function can be represented to

arbitrary accuracy by a Fourier series in Muslim as well as in Hindu

mathematics. Non-commutative algebras (where A times B does not

equal B times A) are as self-consistent and meaningful for speakers

of Indo-European languages as for speakers of Finno-Ugric. Math-

ematics might be prized or ignored, but it is equally true everywhere

- independent of ethnicity, culture, language, religion, ideology. Towards the opposite extreme, there are questions such as

whether abstract expressionism can be 'great' art, or rap 'great'

music; whether it's more important to curb inflation or unemploy-

ment; whether French culture is superior to German culture; or

whether prohibitions against murder should apply to the nation

state. Here the questions are oversimple, or the dichotomies false,

or the answers dependent on unspoken assumptions. Here local

biases might very well determine the answers. Where in this subjective continuum, from almost fully inde-

pendent of cultural norms to almost wholly dependent on them,

does science lie?

Although issues of bias and cultural chauvinism

certainly arise, and although its content is continually being

refined, science is clearly much closer to mathematics than it is to

fashion. The claim that its findings are in general arbitrary and

biased is not merely tendentious, but specious. The historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob

(in Telling the Truth About Histoiy, 1994) criticize Isaac Newton:

he is said to have rejected the philosophical position of Descartes

because it might challenge conventional religion and lead to social

chaos and atheism. Such criticisms amount only to the charge that

scientists are human. How Newton was buffeted by the intellec-

tual currents of his time is of course of interest to the historian of

246

Antiscience

ideas; but it has little bearing on the truth of his propositions. For

them to be generally accepted, they must convince atheists and

theists alike. This is just what happened. Appleby and her colleagues claim that 'When Darwin formu-

lated his theory of evolution, he was an atheist and a materialist,'

and suggest that evolution was a product of a purported atheist

agenda. They have hopelessly confused cause and effect. Darwin

was about to become a minister of the Church of England when

the opportunity to sail on HMS Beagle presented itself. His

religious ideas, as he himself described them, were at the time

highly conventional. He found every one of the Anglican Articles

of Faith entirely believable. Through his interrogation of Nature,

through science, it slowly dawned on him that at least some of his

religion was false. That's why he changed his religious views. Appleby and her colleagues are appalled at Darwin's descrip-

tion of 'the low morality of savages ...

their insufficient powers

of reasoning ...

[their] weak power of self-command', and state

that 'now many people are shocked by his racism'.

But there was

no racism at all, as far as 1 can tell, in Darwin's comment. He was

alluding to the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, suffering from

grinding scarcity in the most barren and Antarctic province of

Argentina. When he described a South American woman of

African origin who threw herself to her death rather than submit

to slavery, he noted that it was only prejudice that kept us from

seeing her defiance in the same heroic light as we would a similar

act by the proud matron of a noble Roman family. He was himself

almost thrown off the Beagle by Captain FitzRoy for his militant

opposition to the Captain's racism. Darwin was head and shoul-

ders above most of his contemporaries in this regard. But again, even if he was not, how does it affect the truth or

falsity of natural selection?

Thomas Jefferson and George

Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas

Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on

indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it

fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?

Some

of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by

later generations - perhaps for insisting that small children and

even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular

approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery

and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating

animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of

euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up

ignorant. Occasionally, in retrospect, someone stands out. In my book,

the English-born American revolutionary Thomas Paine is one

such. He was far ahead of his time. He courageously opposed

monarchy, aristocracy, racism, slavery, superstition and sexism

when all of these constituted the conventional wisdom. He was

unswerving in his criticism of conventional religion. He wrote in

The Age of Reason: 'Whenever we read the obscene stories, the

voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the

unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is

filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a

demon than the word of God. It ...

has served to corrupt and

brutalize mankind.' At the same time the book exhibited the

deepest reverence for a Creator of the Universe whose existence

Paine argued was apparent at a glance at the natural world. But

condemning much of the Bible while embracing God seemed an

impossible position to most of his contemporaries. Christian

theologians concluded he was drunk, mad or corrupt. The Jewish

scholar David Levi forbade his co-religionists from even touching,

much less reading, the book. Paine was made to suffer so much for

his views (including being thrown into prison after the French

Revolution for being too consistent in his opposition to tyranny)

that he became an embittered old man.*

Yes, the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and

grotesquely misused: voracious robber barons may explain their

* Paine was the author of the revolutionary pamphlet 'Common Sense'.

Pub-

lished on 10 January 1776, it sold over half a million copies in the next few

months and stirred many Americans to the cause of independence. He was the

author of the three best-selling books of the eighteenth century. Later

generations reviled him for his social and religious views. Theodore Roosevelt

called him a 'filthy little atheist' - despite his profound belief in God. He is

probably the most illustrious American revolutionary uncommemorated by a

monument in Washington, DC. Antiscience

cut-throat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and

other racists may call on 'survival of the fittest' to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and

corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain

nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social

hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the

Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation and

the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler's rise to power. Very like these or similar events would have transpired with or

without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly

clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by

robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, com-

passion - may be the key to survival. If we could censor Darwin, what other kinds of knowledge

could also be censored?

Who would do the censoring?

Who

among us is wise enough to know which information and insights

we can safely dispense with, and which will be necessary ten or a

hundred or a thousand years into the future?

Surely we can exert

some discretion on which kinds of machines and products it is

safe to develop. We must in any case make such decisions,

because we do not have the resources to pursue all possible

technologies. But censoring knowledge, telling people what they

must think, is the aperture to thought police, authoritarian

government, foolish and incompetent decision-making and long-

term decline. Fervid ideologues and authoritarian regimes find it easy and

natural to impose their views and suppress the alternatives. Nazi

scientists, such as the Nobel laureate physicist Johannes Stark,

distinguished fanciful, imaginary 'Jewish science', including rela-

tivity and quantum mechanics, from realistic, practical 'Aryan

science'.

Another example: 'A new era of the magical explanation

of the world is rising,' said Adolf Hitler, 'an explanation based on

will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral

or the scientific sense.'

As he described it to me three decades later, in 1922 the

American geneticist Hermann J. Muller flew from Berlin to

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Moscow in a light plane to witness the new Soviet society

firsthand. He must have liked what he saw, because - after his

discovery that radiation makes mutations (a discovery that would

later win him a Nobel Prize) - he moved to Moscow to help

establish modern genetics in the Soviet Union. But by the middle

1930s a charlatan named Trofim Lysenko had caught the notice

and then the enthusiastic support of Stalin. Lysenko argued that

genetics - which he called 'Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism',

after some of the founders of the field - had an unacceptable

philosophical base, and that philosophically 'correct' genetics,

genetics that paid proper obeisance to communist dialectical

materialism, would yield very different results. In particular,

Lysenko's genetics would permit an additional crop of winter

wheat - welcome news to a Soviet economy reeling from Stalin's

forced collectivization of agriculture. Lysenko's purported evidence was suspect, there were no

experimental controls, and his broad conclusions flew in the face

of an immense body of contradictory data. As Lysenko's power

grew, Muller passionately argued that classical Mendelian genet-

ics was in flill harmony with dialectical materialism, while

Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteris-

tics and denied a material basis of heredity, was an 'idealist', or

worse. Muller was strongly supported by NT. Vavilov, erstwhile

president of the Ail-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In a 1936 address to the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, now

presided over by Lysenko, Muller gave a stirring address that

included these words:

If the outstanding practitioners are going to support theories

and opinions that are obviously absurd to everyone who

knows even a little about genetics - such views as those

recently put forward by President Lysenko and those who

think as he does - then the choice before us will resemble the

choice between witchcraft and medicine, between astrology

and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry. In a country of arbitrary arrests and police terror, this speech

displayed exemplary - many thought foolhardy - integrity and

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Antiscience

courage. In The Vavilov Affair (1984), the Soviet emigre historian

Mark Popovsky describes these words as being accompanied by

'thunderous applause from the whole hall' and 'remembered by

everyone still living who took part in the session'.

Three months later, Muller was visited in Moscow by a Western

geneticist who expressed astonishment at a widely circulated

letter, signed by Muller, that condemned the prevalence of

'Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism' in the West and that urged

a boycott of the forthcoming International Congress of Genetics. Having never seen, much less signed, such a letter, an outraged

Muller concluded that it was a forgery perpetrated by Lysenko. Muller promptly wrote an angry denunciation of Lysenko to

Pravda and mailed a copy to Stalin. The next day Vavilov came to Muller in a state of some

agitation, informing him that he, Muller, had just volunteered to

serve in the Spanish Civil War. The letter to Pravda had put

Muller's life in danger. He left Moscow the next day, just evading,

so he was later told, the NKVD, the secret police. Vavilov was not

so lucky, and perished in 1943 in Siberia. With the continuing support of Stalin and later of Khrushchev,

Lysenko ruthlessly suppressed classical genetics. Soviet school

biology texts in the early 1960s had as little about chromosomes

and classical genetics as many American school biology texts have

about evolution today. But no new crop of winter wheat grew;

incantations of the phrase 'dialectical materialism' went unheard

by the DNA of domesticated plants; Soviet agriculture remained

in the doldrums; and today, partly for this reason, Russia -

world-class in many other sciences - is still almost hopelessly

backward in molecular biology and genetic engineering. Two

generations of modern biologists have been lost. Lysenkoism was

not overthrown until 1964, in a series of debates and votes at the

Soviet Academy of Sciences - one of the few institutions to

maintain a degree of independence from the leaders of party and

state - in which the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov played an

outstanding role. Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the

Soviet experience. The idea that some state-endorsed ideology

or popular prejudice would hogtie scientific progress seems

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

unthinkable. For two hundred years Americans have prided

themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological

people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudo-

science has flourished in the United States - on race, for

example. Under the guise of 'creationism', a serious effort

continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory - the most

powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for

other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology - from

being taught in the schools. Science is different from many another human enterprise - not, of

course, in its practitioners' being influenced by the culture they

grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong

(which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for

framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive experi-

ments that confirm or deny ideas, in the vigour of its substantive

debate, and in its willingness to abandon ideas that have been

found wanting. If we were not aware of our own limitations,

though, if we were not seeking further data, if we were unwilling

to perform controlled experiments, if we did not respect the

evidence, we would have very little leverage in our quest for the

truth. Through opportunism and timidity we might then be

buffeted by every ideological breeze, with nothing of lasting value

to hang on to. 252

Newton's Sleep

May God keep us from single vision and Newton's sleep. William Blake,

from a poem included in a letter

to Thomas Butts (1802)

[l]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does

knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who

know much, who so positively assert that this or that

problem will never be solved by science. Charles Darwin, Introduction,

The Descent of Man (1871)

B y 'Newton's sleep', the poet, painter and revolutionary

William Blake seems to have meant a tunnel vision in the

perspective ofNewton's physics, as well as Newton's own (incom-

plete) disengagement from mysticism. Blake thought the idea of

atoms and particles of light amusing, and Newton's influence on

our species 'satanic'.

A common critique of science is that it is too

narrow. Because of our well-demonstrated fallibilities, it rules out

of court, beyond serious discourse, a wide range of uplifting

images, playful notions, earnest mysticism and stupefying won-

ders. Without physical evidence, science does not admit spirits,

souls, angels, devils or dharma bodies of the Buddha. Or alien

visitors. 253

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

The American psychologist Charles Tart, who believes the

evidence for extrasensory perception is convincing, writes:

An important factor in the current popularity of 'New Age'

ideas is a reaction against the dehumanizing, despiritualizing

effects of scientism, the philosophical belief (masquerading as

objective science and held with the emotional tenacity of

born-again fundamentalism) that we are nothing but material

beings. To unthinkingly embrace anything and everything

labeled 'spiritual' or 'psychic' or 'New Age' is, of course,

foolish, for many of these ideas are factually wrong, however

noble or inspiring they are. On the other hand, this New Age

interest is a legitimate recognition of some of the realities of

human nature: People have always had and continue to have

experiences that seem to be 'psychic' or 'spiritual'.

But why should 'psychic' experiences challenge the idea that we

are made of matter and nothing but?

There is very little doubt

that, in the everyday world, matter (and energy) exist. The

evidence is all around us. In contrast, as I've mentioned earlier,

the evidence for something non-material called 'spirit' or 'soul' is

very much in doubt. Of course each of us has a rich internal life. Considering the stupendous complexity of matter, though, how

could we possibly prove that our internal life is not wholly due to

matter?

Granted, there is much about human consciousness that

we do not fully understand and cannot yet explain in terms of

neurobiology. Humans have limitations, and no one knows this

better than scientists. But a multitude of aspects of the natural

world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago

are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively

solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a

detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in

terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a 'spirit

world' than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the

sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about

phototropism and plant hormones. And if the world does not in all respects correspond to our

254

Newton's Sleep

wishes, is this the fault of science, or of those who would impose

their wishes on the world?

All the mammals - and many other

animals as well - experience emotions: fear, lust, hope, pain, love,

hate, the need to be led. Humans may brood about the future

more, but there is nothing in our emotions unique to us. On the

other hand, no other species does science as much or as well as

we. How then can science be 'dehumanizing'?

Still, it seems so unfair: some of us starve to death before we're

out of infancy, while others - by an accident of birth - live out

their lives in opulence and splendour. We can be born into an

abusive family or a reviled ethnic group, or start out with some

deformity; we go through life with the deck stacked against us,

and then we die, and that's it?

Nothing but a dreamless and

endless sleep?

Where's the justice in this?

This is stark and brutal

and heartless. Shouldn't we have a second chance on a level

playing field?

How much better if we were born again in circum-

stances that took account of how well we played our part in the

last life, no matter how stacked against us the deck was then. Or if

there were a time of judgement after we die, then - so long as we

did well with the persona we were given in this life, and were

humble and faithful and all the rest - we should be rewarded by

living joyfully until the end of time in a permanent refuge from the

agony and turmoil of the world. That's how it would be if the

world were thought out, preplanned, fair. That's how it would be

if those suffering from pain and torment were to receive the

consolation they deserve. So societies that teach contentment with our present station

in life, in expectation of postmortem reward, tend to inoculate

themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in

some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for

existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach

an afterlife of bliss for heroes - or even for those who just did

what those in authority told them - might gain a competitive

advantage. Thus, the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives

death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and

nations to sell. This is not an issue on which we might anticipate

widespread scepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the

255

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

evidence is meagre to nil. True, brain lesions can make us lose

major segments of our memory, or convert us from manic to

placid, or vice versa; and changes in brain chemistry can convince

us there's a massive conspiracy against us, or make us think we

hear the Voice of God. But as compelling testimony as this

provides that our personality, character, memory - if you will,

soul - resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on

it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence. And if there are powerful social institutions insisting that there

is an afterlife, it should be no surprise that dissenters tend to be

sparse, quiet and resented. Some Eastern, Christian and New Age

religions, as well as Platonism, hold that the world is unreal, that

suffering, death and matter itself are illusions; and that nothing

really exists except 'Mind'.

In contrast, the prevailing scientific

view is that the mind is how we perceive what the brain does; i. e.,

it's a property of the hundred trillion neural connections in the

brain. There is a strangely waxing academic opinion, with roots in the

1960s, that holds all views to be equally arbitrary and 'true' or

'false' to be a delusion. Perhaps it is an attempt to turn the tables

on scientists who have long argued that literary criticism, religion,

aesthetics, and much of philosophy and ethics are mere subjective

opinion, because they cannot be demonstrated like a theorem in

Euclidean geometry nor put to experimental test. There are people who want everything to be possible, to have

their reality unconstrained. Our imagination and our needs

require more, they feel, than the comparatively little that science

teaches we may be reasonably sure of. Many New Age gurus - the

actress Shirley MacLaine among them - go so far as to embrace

solipsism, to assert that the only reality is their own thoughts. 'I

am God,' they actually say. T really think we are creating our own

reality,' MacLaine once told a sceptic. 'I think I'm creating you

right here.'

If 1 dream of being reunited with a dead parent or child, who is

to tell me that it didn't really happen?

If I have a vision of myself

floating in space looking down on the Earth, maybe I was really

there; who are some scientists, who didn't even share the experi-

ence, to tell me that it's all in my head?

If my religion teaches that

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Newton's Sleep

it is the inalterable and inerrant word of God that the Universe is a

few thousand years old, then scientists are being offensive and

impious, as well as mistaken, when they claim it's a few billion. Irritatingly, science claims to set limits on what we can do, even

in principle. Who says we can't travel faster than light?

They used

to say that about sound, didn't they?

Who's going to stop us, if we

have really powerful instruments, from measuring the position

and the momentum of an electron simultaneously?

Why can't we,

if we're very clever, build a perpetual motion machine 'of the first

kind' (one that generates more energy than is supplied to it), or a

perpetual motion machine 'of the second kind' (one that never

runs down)?

Who dares to set limits on human ingenuity?

In fact, Nature does. In fact, a fairly comprehensive and very

brief statement of the laws of Nature, of how the Universe works,

is contained in just such a list of prohibited acts. Tellingly,

pseudoscience and superstition tend to recognize no constraints in

Nature. Instead, 'all things are possible'.

They promise a limitless

production budget, however often their adherents have been

disappointed and betrayed. A related complaint is that science is too simple-minded, too

'reductionist'; it naively imagines that in the final accounting there

will be only a few laws of Nature - perhaps even rather simple

ones - that explain everything, that the exquisite subtlety of the

world, all the snow crystals, spiderweb latticework, spiral galax-

ies, and flashes of human insight can ultimately be 'reduced' to

such laws. Reductionism seems to pay insufficient respect to the

complexity of the Universe. It appears to some as a curious hybrid

of arrogance and intellectual laziness. To Isaac Newton - who in the minds of critics of science

personifies 'single vision' - it looked like a clockwork Universe. Literally. The regular, predictable orbital motions of the planets

around the Sun, or the Moon around the Earth, were described to

high precision by essentially the same differential equation that

predicts the swing of a pendulum or the oscillation of a spring. We

have a tendency today to think we occupy some exalted vantage

point, and to pity the poor Newtonians for having so limited a

world view. But within certain reasonable limitations, the same

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

harmonic equations that describe clockwork really do describe the

motions of astronomical objects throughout the Universe. This is

a profound, not a trivial parallelism. Of course, there are no gears in the solar system, and the

component parts of the gravitational clockwork do not touch. Planets generally have more complicated motions than pendulums

and springs. Also, the clockwork model breaks down in certain

circumstances: over very long periods of time, the gravitational

tugs of distant worlds - tugs that might seem wholly insignificant

over a few orbits - can build up, and some little world can go

unexpectedly careening out of its accustomed course. However,

something like chaotic motion is also known in pendulum clocks;

if we displace the bob too far from the perpendicular, a wild and

ugly motion ensues. But the solar system keeps better time than

any mechanical clock, and the whole idea of keeping time comes

from the observed motion of the Sun and stars. The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well

to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't

impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is

reductionism, so be it. Until the middle twentieth century, there had been a strong

belief - among theologians, philosophers and many biologists -

that life was not 'reducible' to the laws of physics and chemistry,

that there was a 'vital force', an 'entelechy', a tao, a mana that

made living things go. It 'animated' life. It was impossible to see

how mere atoms and molecules could account for the intricacy and

elegance, the fitting of form to function, of a living thing. The

world's religions were invoked: God or the gods breathed life,

soul-stuff, into inanimate matter. The eighteenth-century chemist

Joseph Priestley tried to find the 'vital force'.

He weighed a mouse

just before and just after it died. It weighed the same. All such

attempts have failed. If there is soul-stuff, evidently it weighs

nothing, that is, it is not made of matter. Nevertheless, even biological materialists entertained reserva-

tions; perhaps, if not plant, animal, fungal and microbial souls,

some still undiscovered principle of science was needed to under-

stand life. For example, the British physiologist J. S. Haldane

(father of J. B.S. Haldane) asked in 1932:

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Newton's Sleep

What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life

give of the ...

recovery from disease and injuries?

Simply

none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and

strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly

the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduc-

tion. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a

delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a

living organism, of reproducing itself indefinitely often. But only a few decades later and our knowledge of immunology

and molecular biology have enormously clarified these once

impenetrable mysteries. 1 remember very well when the molecular structure of DNA

and the nature of the genetic code were first elucidated in the

1950s and 1960s, how biologists who studied whole organisms

accused the new proponents of molecular biology of reductionism. ('They'll never understand even a worm with their DNA.') Of

course reducing everything to a 'vital force' is no less reduction-

ism. But it is now clear that all life on Earth, every single living

thing, has its genetic information encoded in its nucleic acids and

employs fundamentally the same codebook to implement the

hereditary instructions. We have learned how to read the code. The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over

again in biology for the widest variety of functions. Genes bearing

significant responsibility for cystic fibrosis and breast cancer have

been identified. The 1.8 million rungs of the DNA ladder of the

bacterium Haemophilis influenzae, comprising its 1,743 genes,

have been sequenced. The specific function of most of these genes

is beautifully detailed - from the manufacture and folding of

hundreds of complex molecules, to protection against heat and

antibiotics, to increasing the mutation rate, to making identical

copies of the bacterium. Much of the genomes of many other

organisms (including the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans)

have now been mapped. Molecular biologists are busily recording

the sequence of the three billion nucleotides that specify how to

make a human being. In another decade or two, they'll be done. (Whether the benefits will ultimately exceed the risks seems by no

means certain.)

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The continuity between atomic physics, molecular chemistry,

and that holy of holies, the nature of reproduction and heredity,

has now been established. No new principle of science need be

invoked. It looks as if there are a small number of simple facts that

can be used to understand the enormous intricacy and variety of

living things. (Molecular genetics also teaches that each organism

has its own particularity.)

Reductionism is even better established in physics and chemis-

try. 1 will later describe the unexpected coalescence of our

understanding of electricity, magnetism, light and relativity into a

single framework. We've known for centuries that a handful of

comparatively simple laws not only explains but quantitatively and

accurately predicts a breathtaking variety of phenomena, not just

on Earth but through the entire Universe. We hear - for example from the theologian Langdon Gilkey in

his Nature, Reality and the Sacred - that the notion of the laws of

Nature being everywhere the same is simply a preconception

imposed on the Universe by fallible scientists and their social

milieu. He longs for other kinds of 'knowledge', as valid in their

contexts as science is in its. But the order of the Universe is not an

assumption; it's an observed fact. We detect the light from distant

quasars only because the laws of electromagnetism are the same

ten billion light years away as here. The spectra of those quasars

are recognizable only because the same chemical elements are

present there as here, and because the same laws of quantum

mechanics apply. The motion of galaxies around one another

follows familiar Newtonian gravity. Gravitational lenses and

binary pulsar spin-downs reveal general relativity in the depths of

space. We could have lived in a Universe with different laws in

every province, but we do not. This fact cannot but elicit feelings

of reverence and awe. We might have lived in a Universe in which nothing could be

understood by a few simple laws, in which Nature was complex

beyond our abilities to understand, in which laws that apply on

Earth are invalid on Mars, or in a distant quasar. But the evidence

- not the preconceptions, the evidence - proves otherwise. Luckily for us, we live in a Universe in which much can be

'reduced' to a small number of comparatively simple laws of

260

Newton's Sleep

Nature. Otherwise we might have lacked the intellectual capacity

and grasp to comprehend the world. Of course, we may make mistakes in applying a reductionist

programme to science. There may be aspects which, for all we

know, are not reducible to a few comparatively simple laws. But

in the light of the findings in the last few centuries, it seems foolish

to complain about reductionism. It is not a deficiency but one of

the chief triumphs of science. And, it seems to me, its findings are

perfectly consonant with many religions (although it does not

prove their validity).

Why should a few simple laws of Nature

explain so much and hold sway throughout this vast Universe?

Isn't this just what you might expect from a Creator of the

Universe?

Why should some religious people oppose the reduc-

tionist programme in science, except out of some misplaced love

of mysticism?

Attempts to reconcile religion and science have been on the religious

agenda for centuries - at least for those who did not insist on Biblical

and Qu'ranic literalism with no room for allegory or metaphor. The crowning achievements of Roman Catholic theology are the

Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles ('Against the

Gentiles') of St Thomas Aquinas. Out of the maelstrom of sophisti-

cated Islamic philosophy that tumbled into Christendom in the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the books of the ancient

Greeks, especially Aristotle, works even on casual inspection of high

accomplishment. Was this ancient learning compatible with God's

Holy Word?* In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas set himself the task

of reconciling 631 questions between Christian and classical sources. But how to do this where a clear dispute arises?

It cannot be

accomplished without some supervening organizing principle, some

superior way to know the world. Often, Aquinas appealed to

common sense and the natural world, i. e., science used as an

error-correcting device. With some contortion of both common

sense and Nature, he managed to reconcile all 631 problems. (Although when push came to shove, the desired answer was simply

* This was no dilemma for many others. 'I believe; therefore I understand' said

St Anselm in the eleventh century. 261

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

assumed. Faith always got the nod over Reason.) Similar attempts at

reconciliation permeate Talmudic and post-Talmudic Jewish litera-

ture and medieval Islamic philosophy. But tenets at the heart of religion can be tested scientifically. This in itself makes some religious bureaucrats and believers

wary of science. Is the Eucharist, as the Church teaches, in fact

and not just as productive metaphor, the flesh of Jesus Christ,

or is it, chemically, microscopically and in other ways, just a

wafer handed to you by a priest?* Will the world be destroyed

at the end of the 52-year Venus cycle unless humans are

sacrificed to the gods?* Does the occasional uncircumcised

Jewish man fare worse than his co-religionists who abide by the

ancient covenant in which God demands a piece of foreskin

from every male worshipper?

Are there humans populating

innumerable other planets, as the Latter Day Saints teach?

Were whites created from blacks by a mad scientist, as the

Nation of Islam asserts?

Would the Sun indeed not rise if the

Hindu sacrificial rite is omitted (as we are assured would be the

case in the Satapatha Brahmana)?

We can gain some insight into the human roots of prayer by

examining those of unfamiliar religions and cultures. Here, for

example, is what is written in a cuneiform inscription on a

Babylonian cylinder seal from the Second Millennium BC:

Oh, Ninlil, Lady of the Lands, in your marriage bed, in the

abode of your delight, intercede for me with Enlil, your

beloved. [Signed] Mili-Shipak, Shatammu ofNinmah. * There was a time when the answer to this question was a matter of life or death. Miles Phillips was an English sailor, stranded in Spanish Mexico. He and his

fellows were brought up before the Inquisition in the year 1574.

They were

asked 'Whether we did not believe that the Host of bread which the priest did

hold up over his head, and the wine that was in the chalice, was the very true

and perfect body and blood of our Saviour Christ, Yea or No?

To which,'

Phillips adds, 'if we answered not "Yea!" then there was no way but death.'

f Since this Mesoamerican ritual has not really been practised for five centuries,

we have the perspective to reflect on the tens of thousands of willing and

unwilling sacrifices to the Aztec and Mayan gods who reconciled themselves to

their fates with the confident faith that they were dying to save the Universe. 262

Newton's Sleep

It's been a long time since there's been a Shatammu in Ninmah, or

even a Ninmah. Despite the fact that Enlil and Ninlil were major

gods - people all over the civilized western world had prayed to

them for two thousand years - was poor Mili-Shipak in fact

praying to a phantom, to a societally condoned product of his

imagination?

And if so, what about us?

Or is this blasphemy, a

forbidden question, as doubtless it was among the worshippers of

Enlil?

Does prayer work at all?

Which ones?

There's a category of prayer in which God is begged to

intervene in human history or just to right some real or imagined

injustice or natural calamity - for example, when a bishop from

the American West prays for God to intervene and end a

devastating dry spell. Why is the prayer needed?

Didn't God

know of the drought?

Was he unaware that it threatened the

bishop's parishioners?

What is implied here about the limitations

of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity?

The bishop

asked his followers to pray as well. Is God more likely to intervene

when many pray for mercy or justice than when only a few do?

consider the following request, printed in 1994 in The Prayer and

Action Weekly News: Iowa's Weekly Christian Information

Source:

Can you join me in praying that God will burn down the

Planned Parenthood in Des Moines in a manner no one can

mistake for any human torching, which impartial investiga-

tors will have to attribute to miraculous (unexplainable)

causes, and which Christians will have to attribute to the

Hand of God?

We've discussed faith-healing. What about longevity through

prayer?

The Victorian statistician Francis Galton argued that,

other things being equal, British monarchs ought to be very

long-lived, because millions of people all over the world daily

intoned the heartfelt mantra 'God Save the Queen' (or King).

Yet, he showed, if anything, they don't live as long as other

members of the wealthy and pampered aristocratic class. Tens of

millions of people in concert publicly wished (although they did

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

not exactly pray) that Mao Zedong would live 'for ten thousand

years'.

Nearly everyone in ancient Egypt exhorted the gods to let

the Pharaoh live 'forever'.

These collective prayers failed. Their

failure constitutes data. By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle,

testable, religions, however unwillingly, enter the arena of sci-

ence. Religions can no longer make unchallenged assertions about

reality so long as they do not seize secular power, provided they

cannot coerce belief. This, in turn, has infuriated some followers of some religions. Occasionally they threaten sceptics with the direst imaginable

penalties. Consider the following high stakes alternative by Wil-

liam Blake in his innocuously titled Auguries of Innocence:

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall ne'er get out. He who respects the Infant's Faith

Triumphs over Hell & Death

Of course many religions, devoted to reverence, awe, ethics,

ritual, community, family, charity, and political and economic

justice, are in no way challenged, but rather uplifted, by the

findings of science. There is no necessary conflict between science

and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant roles,

and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the

consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John

Milton's Areopagitica (1644).

Some of mainstream Christianity

and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of

the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of

received wisdom that the best of science offers. But other sects,

sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist - and today they

seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost

inaudible and invisible - have chosen to make a stand on matters

subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science. The religious traditions are often so rich and multivariate that

they offer ample opportunity for renewal and revision, again

especially when their sacred books can be interpreted metaphori-

cally and allegorically. There is thus a middle ground of confessing

264

Newton's Sleep

past errors, as the Roman Catholic Church did in its 1992

acknowledgement that Galileo was right after all, that the Earth

does revolve around the Sun: three centuries late, but courageous

and most welcome none the less. Modern Roman Catholicism has

no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so

years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological

molecules, or with humans evolving from ape-like ancestors -

although it has special opinions on 'ensoulment'.

Most main-

stream Protestant and Jewish faiths take the same sturdy position. In theological discussion with religious leaders, 1 often ask what

their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were

disproved by science. When 1 put this question to the current,

Fourteenth, Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conserva-

tive or fundamentalist religious leaders do: in such a case, he said,

Tibetan Buddhism would have to change. Even, 1 asked, if it's a really central tenet, like (I searched for an

example) reincarnation?

Even then, he answered. However, he added with a twinkle, it's going to be hard to

disprove reincarnation. Plainly, the Dalai Lama is right. Religious doctrine that is

insulated from disproof has little reason to worry about the

advance of science. The grand idea, common to many faiths, of a

Creator of the Universe is one such doctrine - difficult alike to

demonstrate or to dismiss. Moses Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, held that

God could be truly known only if there were free and open study

ofboth physics and theology [I, 55], What would happen if science

demonstrated an infinitely old Universe?

Then theology would

have to be seriously revamped [11, 25], Indeed, this is the one

conceivable finding of science that could disprove a Creator -

because an infinitely old universe would never have been created. It would have always been here. There are other doctrines, interests and concerns that also

worry about what science will find out. Perhaps, they suggest, it's

better not to know. If men and women turn out to have different

hereditary propensities, won't this be used as an excuse for the

former to suppress the latter?

If there's a genetic component of

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

violence, might this justify repression of one ethnic group by

another, or even precautionary incarceration?

If mental illness is

just brain chemistry, doesn't this unravel our efforts to keep a

grasp on reality or to be responsible for our actions?

If we are not

the special handiwork of the Creator of the Universe, if our basic

moral laws are merely invented by fallible lawgivers, isn't our

struggle to maintain an orderly society undermined?

I suggest that in every one of these cases, religious or secular,

we are much better off if we know the best available approxima-

tion to the truth, and if we keep before us a keen apprehension of

the errors our interest group or belief system has committed in the

past. In every case the imagined dire consequences of the truth

being generally known are exaggerated. And again, we are not

wise enough to know which lies, or even which shadings of the

facts, can competently serve some higher social purpose, espe-

cially in the long run. 266

When Scientists Know Sin

The mind of man - how far will it advance?

Where will its

daring impudence find limits?

If human villainy and human

life shall wax in due proportion, if the son shall always grow

in wickedness past his father, the gods must add another

world to this that all the sinners may have space enough. Euripides,

Hippolytus (428 BC)

I n a post-war meeting with President Harry S Truman, J. Robert

Oppenheimer - the scientific director of the Manhattan nuclear

weapons project - mournfully commented that scientists had bloody

hands; they had now known sin. Afterwards, Truman instructed his

aides that he never wished to see Oppenheimer again. Sometimes

scientists are castigated for doing evil, and sometimes for warning

about the evil uses to which science may be put. More often, science is taken to task because it and its

products are said to be morally neutral, ethically ambiguous, as

readily employed in the service of evil as of good. This is an old

indictment. It goes back probably to the flaking of stone tools

and the domestication of fire. Since technology has been with

our ancestral line from before the first human, since we are a

technological species, this problem is not so much one of

science as of human nature. By this I don't mean that science

has no responsibility for the misuse of its findings. It has

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profound responsibility, and the more powerful its products the

greater its responsibility. Like assault weapons and market derivatives, the technologies

that allow us to alter the global environment that sustains us

should mandate caution and prudence. Yes, it's the same old

humans who have made it so far. Yes, we're developing new

technologies as we always have. But when the weaknesses we've

always had join forces with a capacity to do harm on an unprec-

edented planetary scale, something more is required of us - an

emerging ethic that also must be established on an unprecedented

planetary scale. Sometimes scientists try to have it both ways: to take credit for

those applications of science that enrich our lives, but to distance

themselves from the instruments of death, intentional and inadvert-

ent, that also trace back to scientific research. The Australian

philosopher John Passmore writes in his book Science and Its Critics:

The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility

for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the

secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would

be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us

would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean

of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific

discoveries is clear and obvious - as when a scientist works on

nerve gases - he cannot properly claim that such applications

are 'none of his business', merely on the grounds that it is the

military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or

kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately

offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a

scientist, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such

body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he

knows his work will be useless to them and must take some

responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be

useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in

relation to any innovations which flow from his work. An important case history is provided by the career of the

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When Scientists Know Sin

Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller. Teller was marked at a

young age by the Bela Kuhn communist revolution in Hungary, in

which the property of middle-class families like his was expropri-

ated, and by losing part of his leg in a streetcar accident, leaving

him in permanent pain. His early contributions ranged from

quantum mechanical selection rules and solid state physics to

cosmology. It was he who chauffeured the physicist Leo Szilard to

the vacationing Albert Einstein on Long Island in July 1939 - a

meeting that led to the historic letter from Einstein to President

Franklin Roosevelt urging, in view of both scientific and political

events in Nazi Germany, that the United States develop a fission,

or 'atomic' bomb. Recruited to work on the Manhattan Project,

Teller arrived at Los Alamos and promptly refused to cooperate -

not because he was dismayed at what an atomic bomb might do,

but just the opposite: because he wanted to work on a much more

destructive weapon, the fusion, or thermonuclear, or hydrogen

bomb. (While there is a practical upper limit on the yield or

destructive energy of an atomic bomb, there is no such limit for a

hydrogen bomb. But a hydrogen bomb needs an atomic bomb as

trigger.)

After the fission bomb was invented, after Germany and Japan

surrendered, after the war was over. Teller remained a persistent

advocate of what was called 'the Super', specifically intended to

intimidate the Soviet Union. Concern about the rebuilding,

toughened and militarized Soviet Union under Stalin and the

national paranoia in America called McCarthyism, eased Teller's

path. A substantial obstacle was offered, though, in the person of

Oppenheimer, who had become the chairman of the General

Advisory Committee to the post-war Atomic Energy Commis-

sion. Teller provided critical testimony at a government hearing,

questioning Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States. Teller's

involvement is generally thought to have played a major role in

the aftermath: although Oppenheimer's loyalty was not exactly

impugned by the review board, somehow his security clearance

was denied, he was retired from the AEC, and Teller's way to the

Super was greased. The technique for making a thermonuclear weapon is generally

attributed to Teller and the mathematician Stanislas Ulam. Hans

269

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Bethe, the Nobel laureate physicist who headed the Theoretical

Division at the Manhattan Project and who played a major role in

the development of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs,

attests that Teller's original suggestion was flawed, and that the

work of many people was necessary to bring the thermonuclear

weapon to reality. With fundamental technical contributions from

a young physicist named Richard Garwin, the first US thermonu-

clear 'device' was exploded in 1952.

It was too unwieldy to be

carried by a missile or bomber; it just sat there where it was

assembled and blew up. The first true hydrogen bomb was a

Soviet invention exploded one year later. There has been debate

on whether the Soviet Union would have developed a thermonu-

clear weapon if the United States had not, and whether a US

thermonuclear weapon was even needed to deter Soviet use of

their hydrogen bomb, since the US by then possessed a substantial

arsenal of fission weapons. The preponderance of current evi-

dence is that the USSR, even before it exploded its first fission

bomb, had a workable design for a thermonuclear weapon. It was

'the next logical step'.

But Soviet pursuit of fusion weapons was

much aided by the knowledge, from espionage, that the Ameri-

cans were working on them. From my point of view, the consequences of global nuclear war

became much more dangerous with the invention of the hydrogen

bomb, because airbursts of thermonuclear weapons are much

more capable of burning cities, generating vast amounts of smoke,

cooling and darkening the Earth, and inducing global-scale

nuclear winter. This was perhaps the most controversial scientific

debate I've been involved in (from about 1983-90).

Much of the

debate was politically driven. The strategic implications of nuclear

winter were disquieting to those wedded to a policy of massive

retaliation to deter a nuclear attack, or to those wishing to

preserve the option of a massive first strike. In either case, the

environmental consequences work the self-destruction of any

nation launching large numbers of thermonuclear weapons even

with no retaliation from the adversary. A major segment of the

strategic policy of decades, and the reason for accumulating tens

of thousands of nuclear weapons, suddenly became much less

credible. 270

When Scientists Know Sin

The global temperature declines predicted in the original (1983)

nuclear winter scientific paper were 15-20°C; current estimates

are 10-15°C. The two values are in good agreement considering

the irreducible uncertainties in the calculations. Both temperature

declines are much greater than the difference between current

global temperatures and those of the last Ice Age. The long-term

consequences of global thermonuclear war have been estimated

by an international team of 200 scientists, who concluded that

through nuclear winter the global civilization and most of the

people on Earth, including those far from the northern mid-

latitude target zone, would be at risk, mainly from starvation. If

large-scale nuclear war ever occurs, with cities targeted, the effort

of Edward Teller and his colleagues in the United States (and the

counterpart team headed by Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet

Union) might be responsible for lowering the curtain on the

human future. The hydrogen bomb is by far the most horrific

weapon ever invented. When nuclear winter was discovered in 1983, Teller was quick

to argue both (1) that the physics was mistaken, and (2) that the

discovery had been made years earlier under his tutelage at the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There is in fact no

evidence for such a prior discovery, and considerable evidence

that those in every nation charged to inform their national leaders

of the effects of nuclear weapons had consistently overlooked

nuclear winter. But if Teller is right, then it was unconscionable of

him not to have disclosed the purported discovery to the affected

parties - the citizens and leaders of his nation and the world. As in

the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove, classifying the ultimate

weapon - so no one knows that it exists or what it can do - is the

ultimate absurdity. It seems to me impossible for any normal human being to be

untroubled by helping to make such an invention, even putting

nuclear winter aside. The stresses, conscious or unconscious, on

those who take credit for the contrivance must be considerable. Whatever his actual contributions, Edward Teller has been widely

described as the 'father' of the hydrogen bomb. In an admiring

1954 article, Life magazine described his 'almost fanatic determi-

nation' to build the hydrogen bomb. Much of his subsequent

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

career can, 1 think, be understood as an attempt to justify what he

begat. Teller has contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen

bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war,

because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are

now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we?

But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations

are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and

that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never

overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in

charge of nuclear weapons).

In the century of Hitler and Stalin,

this seems ingenuous. Teller has been a major force in preventing a comprehensive

treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. He made it much more

difficult to accomplish the 1963 Limited (above-ground) Test Ban

Treaty. His argument that above-ground testing was essential to

maintain and 'improve' the nuclear arsenals, that ratifying the

treaty would 'give away the future safety of our country' has

proven specious. He has also been a vigorous proponent of the

safety and cost-effectiveness of fission power plants, claiming

himself to be the only casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear

accident in Pennsylvania in 1979; he had a heart attack, he says,

debating the issue. Teller advocated exploding nuclear weapons from Alaska to

South Africa, to dredge harbours and canals, to obliterate trou-

blesome mountains, to do heavy earth-moving. When he pro-

posed such a scheme to Queen Frederika of Greece, she is said to

have responded, 'Thank you, Dr Teller, but Greece has enough

quaint ruins already.' Want to test Einstein's general relativity?

Then explode a nuclear weapon on the far side of the Sun, Teller

proposed. Want to understand the chemical composition of the

Moon?

Then fly a hydrogen bomb to the Moon, explode it, and

examine the spectrum of the flash and fireball. Also in the 1980s, Teller sold President Ronald Reagan the

notion of Star Wars, called by them the 'Strategic Defense

Initiative', SDI Reagan seems to have believed a highly imagina-

tive story of Teller's that it was possible to build a desk-sized

orbiting hydrogen-bomb-driven X-ray laser that would destroy

10,000 Soviet warheads in flight, and provide genuine protection

272

When Scientists Know Sin

for the citizens of the United States in case of global thermo-

nuclear war. It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration

that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it

intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet

Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this conten-

tion. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and

other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev

made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a

Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response

would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear

weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have

increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At

any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against

American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of

a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The

fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the

command economy, growing awareness of the standard of

living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund

Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an

outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness. Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly

pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from

the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread

and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceiv-

able personal cost) with a democratic government that had,

temporarily at least, lost its way. Teller has also advocated the development of burrowing

nuclear warheads, so that underground command centres and

deeply buried shelters for the leadership (and their families) of an

adversary nation might be dug down to and wiped out; and

0.1-kiloton nuclear warheads that would saturate an enemy coun-

try, obliterating its infrastructure 'without a single casualty'.

Civilians would be alerted in advance. Nuclear war would be

humane. As 1 write, Edward Teller - still vigorous and retaining consid-

erable intellectual powers into his late eighties - has mounted a

campaign, with his counterpart in the former Soviet nuclear

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

weapons establishment, to develop and explode new genera-

tions of high-yield thermonuclear weapons in space, in order to

destroy or deflect asteroids that might be on collision trajecto-

ries with the Earth. I worry that premature experimentation

with the orbits of nearby asteroids may involve extreme dangers

for our species. Dr Teller and I have met privately. We've debated at

scientific meetings, in the national media, and in a closed rump

session of Congress. We've had strong disagreements, espe-

cially on Star Wars, nuclear winter and asteroid defence. Perhaps all this has hopelessly coloured my view of him. Although he has always been a fervent anticommunist and

technophile, as 1 look back over his life it seems to me 1 see

something more in his desperate attempt to justify the hydro-

gen bomb: its effects aren't as bad as you might think. It can be

used to defend the world from other hydrogen bombs, for

science, for civil engineering, to protect the population of the

United States against an enemy's thermonuclear weapons, to

wage war humanely, to save the planet from random hazards

from space. Somehow, somewhere, he wants to believe that

thermonuclear weapons, and he, will be acknowledged by the

human species as its saviour and not its destroyer. When scientific research provides fallible nations and politi-

cal leaders with formidable, indeed awesome powers, many

dangers present themselves: one is that some of the scientists

involved may lose all but a superficial semblance of objectivity. As always, power tends to corrupt. In this circumstance, the

institution of secrecy is especially pernicious, and the checks

and balances of a democracy become especially valuable. (Teller, who has flourished in the secrecy culture, has also

repeatedly attacked it.) The CIA Inspector General com-

mented in 1995 that 'absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely'.

The

most open and vigorous debate is often the only protection

against the most perilous misuse of technology. The critical

piece of the counterargument may be something obvious that

many scientists or even lay people could come up with provided

there were no penalties for speaking out. Or it might be

something more subtle, something that would be noted by an

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When Scientists Know Sin

obscure graduate student in some locale remote from Washington,

DC, who, if the arguments were closely held and highly secret,

would never have the opportunity to address the issue. What realm of human endeavour is not morally ambiguous?

Even

folk institutions that purport to give us advice on behaviour and

ethics seem fraught with contradictions. Consider aphorisms -

haste makes waste; yes, but a stitch in time saves nine. Better safe

than sorry; but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Where there's

smoke, there's fire; but you can't tell a book by its cover. A penny

saved is a penny earned; but you can't take it with you. He who

hesitates is lost; but fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Two

heads are better than one; but too many cooks spoil the broth. There was a time when people planned or justified their actions on

the basis of such contradictory platitudes. What is the moral

responsibility of the aphorist?

Or the Sun-sign astrologer, the

Tarot card reader, the tabloid prophet?

Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in

Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to

commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our

neighbour as ourselves; and in the Gospels we are urged to love

our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent

followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations

are embedded. In Joshua and in the second half of Numbers is celebrated the

mass murder of men, women, children, down to the domestic

animals in city after city across the whole land of Canaan. Jericho

is obliterated in a kherem, a 'holy war'.

The only justification

offered for this slaughter is the mass murderers' claim that, in

exchange for circumcising their sons and adopting a particular set

of rituals, their ancestors were long before promised that this land

was their land. Not a hint of self-reproach, not a muttering of

patriarchal or divine disquiet at these campaigns of extermination

can be dug out of holy scripture. Instead, Joshua 'destroyed all

that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded' (Joshua, x,

40).

And these events are not incidental, but central to the main

narrative thrust of the Old Testament. Similar stories of mass

murder (and in the case of the Amalekites, genocide) can be

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

found in the books of Saul, Esther, and elsewhere in the Bible,

with hardly a pang of moral doubt. It was all, of course, troubling

to liberal theologians of a later age. It is properly said that the Devil can 'quote Scripture to his

purpose'.

The Bible is hill of so many stories of contradictory

moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justifica-

tion for nearly any action it proposes, from incest, slavery and

mass murder to the most refined love, courage and self-sacrifice. And this moral multiple personality disorder is hardly restricted to

Judaism and Christianity. You can find it deep within Islam, the

Hindu tradition, indeed nearly all the world's religions. Perhaps

then it is not so much scientists as people who are morally

ambiguous. It is the particular task of scientists, I believe, to alert the public

to possible dangers, especially those emanating from science or

foreseeable through the use of science. Such a mission is, you

might say, prophetic. Clearly the warnings need to be judicious

and not more flamboyant than the dangers require; but if we must

make errors, given the stakes, they should be on the side of safety. Among the !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert,

when two men, perhaps testosterone-inflamed, would begin to

argue, the women would reach for their poison arrows and put the

weapons out of harm's way. Today our poison arrows can destroy

the global civilization and just possibly annihilate our species. The

price of moral ambiguity is now too high. For this reason - and not

because of its approach to knowledge - the ethical responsibility

of scientists must also be high, extraordinarily high, unprecedent-

edly high. I wish graduate science programmes explicitly and

systematically raised these questions with fledgling scientists and

engineers. And sometimes I wonder whether in our society, too,

the women - and the children - will eventually put the poison

arrows out of harm's way. 276

The Marriage of Scepticism

and Wonder

Nothing is too wonderful to be true. Remark attributed to

Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient

guarantee of truth. Bertrand Russell,

Mysticism and Logic (1929)

W hen we are asked to swear in courts of law that we will tell

'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth', we

are being asked the impossible. It is simply beyond our powers. Our memories are fallible; even scientific truth is merely an

approximation; and we are ignorant about nearly all of the

Universe. Nevertheless, a life may depend on our testimony. To

swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

to the limit of our abilities is a fair request. Without the qualifying

phrase, though, it's simply out of touch. But such a qualification,

however consonant with human reality, is unacceptable to any

legal system. If everyone tells the truth only to a degree deter-

mined by individual judgement, then incriminating or awkward

facts might be withheld, events shaded, culpability hidden,

responsibility evaded, and justice denied. So the law strives for an

impossible standard of accuracy, and we do the best we can. 277

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

In the jury selection process, the court needs to be reassured

that the verdict will be based on evidence. It makes heroic efforts

to weed out bias. It is aware of human imperfection. Does the

potential juror personally know the district attorney, or the

prosecutor, or the defence attorney?

What about the judge or the

other jurors?

Has she formed an opinion about this case not from

the facts laid out in court but from pre-trial publicity?

Will she

assign evidence from police officers greater or lesser weight than

evidence from witnesses for the defence?

Is she biased against the

defendant's ethnic group?

Does the potential juror live in the

neighbourhood where the crimes were committed, and might that

influence her judgement?

Does she have a scientific background

about matters on which expert witnesses will testify?

(This is often

a count against her.) Are any of her relatives or close family

members employed in law enforcement or criminal law?

Has she

herself ever had any run-ins with police that might influence her

judgement in the trial?

Was any close friend or relative ever

arrested on a similar charge?

The American system of jurisprudence recognizes a wide range

of factors, predispositions, prejudices and experiences that might

cloud our judgement, or affect our objectivity, sometimes even

without our knowing it. It goes to great, perhaps even extrava-

gant, lengths to safeguard the process of judgement in a criminal

trial from the human weaknesses of those who must decide on

innocence or guilt. Even then, of course, the process sometimes

fails. Why would we settle for anything less when interrogating the

natural world, or when attempting to decide on vital matters of

politics, economics, religion and ethics?

If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for

its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: we are enjoined, no

matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and

our cultural institutions scientifically and not to accept uncritically

whatever we're told; to surmount as best we can our hopes,

conceits and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really

are. Can we conscientiously and courageously follow planetary

motion or bacterial genetics wherever the search may lead, but

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declare the origin of matter or human behaviour off-limits?

Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang

of scientific reasoning you're eager to apply it everywhere. However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we

may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the

world. I'm aware that some of the discussion in, say, the preceding

chapter may have such a character. When anthropologists survey the thousands of distinct cul-

tures and ethnicities that comprise the human family, they are

struck by how few features there are that are givens, always

present no matter how exotic the society. There are, for

example, cultures - the Ik of Uganda is one - where all Ten

Commandments seem to be systematically, institutionally

ignored. There are societies that abandon their old and their

newborn, that eat their enemies, that use seashells or pigs or

young women for money. But they all have a strong incest

taboo, they all use technology, and almost all believe in a

supernatural world of gods and spirits, often connected with the

natural environment they inhabit and the well-being of the

plants and animals they eat. (The ones with a supreme god who

lives in the sky tend to be the most ferocious - torturing their

enemies for example. But this is a statistical correlation only;

the causal link has not been established, although speculations

naturally present themselves.)

In every such society, there is a cherished world of myth and

metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to

reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints tend

to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scien-

tists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the sceptical world

of science and the credulous world of religious belief without

skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between

these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with

untroubled conscience, with both. In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything

that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science

cannot remedy their anguish. Those who cannot bear the burden

of science are free to ignore its precepts. But we cannot have

science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

ignoring it where we feel threatened - again, because we are not

wise enough to do so. Except by sealing the brain off into separate air-tight compart-

ments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or

take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000

years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

Have 1 ever heard a sceptic wax superior and contemptuous?

Certainly. I've even sometimes heard, to my retrospective dismay,

that unpleasant tone in my own voice. There are human imperfec-

tions on both sides of this issue. Even when it's applied sensitively,

scientific scepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic,

heartless and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of

others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated

sceptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse. Sometimes it looks as if the sceptical conclusion came first, that

contentions were dismissed before, not after, the evidence was

examined. All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree,

self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our

belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates,

merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or

demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under

the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It

feels like a personal assault. The scientist who first proposed to consecrate doubt as a prime

virtue of the inquiring mind made it clear that it was a tool and not

an end in itself. Rene Descartes wrote,

1 did not imitate the sceptics who doubt only for doubting's

sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary,

my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig

away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay

beneath. In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public

concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore

the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and

pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the

sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what

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our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant

with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they

need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with

kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. Clearly there are limits to the uses of scepticism. There is some

cost-benefit analysis which must be applied, and if the comfort,

consolation and hope delivered by mysticism and superstition is

high, and the dangers of belief comparatively low, should we not

keep our misgivings to ourselves?

But the issue is tricky. Imagine

that you enter a big-city taxicab and the moment you get settled in

the driver begins a harangue about the supposed iniquities and

inferiorities of another ethnic group. Is your best course to keep

quiet, bearing in mind that silence conveys assent?

Or is it your

moral responsibility to argue with him, to express outrage, even to

leave the cab - because you know that every silent assent will

encourage him next time, and every vigorous dissent will cause

him next time to think twice?

Likewise, if we offer too much silent

assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to

be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which

scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous

thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a pru-

dent balance takes wisdom. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the

Paranormal is an organization of scientists, academics, magicians

and others dedicated to sceptical scrutiny of emerging or full-

blown pseudosciences. It was founded by the University of

Buffalo philosopher Paul Kurtz in 1976.

I've been affiliated with it

since its beginning. Its acronym, CSICOP, is pronounced 'sci-cop'

- as if it's an organization of scientists performing a police

function. Those wounded by CSICOP's analyses sometimes make

just such a complaint: it's hostile to every new idea, they say, will

go to absurd lengths in its knee-jerk debunking, is a vigilante

organization, a New Inquisition, and so on. CSICOP is imperfect. In certain cases such a critique is to some

degree justified. But from my point of view CSICOP serves an

important social function as a well-known organization to which

media can apply when they wish to hear the other side of the

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story, especially when some amazing claim to pseudoscience is

adjudged newsworthy. It used to be (and for much of the global

news media it still is) that every levitating guru, visiting alien,

channeller and faith-healer, when covered by the media, would be

treated nonsubstantively and uncritically. There would be no

institutional memory at the television studio or newspaper or

magazine about other, similar claims previously shown to be

scams and bamboozles. CSICOP represents a counterbalance,

although not yet nearly a loud enough voice, to the pseudoscience

gullibility that seems second nature to so much of the media. One of my favourite cartoons shows a fortune-teller scrutinizing

the mark's palm and gravely concluding, 'You are very gullible.'

CSICOP publishes a bi-monthly periodical called The Skeptical

Inquirer. On the day it arrives, I take it home from the office and

pore through its pages, wondering what new misunderstandings

will be revealed. There's always another bamboozle that I never

thought of. Crop circles!

Aliens have come and made perfect

circles and mathematical messages ...

in wheat!

Who would have

thought it?

So unlikely an artistic medium. Or they've come and

eviscerated cows - on a large scale, systematically. Farmers are

furious. At first, I'm impressed by the inventiveness of the stories. But then, on more sober reflection, it always strikes me how dull

and routine these accounts are; what a compilation of unimagina-

tive stale ideas, chauvinisms, hopes and fears dressed up as facts. The contentions, from this point of view, are suspect on their face. That's all they can conceive the extraterrestrials doing ...

mak-

ing circles in wheat?

What a failure of the imagination!

With every

issue, another facet of pseudoscience is revealed and criticized. And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in

its polarization: Us v. 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, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstmctive. It does not

get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent

minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the

beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and

superstition might be much more widely accepted. If we understand this, then of course we feel the uncertainty and

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pain of the abductees, or those who dare not leave home without

consulting their horoscopes, or those who pin their hopes on

crystals from Atlantis. And such compassion for kindred spirits in

a common quest also works to make science and the scientific

method less off-putting, especially to the young. Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out

of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives and

are therefore themselves a kind of scepticism. (The same is true of

the origins of most religions.) David Hess (in Science and the New

Age) argues that

the world of paranormal beliefs and practices cannot be

reduced to cranks, crackpots, and charlatans. A large number

of sincere people are exploring alternative approaches to

questions of personal meaning, spirituality, healing, and

paranormal experience in general. To the sceptic, their quest

may ultimately rest on a delusion, but debunking is hardly

likely to be an effective rhetorical device for their rationalist

project of getting [people] to recognize what appears to the

sceptic as mistaken or magical thinking....

[T]he sceptic might take a clue from cultural anthro-

pology and develop a more sophisticated scepticism by under-

standing alternative belief systems from the perspective of the

people who hold them and by situating these beliefs in their

historical, social, and cultural contexts. As a result, the world

of the paranormal may appear less as a silly turn toward

irrationalism and more as an idiom through which segments

of society express their conflicts, dilemmas, and identi-

ties ...

To the extent that sceptics have a psychological or socio-

logical theory of New Age beliefs, it tends to be very

simplistic: paranormal beliefs are 'comforting' to people who

cannot handle the reality of an atheistic universe, or their

beliefs are the product of an irresponsible media that is not

encouraging the public to think critically ...

But Hess's just criticism promptly deteriorates into complaints

that parapsychologists 'have had their careers ruined by sceptical

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

colleagues', and that sceptics exhibit 'a kind of religious zeal to

defend the materialistic and atheistic world view that smacks of

what has been called "scientific fundamentalism" or "irrational

rationalism"

This is a common but to me deeply mysterious - indeed, occult

- complaint. Again, we know a great deal about the existence and

properties of matter. If a given phenomenon can already be

plausibly understood in terms of matter and energy, why should

we hypothesize that something else, something for which there is

as yet no other good evidence, is responsible?

Yet the complaint

persists: sceptics won't accept that there's an invisible fire-

breathing dragon in my garage because they're all atheistic

materialists. In Science in the New Age, scepticism is discussed, but it is not

understood, and it is certainly not practised. All sorts of paranor-

mal claims are quoted, sceptics are 'deconstructed', but you can

never learn from reading it that there are ways to decide whether

New Age and parapsychological claims to knowledge are promis-

ing or false. It's all, as in many postmodernist texts, a matter of

how strongly people feel and what their biases may be. Robert Anton Wilson (in The New Inquisition: Irrational

Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, 1986) describes sceptics as

the 'New Inquisition'.

But to my knowledge no sceptic compels

belief. Indeed, on most TV documentaries and talk shows,

sceptics get short shrift and almost no air time. All that's

happening is that some doctrines and methods are being criticized

- at the worst, ridiculed - in magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer

with circulations of a few tens of thousands. New Agers are not

much, as in earlier times, being called up before criminal tribu-

nals, nor whipped for having visions, and they are certainly not

being burned at the stake. Why fear a little criticism?

Aren't they

interested to see how well their beliefs hold up against the best

counterarguments the sceptics can muster?

Perhaps one per cent of the time, someone who has an idea that

smells, feels and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of

pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered

reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found

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The Marriage of Scepticism and Wonder

in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artefacts of an

advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the solar system. At

the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in

my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone

humans can (barely) affect random number generators in comput-

ers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive

thoughts or images 'projected' at them; and (3) that young

children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which

upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not

have known about in any other way than reincarnation. I pick

these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (1 don't),

but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three

have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course, I could be wrong. In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a

modest manifesto called 'Objections to Astrology' and asked me

to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found

myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any

validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of

the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having

origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for

religion, chemistry, medicine and astronomy, to mention only

four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge

astrology came from, but what is its present validity. Then there

was speculation on the psychological motivations of those who

believe in astrology. These motivations - for example, the feeling

of powerlessness in a complex, troublesome and unpredictable

world - might explain why astrology is not generally given the

sceptical scrutiny it deserves, but is quite peripheral to whether it

works. The statement stressed that we can think of no mechanism by

which astrology could work. This is certainly a relevant point but

by itself it's unconvincing. No mechanism was known for conti-

nental drift (now subsumed in plate tectonics) when it was

proposed by Alfred Wegener in the first quarter of the twentieth

century to explain a range of puzzling data in geology and

palaeontology. (Ore-bearing veins of rocks and fossils seemed to

run continuously from eastern South America to West Africa;

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

were the two continents once touching and the Atlantic Ocean

new to our planet?) The notion was roundly dismissed by all the

great geophysicists, who were certain that continents were fixed,

not floating on anything, and therefore unable to 'drift'.

Instead,

the key twentieth-century idea in geophysics turns out to be plate

tectonics; we now understand that continental plates do indeed

float and 'drift' (or better, are carried by a kind of conveyor belt

driven by the great heat engine of the Earth's interior), and all

those great geophysicists were simply wrong. Objections to pseu-

doscience on the grounds of unavailable mechanism can be

mistaken - although if the contentions violate well-established

laws of physics, such objections of course carry great weight. Many valid criticisms of astrology can be formulated in a few

sentences: for example, its acceptance of precession of the equi-

noxes in announcing an 'Age of Aquarius' and its rejection of

precession of the equinoxes in casting horoscopes; its neglect of

atmospheric refraction; its list of supposedly significant celestial

objects that is mainly limited to naked eye objects known to

Ptolemy in the second century, and that ignores an enormous

variety of new astronomical objects discovered since (where is the

astrology of near-Earth asteroids?); inconsistent requirements for

detailed information on the time as compared to the latitude and

longitude of birth; the failure of astrology to pass the identical-

twin test; the major differences in horoscopes cast from the same

birth information by different astrologers; and the absence of

demonstrated correlation between horoscopes and such psycho-

logical tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. What I would have signed is a statement describing and refuting

the principal tenets of astrological belief. Such a statement would

have been far more persuasive than what was actually circulated

and published. But astrology, which has been with us for four

thousand years or more, today seems more popular than ever. At

least a quarter of all Americans, according to opinion polls,

'believe' in astrology. A third think Sun-sign astrology is 'scien-

tific'.

The fraction of schoolchildren believing in astrology rose

from 40 per cent to 59 per cent between 1978 and 1984.

There are

perhaps ten times more astrologers than astronomers in the

United States. In France there are more astrologers than Roman

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Catholic clergy. No stuffy dismissal by a gaggle of scientists makes

contact with the social needs that astrology - no matter how

invalid it is - addresses, and science does not. As I've tried to stress, at the heart of science is an essential

balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an

openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive,

and the most ruthlessly sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The

collective enterprise of creative thinking and sceptical thinking,

working together, keeps the field on track. Those two seemingly

contradictory attitudes are, though, in some tension. Consider this claim: as I walk along, time - as measured by my

wristwatch or my ageing process - slows down. Also, I shrink in

the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever

witnessed such a thing?

It's easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here's

another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the

universe, being created from nothing. Here's a third: once in a

veiy great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the

brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the

street. They're all absurd!

But the first is a statement of special

relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum

mechanics (vacuum fluctuations and barrier tunnelling,* they're

called).

Like it or not, that's the way the world is. If you insist it's

ridiculous, you'll be forever closed to some of the major findings

on the rules that govern the Universe. If you're only sceptical, then no new ideas make it through to

you. You never learn anything. You become a crochety misan-

thrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of

course, much data to support you.) Since major discoveries in the

borderlines of science are rare, experience will tend to confirm

your grumpiness. But every now and then a new idea turns out to

be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you're too resolutely and

uncompromisingly sceptical, you're going to miss (or resent) the

* The average waiting time per stochastic ooze is much longer than the age of the

Universe since the Big Bang. But, however improbable, in principle it might

happen tomorrow. 287

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

transforming discoveries in science, and either way you will be

obstructing understanding and progress. Mere scepticism is not

enough. At the same time, science requires the most vigorous and

uncompromising scepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are

simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the

chaff is by critical experiment and analysis. If you're open to the

point of gullibility and have not a microgram of sceptical sense in

you, then you cannot distinguish the promising ideas from the

worthless ones. Uncritically accepting every proffered notion,

idea and hypothesis is tantamount to knowing nothing. Ideas

contradict one another; only through sceptical scrutiny can we

decide among them. Some ideas really are better than others. The judicious mix of these two modes of thought is central to

the success of science. Good scientists do both. On their own,

talking to themselves, they churn up many new ideas, and criticize

them systematically. Most of the ideas never make it to the

outside world. Only those that pass a rigorous self-filtration make

it out to be criticized by the rest of the scientific community. Because of this dogged mutual and self-criticism, and the

proper reliance on experiment as the arbiter between contending

hypotheses, many scientists tend to be diffident about describing

their own sense of wonder at the dawning of a wild surmise. This is

a pity, because these rare exultant moments demystify and

humanize the scientific endeavour. No one can be entirely open or completely sceptical. We all

must draw the line somewhere.* An ancient Chinese proverb

advises, 'Better to be too credulous than too sceptical', but this is

from an extremely conservative society in which stability was

much more prized than freedom and where the rulers had a

powerful vested interest in not being challenged. Most scientists, 1

believe, would say, 'Better to be too sceptical than too credulous'.

But neither is easy. Responsible, thoroughgoing, rigorous scepti-

cism requires a hardnosed habit of thought that takes practice and

training to master. Credulity - 1 think a better word here is

* And in some cases scepticism would be simply silly, as for example in learning

to spell. 288

The Marriage of Scepticism and Wonder

'openness' or 'wonder' - does not come easily either. If we really

are to be open to counterintuitive ideas in physics or social

organization or anything else, we must grasp those ideas. It means

nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand. Both scepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and

practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every

schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I'd

love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media,

television especially: a community of people really working the

mix - hill of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing

nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as

second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence; and

these standards applied with at least as much rigour to what they

hold dear as to what they are tempted to reject with impunity. 289

The Wind Makes Dust

[T]he wind makes dust because it intends to blow, taking

away our footprints. Specimens of Bushmen Folklore,

W. H.I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd,

collectors, L. C. Lloyd, editor (1911)

[E]very time a savage tracks his game he employs a

minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and

deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would

assure some reputation as a man of science ...

[T]he

intellectual labour of a 'good hunter or warrior' considerably

exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman. Thomas H. Huxley, Collected Essays,

Volume II, Darwiniana: Essays

(London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 175-6

[from 'Mr Darwin's Critics' (1871)]

W hy should so many people find science hard to learn and

hard to teach?

I've tried to suggest some of the reasons - its

precision, its counterintuitive and disquieting aspects, its pros-

pects of misuse, its independence of authority, and so on. But is

there something deeper?

Alan Cromer is a physics professor at

Northeastern University in Boston who was surprised to find so

many students unable to grasp the most elementary concepts in his

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The Wind Makes Dust

physics class. In Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of

Science (1993), Cromer proposes that science is difficult because

it's new. We, a species that's a few hundred thousand years old,

discovered the method of science only a few centuries ago, he

says. Like writing, which is only a few millennia old, we haven't

gotten the hang of it yet - or at least not without very serious and

attentive study. Except for an unlikely concatenation of historical events, he

suggests, we would never have invented science:

This hostility to science, in the face of its obvious triumphs

and benefits, is ...

evidence that it is something outside the

mainstream of human development, perhaps a fluke. Chinese civilization invented movable type, gunpowder, the

rocket, the magnetic compass, the seismograph, and systematic

observations and chronicles of the heavens. Indian mathemati-

cians invented the zero, the key to comfortable arithmetic and

therefore to quantitative science. Aztec civilization developed a

far better calendar than that of the European civilization that

inundated and destroyed it; they were better able, and for longer

periods into the future, to predict where the planets would be. But

none of these civilizations, Cromer argues, had developed the

sceptical, inquiring, experimental method of science. All of that

came out of ancient Greece:

The development of objective thinking by the Greeks

appears to have required a number of specific cultural

factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to

persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second

was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and paro-

chialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-

speaking world around which travelers and scholars could

wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent mer-

chant class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth was the Iliad

and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves

the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary

religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the

291

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

persistence of these factors for 1,000 years. That all these factors came together in one great civiliza-

tion is quite fortuitous; it didn't happen twice. I'm sympathetic to part of this thesis. The ancient lonians were

the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of

Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even

the existence of the world. As Lucretius summarized their views,

'Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all

things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.'

Except for the first week of introductory philosophy courses,

though, the names and notions of the early lonians are almost

never mentioned in our society. Those who dismiss the gods tend

to be forgotten. We are not anxious to preserve the memory of

such sceptics, much less their ideas. Heroes who try to explain the

world in terms of matter and energy may have arisen many times

in many cultures, only to be obliterated by the priests and

philosophers in charge of the conventional wisdom, as the Ionian

approach was almost wholly lost after the time of Plato and

Aristotle. With many cultures and many experiments of this sort,

it may be that only on rare occasions does the idea take root. Plants and animals were domesticated and civilization began

only ten or twelve thousand years ago. The Ionian experiment is

2,500 years old. It was almost entirely expunged. We can see steps

towards science in ancient China, India and elsewhere, even

though faltering, incomplete, and bearing less fruit. But suppose

the lonians had never existed, and Greek science and mathemat-

ics never flourished. Is it possible that never again in the history of

the human species would science have emerged?

Or, given many

cultures and many alternative historical skeins, isn't it likely that

the right combination of factors would come into play somewhere

else, sooner or later - in the islands of Indonesia, say, or in the

Caribbean on the outskirts of a Mesoamerican civilization

untouched by Conquistadores, or in Norse colonies on the shores

of the Black Sea?

The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the

difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been

mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and

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The Wind Makes Dust

theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical. In those cultures

lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where funda-

mental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be

rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be

enforced - all without much harm. But under varied and changing

environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply

copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits

those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist

their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to

what the Universe teaches. Each society must decide where in the

continuum between openness and rigidity safety lies. Greek mathematics was a brilliant step forward. Greek science,

on the other hand - its first steps rudimentary and often unin-

formed by experiment - was riddled with error. Despite the fact

that we cannot see in pitch darkness, they believed that vision

depends on a kind of radar that emanates from the eye, bounces

off what we're seeing, and returns to the eye. (Nevertheless, they

made substantial progress in optics.) Despite the obvious resem-

blance of children to their mothers, they believed that heredity

was carried by semen alone, the woman a mere passive receptacle. They believed that the horizontal motion of a thrown rock

somehow lifts it up, so that it takes longer to reach the ground

than a rock dropped from the same height at the same moment. Enamoured of simple geometry, they believed the circle to be

'perfect'; despite the 'Man in the Moon' and sunspots (occasion-

ally visible to the naked eye at sunset), they held the heavens also

to be 'perfect'; therefore, planetary orbits had to be circular. Being freed from superstition isn't enough for science to

grow. One must also have the idea of interrogating Nature, of

doing experiments. There were some brilliant examples -

Eratosthenes's measurement of the Earth's diameter, say, or

Empedocles's clepsydra experiment demonstrating the material

nature of air. But in a society in which manual labour is

demeaned and thought fit only for slaves, as in the classical

Graeco-Roman world, the experimental method does not

thrive. Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by

the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in

glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about

religion, and the rise of science might go together. Liberation from

superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science. At the same time, it is undeniable that central figures in the

transition from medieval superstition to modern science were

profoundly influenced by the idea of one Supreme God who

created the Universe and established not only commandments

that humans must live by, but laws that Nature itself must abide

by. The seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes

Kepler, without whom Newtonian physics might not have come to

be, described his pursuit of science as a wish to know the mind of

God. In our own time, leading scientists, including Albert Ein-

stein and Stephen Hawking, have described their quest in nearly

identical terms. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the

historian of Chinese technology Joseph Needham have also

suggested that what was lacking in the development of science in

non-western cultures was monotheism. And yet, 1 think there is strong contrary evidence to this whole

thesis, calling out to us from across the millennia ...

The small hunting party follows the trail of hoofprints and other

spoor. They pause for a moment by a stand of trees. Squatting on

their heels, they examine the evidence more carefully. The trail

they've been following has been crossed by another. Quickly they

agree on which animals are responsible, how many of them, what

ages and sexes, whether any are injured, how fast they're travelling,

how long ago they passed, whether any other hunters are in pursuit,

whether the party can overtake the game, and if so, how long it will

take. The decision made, they flick their hands over the trail they

will follow, make a quiet sound between their teeth like the wind,

and off they lope. Despite their bows and poison arrows, they

continue at championship marathon racing form for hours. Almost

always they've read the message in the ground correctly. The

wildebeests or elands or okapis are where they thought, in the

numbers and condition they estimated. The hunt is successful. Meat

is carried back to the temporary camp. Everyone feasts. 294

The Wind Makes Dust

This more or less typical hunting vignette comes from the IKung

San people of the Kalahari Desert, in the Republics of Botswana

and Namibia, who are now, tragically, on the verge of extinction. But for decades they and their way of life were studied by

anthropologists. The IKung San may be typical of the hunter-

gatherer mode of existence in which we humans spent most of our

time, until ten thousand years ago, when plants and animals were

domesticated and the human condition began to change, perhaps

forever. They were trackers of such legendary prowess that they

were enlisted by the apartheid South African army to hunt down

human prey in the wars against the 'front-line states'.

This

encounter with the white South African military in several differ-

ent ways accelerated the destruction of the IKung San way of life. It had, in any case, been deteriorating bit by bit over the centuries

from every contact with European civilization. How did they do it?

How could they tell so much from barely

more than a glance?

Saying they're keen observers explains

nothing. What actually did they do?

According to anthropologist

Richard Lee:

They scrutinized the shape of the depressions. The footprints of

a fast-moving animal display a more elongated symmetry. A

slightly lame animal favours the afflicted foot, puts less weight on

it, and leaves a fainter imprint. A heavier animal leaves a deeper

and broader hollow. The correlation functions are in the heads of

the hunters. In the course of the day, the footprints erode a little. The walls

of the depression tend to crumble. Windblown sand accumulates

on the floor of the hollow. Perhaps bits of leaf, twigs or grass are

blown into it. The longer you wait, the more erosion there is. This method is essentially identical to what planetary astrono-

mers use in analysing craters left by impacting worldlets: other

things being equal, the shallower the crater, the older it is. Craters

with slumped walls, with modest depth-to-diameter ratios, with

fine particles accumulated in their interiors tend to be more

ancient, because they had to be around long enough for these

erosive processes to come into play. The sources of degradation may differ from world to world, or

desert to desert, or epoch to epoch. But if you know what they are

295

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

you can determine a great deal from how crisp or blurred the

crater is. If insect or other animal tracks are superposed on the

hoofprints, this also argues against their freshness. The subsurface

moisture content of the soil and the rate at which it dries out after

being exposed by a hoof determine how crumbly the crater walls

are. All these matters are closely studied by the IKung. The galloping herd hates the hot Sun. The animals will use

whatever shade they can find. They will alter course to take brief

advantage of the shade from a stand of trees. But where the

shadow is depends on the time of day, because the Sun is moving

across the sky. In the morning, as the Sun is rising in the east,

shadows are cast west of the trees. Later in the afternoon, as the

Sun is setting toward the west, shadows are cast to the east. From

the swerve of the tracks, it's possible to tell how long ago the

animals passed. This calculation will be different in different

seasons of the year. So the hunters must carry in their heads a kind

of astronomical calendar predicting the apparent solar motion. To me, all of these formidable forensic tracking skills are

science in action. Not only are hunter-gatherers expert in the tracks of other

animals; they also know human tracks very well. Every member of

the band is recognizable by his or her footprints; they are as

familiar as their faces. Laurens van der Post recounts,

[M]any miles from home and separated from the rest, Nxou

and I, on the track of a wounded buck, suddenly found

another set of prints and spoor joining our own. He gave a

deep grunt of satisfaction and said it was Bauxhau's foot-

marks made not many minutes before. He declared Bauxhau

was running fast and that we would soon see him and the

animal. We topped the dune in front of us and there was

Bauxhau, already skinning the animal. Or Richard Lee, also among the !Kung San, relates how when

briefly examining some tracks a hunter commented, 'Oh, look,

Tunu is here with his brother-in-law. But where is his son?'

Is this really science?

Does every tracker in the course of his

training sit on his haunches for hours, following the slow degradation

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The Wind Makes Dust

of an eland hoofprint?

When the anthropologist asks this question,

the answer given is that hunters have always used such methods. They observed their fathers and other accomplished hunters during

their apprenticeships. They learned by imitation. The general princi-

ples were passed down from generation to generation. The local

variations - wind speed, soil moisture - are updated as needed in

each generation, or seasonally, or day-by-day. But modern scientists do just the same. Every time we try to

judge the age of a crater on the Moon or Mercury or Triton by its

degree of erosion, we do not perform the calculation from scratch. We dust off a certain scientific paper and read the tried-and-true

numbers that have been set down perhaps as much as a generation

earlier. Physicists do not derive Maxwell's equations or quantum

mechanics from scratch. They try to understand the principles and

the mathematics, they observe its utility, they note how Nature

follows these rules, and they take these sciences to heart, making

them their own. Yet someone had to figure out all these tracking protocols for

the first time, perhaps some palaeolithic genius, or more likely a

succession of geniuses in widely separated times and places. There

is no hint in the IKung tracking protocols of magical methods -

examining the stars the night before or the entrails of an animal,

or casting dice, or interpreting dreams, or conjuring demons, or

any of the myriad other spurious claims to knowledge that humans

have intermittently entertained. Here there's a specific, well-

defined question: which way did the prey go and what are its

characteristics?

You need a precise answer that magic and divina-

tion simply do not provide, or at least not often enough to stave

off starvation. Instead hunter-gatherers - who are not very

superstitious in their everyday life, except during trance dances

around the fire and under the influence of mild euphoriants - are

practical, workaday, motivated, social, and often very cheerful. They employ skills winnowed from past successes and failures. Scientific thinking has almost certainly been with us from the

beginning. You can even see it in chimpanzees when tracking on

patrol of the frontiers of their territory, or when preparing a reed

to insert into the termite mound to extract a modest but much-

needed source of protein. The development of tracking skills

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

delivers a powerful evolutionary selective advantage. Those

groups unable to figure it out get less protein and leave fewer

offspring. Those with a scientific bent, those able patiently to

observe, those with a penchant for figuring out acquire more food,

especially more protein, and live in more varied habitats; they and

their hereditary lines prosper. The same is true, for instance, of

Polynesian seafaring skills. A scientific bent brings tangible

rewards. The other principal food-garnering activity of pre-agrarian

societies is foraging. To forage, you must know the properties of

many plants, and you must certainly be able to distinguish one

from another. Botanists and anthropologists have repeatedly

found that all over the world hunter-gatherer peoples have

distinguished the various plant species with the precision of

western taxonomists. They have mentally mapped their territory

with the finesse of cartographers. Again, all this is a precondition

for survival. So the claim that, just as children are not developmentally

ready for certain concepts in mathematics or logic, so 'primitive'

peoples are not intellectually able to grasp science and technol-

ogy, is nonsense. This vestige of colonialism and racism is belied

by the everyday activities of people living with no fixed abode and

almost no possessions, the few remaining hunter-gatherers - the

custodians of our deep past. Of Cromer's criteria for 'objective thinking', we can certainly

find in hunter-gatherer peoples vigorous and substantive debate,

direct participatory democracy, wide-ranging travel, no priests,

and the persistence of these factors not for 1,000 but for 300,000

years or more. By his criteria hunter-gatherers ought to have

science. 1 think they do. Or did. What Ionia and ancient Greece provided is not so much inven-

tions or technology or engineering, but the idea of systematic

inquiry, the notion that laws of Nature, rather than capricious

gods, govern the world. Water, air, earth and fire all had their

turn as candidate 'explanations' of the nature and origin of the

world. Each such explanation - identified with a different pre-

Socratic philosopher - was deeply flawed in its details. But the

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The Wind Makes Dust

mode of explanation, an alternative to divine intervention, was

productive and new. Likewise, in the history of ancient Greece,

we can see nearly all significant events driven by the caprice of the

gods in Homer, only a few events in Herodotus, and essentially

none at all in Thucydides. In a few hundred years, history passed

from god-driven to human-driven. Something akin to laws of Nature were once glimpsed in a

determinedly polytheistic society, in which some scholars toyed

with a form of atheism. This approach of the pre-Socratics was,

beginning in about the fourth century BC, quenched by Plato,

Aristotle and then Christian theologians, if the skein of historical

causality had been different - if the brilliant guesses of the

atomists on the nature of matter, the plurality of worlds, the

vastness of space and time had been treasured and built upon, if

the innovative technology of Archimedes had been taught and

emulated, if the notion of invariable laws of Nature that humans

must seek out and understand had been widely propagated - 1

wonder what kind of world we would live in now. 1 don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't

ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because,

by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that 1 see in first-graders

and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak

eloquently: a proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us,

in all times, places and cultures. It has been the means for our

survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inatten-

tion, incompetence, or fear of scepticism, we discourage children

from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the

tools needed to manage their future. 299

No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

So we keep asking, over and over. Until a handful of earth

Stops our mouths —

But is that an answer?

Heinrich Heine,

'Lazarus' (1854)

I n East Africa, in the records of the rocks dating back to about

two million years ago, you can find a sequence of worked tools

that our ancestors designed and executed. Their lives depended

on making and using these tools. This was, of course, Early Stone

Age technology. Over time, specially fashioned stones were used

for stabbing, chipping, flaking, cutting, carving. Although there

are many ways of making stone tools, what is remarkable is that in

a given site for enormous periods of time the tools were made in

the same way - which means that there must have been educa-

tional institutions hundreds of thousands of years ago, even if it

was mainly an apprenticeship system. While it's easy to exagger-

ate the similarities, it's also easy to imagine the equivalent of

professors and students in loincloths, laboratory courses, exami-

nations, failing grades, graduation ceremonies and postgraduate

education. When the training is unchanged for immense periods of time,

traditions are passed on intact to the next generation. But when

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

what needs to be learned changes quickly, especially in the course

of a single generation, it becomes much harder to know what to

teach and how to teach it. Then, students complain about

relevance; respect for their elders diminishes. Teachers despair at

how educational standards have deteriorated, and how lackadaisi-

cal students have become. In a world in transition, students and

teachers both need to teach themselves one essential skill -

learning how to learn. Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the

important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why

Nature is the way it is; where the Cosmos came from, or whether

it was always here; if time will one day flow backward, and effects

precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what

humans can know. There are even children, and I have met some

of them, who want to know what a black hole looks like; what is

the smallest piece of matter; why we remember the past and not

the future; and why there is a Universe. Every now and then, I'm lucky enough to teach a kindergarten

or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born

scientists - although heavy on the wonder side and light on

scepticism. They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative

and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enor-

mous enthusiasm. I'm asked follow-up questions. They've never

heard of the notion of a 'dumb question'.

But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something

different. They memorize 'facts'.

By and large, though, the joy of

discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder, and gained very little scepti-

cism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they're

willing to accept inadequate answers; they don't pose follow-up

questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge,

second-by-second, the approval of their peers. They come to class

with their questions written out on pieces of paper, which they

surreptitiously examine, waiting their turn and oblivious of what-

ever discussion their peers are at this moment engaged in. Something has happened between first and twelfth grade, and

it's not just puberty. I'd guess that it's partly peer pressure not to

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

excel (except in sports); partly that the society teaches short-term

gratification; partly the impression that science or mathematics

won't buy you a sports car; partly that so little is expected of

students; and partly that there are few rewards or role models for

intelligent discussion of science and technology - or even for

learning for its own sake. Those few who remain interested are

vilified as 'nerds' or 'geeks' or 'grinds'.

But there's something else: 1 find many adults are put off when

young children pose scientific questions. Why is the Moon round?

the children ask. Why is grass green?

What is a dream?

How deep

can you dig a hole?

When is the world's birthday?

Why do we

have toes?

Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation

or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else: 'What did you

expect the Moon to be, square?' Children soon recognize that

somehow this kind of question annoys the grown-ups. A few more

experiences like it, and another child has been lost to science. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before 6-year-olds, 1

can't for the life of me understand. What's wrong with admitting

that we don't know something?

Is our self-esteem so fragile?

What's more, many of these questions go to deep issues in

science, a few of which are not yet fully resolved. Why the Moon

is round has to do with the fact that gravity is a central force

pulling towards the middle of any world, and with how strong

rocks are. Grass is green because of the pigment chlorophyll, of

course - we've all had that drummed into us by high schools - but

why do plants have chlorophyll?

It seems foolish, since the Sun

puts out its peak energy in the yellow and green part of the

spectrum. Why should plants all over the world reject sunlight in

its most abundant wavelengths?

Maybe it's a frozen accident from

the ancient history of life on Earth. But there's something we still

don't understand about why grass is green. There are many better responses than making the child feel that

asking deep questions constitutes a social blunder. If we have an

idea of the answer, we can try to explain. Even an incomplete

attempt constitutes a reassurance and encouragement. If we have

no idea of the answer, we can go to the encyclopedia. If we don't

have an encyclopedia, we can take the child to the library. Or we

might say: 'I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

when you grow up, you'll be the first person to find out.'

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased ques-

tions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every

question is a cry to understand the world.* There is no such thing

as a dumb question. Bright, curious children are a national and world resource. They need to be cared for, cherished, and encouraged. But mere

encouragement isn't enough. We must also give them the essential

tools to think with. 'It's Official', reads one newspaper headline: 'We Stink in Sci-

ence'.

In tests of average 17-year-olds in many world regions, the

US ranked dead last in algebra. On identical tests, the US kids

averaged 43% and their Japanese counterparts 78%.

In my book,

78% is pretty good - it corresponds to a C + , or maybe even a B-;

43% is an F. In a chemistry test, students in only two of 13 nations

did worse than the US. Britain, Singapore and Hong Kong were

so high they were almost off-scale, and 25% of Canadian 18-year-

olds knew just as much chemistry as a select 1% of American high

school seniors (in their second chemistry course, and most of them

in 'advanced' placement programmes).

The best of 20 fifth-grade

classrooms in Minneapolis was outpaced by every one of 20

classrooms in Sendai, Japan, and 19 out of 20 in Taipei, Taiwan. South Korean students were far ahead of American students in all

aspects of mathematics and science, and 13-year-olds in British

Columbia (in western Canada) outpaced their US counterparts

across the board (in some areas they did better than the Koreans).

Of the US kids, 22% say they dislike school; only 8% of the

Koreans do. Yet two-thirds of the Americans, but only a quarter

of the Koreans, say they are 'good at mathematics'.

Such dismal trends for average students in the United States are

occasionally offset by the performance of outstanding students. In

1994, American students at the International Mathematical Olym-

piad in Hong Kong achieved an unprecedented perfect score,

defeating 360 other students from 68 nations in algebra, geometry

* I'm excluding the fusillade of 'whys' that two-year-olds sometimes pelt their

parents with - perhaps in an effort to control adult behaviour. 303

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

and number theory. One of them, 17-year-old Jeremy Bern,

commented 'Maths problems are logic puzzles. There's no routine

- it's all very creative and artistic' But here I'm concerned not

with producing a new generation of first-rate scientists and

mathematicians, but a scientifically literate public. Sixty-three per cent of American adults are unaware that the

last dinosaur died before the first human arose; 75 per cent do not

know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses; 57 per cent do

not know that 'electrons are smaller than atoms'.

Polls show that

something like half of American adults do not know that the Earth

goes around the Sun and takes a year to do it. 1 can find in my

undergraduate classes at Cornell University bright students who

do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the

Sun is a star. Because of science fiction, the educational system, NASA, and

the role that science plays in society, Americans have much more

exposure to the Copernican insight than does the average human. A 1993 poll by the China Association of Science and Technology

shows that, as in America, no more than half the people in China

know that the Earth revolves around the Sun once a year. It may

very well be, then, that more than four and a half centuries after

Copernicus, most people on Earth still think, in their heart of

hearts, that our planet sits immobile at the centre of the Universe,

and that we are profoundly 'special'.

These are typical questions in 'scientific literacy'.

The results

are appalling. But what do they measure?

The memorization of

authoritative pronouncements. What they should be asking is how

we know - that antibiotics discriminate between microbes, that

electrons are 'smaller' than atoms, that the Sun is a star which the

Earth orbits once a year. Such questions are a much truer measure

of public understanding of science, and the results of such tests

would doubtless be more disheartening still. If you accept the literal truth of every word of the Bible, then

the Earth must be flat. The same is true for the Qu'ran. Pronouncing the Earth round then means you're an atheist. In

1993, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik

Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the

world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

God and should be punished. Among many ironies, the lucid

evidence that the Earth is a sphere, accumulated by the second-

century Graeco-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, was

transmitted to the west by astronomers who were Muslim and

Arab. In the ninth century, they named Ptolemy's book in which

the sphericity of the Earth is demonstrated, the Almagest, 'The

Greatest'.

1 meet many people offended by evolution, who passionately

prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind

physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. They also tend

to be less than assiduous in exposing themselves to the evidence. Evidence has little to do with it: what they wish to be true, they

believe is true. Only nine per cent of Americans accept the central

finding of modern biology that human beings (and all the other

species) have slowly evolved by natural processes from a succes-

sion of more ancient beings with no divine intervention needed

along the way. (When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45

per cent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 per cent in China.)

When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was

condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolu-

tion and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million

years ago, when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashanah and

every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000

years old. The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in

our genes. But evolution is still being fought, ironically by those

whose own DNA proclaims it - in the schools, in the courts, in

textbook publishing houses, and on the question of just how much

pain we can inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical

threshold. During the Great Depression in America, teachers enjoyed job

security, good salaries, respectability. Teaching was an admired

profession, partly because learning was widely recognized as the

road out of poverty. Little of that is true today. And so science

(and other) teaching is too often incompetently or uninspiringly

done, its practitioners, astonishingly, having little or no training in

their subjects, impatient with the method and in a hurry to get to

the findings of science - and sometimes themselves unable to

distinguish science from pseudoscience. Those who do have the

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

training often get higher-paying jobs elsewhere. Children need hands-on experience with the experimental

method rather than just reading about science in a book. We can

be told about oxidation of wax as the explanation of the candle

flame. But we have a much more vivid sense of what's going on if

we witness the candle burning briefly in a bell jar until the carbon

dioxide produced by the burning surrounds the wick, blocks

access to oxygen, and the flame flickers and dies. We can be

taught about mitochondria in cells, how they mediate the oxida-

tion of food like the flame burning the wax, but it's another thing

altogether to see them under the microscope. We may be told that

oxygen is necessary for the life of some organisms and not others. But we begin really to understand when we test the proposition in

a bell jar fully depleted of oxygen. What does oxygen do for us?

Why do we die without it?

Where does the oxygen in the air come

from?

How secure is the supply?

Experiment and the scientific method can be taught in many

matters other than science. Daniel Kunitz is a friend of mine from

college. He's spent his life as an innovative junior and senior high

school social sciences teacher. Want the students to understand

the Constitution of the United States?

You could have them read

it. Article by Article, and then discuss it in class but, sadly, this

will put most of them to sleep. Or you could try the Kunitz

method: you forbid the students to read the Constitution. Instead,

you assign them, two for each state, to attend a Constitutional

Convention. You brief each of the thirteen teams in detail on the

particular interests of their state and region. The South Carolina

delegation, say, would be told of the primacy of cotton, the

necessity and morality of the slave trade, the danger posed by the

industrial north, and so on. The thirteen delegations assemble,

and with a little faculty guidance, but mainly on their own, over

some weeks write a constitution. Then they read the real Consti-

tution. The students have reserved war-making powers to the

President. The delegates of 1787 assigned them to Congress. Why?

The students have freed the slaves. The original Constitu-

tional Convention did not. Why?

This takes more preparation by

the teachers and more work by the students, but the experience is

unforgettable. It's hard not to think that the nations of the Earth

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

would be in better shape if every citizen went through a compara-

ble experience. We need more money for teachers' training and salaries, and

for laboratories. But all across America, school-bond issues are

regularly voted down. No one suggests that property taxes be used

to provide for the military budget, or for agriculture subsidies, or

for cleaning up toxic wastes. Why just education?

Why not

support it from general taxes on the local and state levels?

What

about a special education tax for those industries with special

needs for technically trained workers?

American schoolchildren don't do enough schoolwork. There

are 180 days in the standard school year in the United States, as

compared with 220 in South Korea, about 230 in Germany, and

243 in Japan. Children in some of these countries go to school on

Saturday. The average American high school student spends 3.5

hours a week on homework. The total time devoted to studies, in

and out of the classroom, is about 20 hours a week. Japanese

fifth-graders average 33 hours a week. Japan, with half the

population of the United States, produces twice as many scientists

and engineers with advanced degrees every year. During four years of high school, American students spend less

than 1,500 hours on such subjects as mathematics, science and

history. Japanese, French and German students spend more than

twice as much time. A 1994 report commissioned by the US

Department of Education notes:

The traditional school day must now fit in a whole set of

requirements for what has been called the 'new work of the

schools' - education about personal safety, consumer affairs,

AIDS, conservation and energy, family life and driver's

training. So, because of the deficiencies of society and the inadequacies of

education in the home, only about three hours a day are spent in

high school on the core academic subjects. There's a widely held perception that science is 'too hard' for

ordinary people. We can see this reflected in the statistic that only

around 10 per cent of American high school students ever opt for

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

a course in physics. What makes science suddenly 'too hard'?

Why

isn't it too hard for the citizens of all those other countries that are

outperforming the United States?

What has happened to the

American genius for science, technical innovation and hard work?

Americans once took enormous pride in their inventors, who

pioneered the telegraph, telephone, electric light, phonograph,

automobile and airplane. Except for computers, all that seems a

thing of the past. Where did all that 'Yankee ingenuity' go?

Most American children aren't stupid. Part of the reason they

don't study hard is that they receive few tangible benefits when

they do. Competency (that is, actually knowing the stuff) in verbal

skills, mathematics, science and history these days doesn't

increase earnings for average young men in their first eight years

out of high school, many of whom take service rather than

industrial jobs. In the productive sectors of the economy, though, the story is

often different. There are furniture factories, for example, in

danger of going out of business - not because there are no

customers, but because so few entry-level workers can do simple

arithmetic. A major electronics company reports that 80 per cent

of its job applicants can't pass a fifth-grade mathematics test. The

United States already is losing some $40 billion a year (mainly in

lost productivity and the cost of remedial education) because

workers, to too great a degree, can't read, write, count or think. In a survey by the US National Science Board of 139 high

technology companies in the United States, the chief causes of the

research and development decline attributable to national policy

were (1) lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with the problem;

(2) too little attention paid to the training of future scientists and

engineers; (3) too much investment in 'defence', and not enough

in civilian research and development; and (4) too little attention

paid to pre-college education. Ignorance feeds on ignorance. Science phobia is contagious. Those in America with the most favourable view of science tend

to be young, well-to-do, college-educated white males. But three-

quarters of new American workers in the next decade will be

women, nonwhites and immigrants. Failing to rouse their enthusi-

asm, to say nothing of discriminating against them, isn't only

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

unjust, it's also stupid and self-defeating. It deprives the economy

of desperately needed skilled workers. African-American and Hispanic students are doing significantly

better in standardized science tests now than in the late 1960s, but

they're the only ones who are. The average maths gap between

white and black US high school graduates is still huge - two to

three grade levels; but the gap between white US high school

graduates and those in, say, Japan, Canada, Great Britain or

Finland is more than twice as large (with the US students behind).

If you're poorly motivated and poorly educated, you won't know

much - no mystery there. Suburban African-Americans with

college-educated parents do just as well in college as suburban

whites with college-educated parents. According to some statis-

tics, enrolling a poor child in a Head Start programme doubles his

or her chances to be employed later in life; one who completes an

Upward Bound programme is four times as likely to get a college

education. If we're serious, we know what to do. What about college and university?

There are obvious steps to

take: improved status based on teaching success, and promotions

of teachers based on the performance of their students in stand-

ardized, double-blind tests; salaries for teachers that approach

what they could get in industry; more scholarships, fellowships

and laboratory equipment; imaginative, inspiring curricula and

textbooks in which the leading faculty members play a major role;

laboratory courses required of everyone to graduate; and special

attention paid to those traditionally steered away from science. We should also encourage the best academic scientists to spend

more time on public education - textbooks, lectures, newspaper

and magazine articles, TV appearances. And a mandatory fresh-

man or sophomore (first- or second-year) course in sceptical

thinking and the methods of science might be worth trying. The mystic William Blake stared at the Sun and saw angels there,

while others, more worldly, 'perceived only an object of about the

size and colour of a golden guinea'.

Did Blake really see angels in

the Sun, or was it some perceptual or cognitive error?

I know of

no photograph of the Sun that shows anything of the sort. Did

Blake see what the camera and the telescope cannot?

Or does the

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

explanation lie much more inside Blake's head than outside?

And

is not the truth of the Sun's nature as revealed by modern science

far more wonderful: no mere angels or gold coin, but an enormous

sphere into which a million Earths could be packed, in the core of

which the hidden nuclei of atoms are being jammed together,

hydrogen transfigured into helium, the energy latent in hydrogen

for billions of years released, the Earth and other planets warmed

and lit thereby, and the same process repeated four hundred

billion times elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy?

The blueprints, detailed instructions, and job orders for build-

ing you from scratch would fill about 1,000 encyclopedia volumes

if written out in English. Yet every cell in your body has a set of

these encyclopedias. A quasar is so far away that the light we see

from it began its intergalactic voyage before the Earth was

formed. Every person on Earth is descended from the same

not-quite-human ancestors in East Africa a few million years ago,

making us all cousins. Whenever 1 think about any of these discoveries, 1 feel a tingle of

exhilaration. My heart races. 1 can't help it. Science is an astonish-

ment and a delight. Every time a spacecraft flies by a new world, 1

find myself amazed. Planetary scientists ask themselves: 'Oh, is that

the way it is?

Why didn't we think of that?' But nature is always more

subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to

imagine. Given our manifest human limitations, what is surprising is

that we have been able to penetrate so far into the secrets ofNature. Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discov-

ery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science

- pure science, science not for any practical application but for its

own sake - is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it,

as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to

see what's been discovered lately. And, as in a detective story, it's a joy to frame key questions, to

work through alternative explanations, and maybe even to

advance the process of scientific discovery. Consider these exam-

ples, some very simple, some not, chosen more or less at random:

• Could there be an undiscovered integer between 6 and 7?

• Could there be an undiscovered chemical element between

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

atomic number 6 (which is carbon) and atomic number 7 (which

is nitrogen)?

Yes, the new preservative causes cancer in rats. But what if you

have to give a person, who weighs much more than a rat, a

pound a day of the stuff to induce cancer?

In that case, maybe

the new preservative isn't all that dangerous. Might the benefit

of having food preserved for long periods outweigh the small

additional risk of cancer?

Who decides?

What data do they

need to make a prudent decision?

In a 3.8 billion-year-old rock, you find a ratio of carbon isotopes

typical of living things today, and different from inorganic sedi-

ments. Do you deduce abundant life on Earth 3.8 billion years

ago?

Or could the chemical remains of more modern organisms

have infiltrated into the rock?

Or is there a way for isotopes to

separate in the rock apart from biological processes?

Sensitive measurements of electrical currents in the human

brain show that when certain memories or mental processes

occur, particular regions of the brain go into action. Can our

thoughts, memories and passions all be generated by particular

circuitry of the brain neurons?

Might it ever be possible to

simulate such circuitry in a robot?

Would it ever be feasible to

insert new circuits or alter old ones in the brain in such a way as

to change opinions, memories, emotions, logical deductions?

such tampering wildly dangerous?

Your theory of the origin of the solar system predicts many flat

discs of gas and dust all over the Milky Way galaxy. You look

through the telescope and you find flat discs everywhere. You

happily conclude that your theory is confirmed. But it turns out

the discs you sighted were spiral galaxies far beyond the Milky

Way, and much too big to be nascent solar systems. Should you

abandon your theory?

Or should you look for a different kind

of disc?

Or is this just an expression of your unwillingness to

abandon a discredited hypothesis?

A growing cancer sends out an all-points bulletin to the cells

lining adjacent blood vessels: 'We need blood,' the message

says. The endothelial cells obligingly build blood vessel bridges

to supply the cancer cells with blood. How does this come

about?

Can the message be intercepted or cancelled?

311

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

You mix violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red paints and

make a murky brown. Then you mix light of the same colours

and you get white. What's going on?

In the genes of humans and many other animals there are long,

repetitive sequences of hereditary information (called 'non-

sense').

Some of these sequences cause genetic diseases. Could

it be that segments of the DNA are rogue nucleic acids,

reproducing on their own, in business for themselves, disdain-

ing the well-being of the organism they inhabit?

Many animals behave strangely just before an earthquake. What do they know that seismologists don't?

The ancient Aztec and the ancient Greek words for 'God' are

nearly the same. Is this evidence of some contact or commonal-

ity between the two civilizations, or should we expect occa-

sional such coincidences between two wholly unrelated

languages merely by chance?

Or could, as Plato thought in the

Cratylus , certain words be built into us from birth?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in the Universe

as a whole, disorder increases as time goes on. (Of course, locally

worlds and life and intelligence can emerge, at the cost of a

decrease in order elsewhere in the Universe.) But if we live in a

Universe in which the present Big Bang expansion will slow, stop,

and be replaced by a contraction, might the Second Law then be

reversed?

Can effects precede causes?

The human body uses concentrated hydrochloric acid in the

stomach to dissolve food and aid digestion. Why doesn't the

hydrochloric acid dissolve the stomach?

The oldest stars seem to be, at the time I'm writing, older than

the Universe. Like the claim that an acquaintance has children

older than she is, you don't have to know very much to

recognize that someone has made a mistake. Who?

The technology now exists to move individual atoms around, so

long and complex messages can be written on an ultra-

microscopic scale. It is also possible to make machines the size

of molecules. Rudimentary examples of both these 'nano-

technologies' are now well demonstrated. Where does this take

us in another few decades?

In several different laboratories, complex molecules have been

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

found that under suitable conditions make copies of themselves in

the test tube. Some of these molecules are, like DNA and RNA,

built out of nucleotides; others are not. Some use enzymes to

hasten the pace of the chemistry; others do not. Sometimes there

is a mistake in copying; from that point forward the mistake is

copied in successive generations of molecules. Thus there get to

be slightly different species of self-replicating molecules, some of

which reproduce faster or more efficiently than others. These

preferentially thrive. As time goes on, the molecules in the test

tube become more and more efficient. We are beginning to

witness the evolution of molecules. How much insight does this

provide about the origin of life?

• Why is ordinary ice white, but pure glacial ice blue?

• Life has been found miles below the surface of the Earth. How

deep does it go?

• The Dogon people in the Republic of Mali are said by a French

anthropologist to have a legend that the star Sirius has an

extremely dense companion star. Sirius in fact does have such a

companion, although it requires fairly sophisticated astronomy to

detect it. So (1) did the Dogon people descend from a forgotten

civilization that had large optical telescopes and theoretical astro-

physics?

Or, (2) were they instructed by extraterrestrials?

Or, (3)

did the Dogon hear about the white dwarf companion of Sirius

from a visiting European?

Or, (4) was the French anthropologist

mistaken and the Dogon in fact never had such a legend?

Why should it be hard for scientists to get science across?

Some

scientists, including some very good ones, tell me they'd love to

popularize, but feel they lack talent in this area. Knowing and

explaining, they say, are not the same thing. What's the secret?

There's only one, 1 think: don't talk to the general audience as

you would to your scientific colleagues. There are terms that

convey your meaning instantly and accurately to fellow experts. You may parse these phrases every day in your professional work. But they do no more than mystify an audience of non-specialists. Use the simplest possible language. Above all, remember how it

was before you yourself grasped whatever it is you're explaining. Remember the misunderstandings that you almost fell into, and

313

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

note them explicitly. Keep firmly in mind that there was a time

when you didn't understand any of this either. Recapitulate the

first steps that led you from ignorance to knowledge. Never forget

that native intelligence is widely distributed in our species. Indeed, it is the secret of our success. The effort involved is slight, the benefits great. Among the

potential pitfalls are oversimplification, the need to be sparing

with qualifications (and quantifications), inadequate credit given

to the many scientists involved, and insufficient distinctions drawn

between helpful analogy and reality. Doubtless, compromises

must be made. The more you make such presentations, the clearer it is which

approaches work and which do not. There is a natural selection of

metaphors, images, analogies, anecdotes. After a while you find

that you can get almost anywhere you want to go, walking on

consumer-tested stepping-stones. You can then fine-tune your

presentations for the needs of a given audience. Like some editors and television producers, some scientists

believe the public is too ignorant or too stupid to understand

science, that the enterprise of popularization is fundamentally a

lost cause, or even that it's tantamount to fraternization, if not

outright cohabitation, with the enemy. Among the many criti-

cisms that could be made of this judgement - along with its

insufferable arrogance and its neglect of a host of examples of

highly successful science popularizations - is that it is self-

confirming. And also, for the scientists involved, self-defeating. Large-scale government support for science is fairly new, dating

back only to World War Two - although patronage of a few

scientists by the rich and powerful is much older. With the end of

the Cold War, the national defence trump card that provided

support for all sorts of fundamental science became virtually

unplayable. Only partly for this reason, most scientists, I think,

are now comfortable with the idea of popularizing science. (Since

nearly all support for science comes from the public coffers, it

would be an odd flirtation with suicide for scientists to oppose

competent popularization.) What the public understands and

appreciates, it is more likely to support. 1 don't mean writing

articles for Scientific American, say, that are read by science

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No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

enthusiasts and scientists in other fields. I'm not just talking about

teaching introductory courses for undergraduates. I'm talking about

efforts to communicate the substance and approach of science in

newspapers, magazines, on radio and television, in lectures for the

general public, and in elementary, middle and high school textbooks. Of course there are judgement calls to be made in popularizing. It's important neither to mystify nor to patronize. In attempting to

prod public interest, scientists have on occasion gone too far - for

example, in drawing unjustified religious conclusions. Astrono-

mer George Smoot described his discovery of small irregularities

in the ratio radiation left over from the Big Bang as 'seeing God

face-to-face'.

Physics Nobel laureate Leon Lederman described

the Higgs boson, a hypothetical building block of matter, as 'the

God particle', and so titled a book. (In my opinion, they're all

God particles.) If the Higgs boson doesn't exist, is the God

hypothesis disproved?

Physicist Frank Tipler proposes that com-

puters in the remote future will prove the existence of God and

work our bodily resurrection. Periodicals and television can strike sparks as they give us a

glimpse of science, and this is very important. But - apart from

apprenticeship or well-structured classes and seminars - the best

way to popularize science is through textbooks, popular books,

CD-ROMs and laser discs. You can mull things over, go at your

own pace, revisit the hard parts, compare texts, dig deep. It has to

be done right, though, and in the schools especially it generally

isn't. There, as the philosopher John Passmore comments, science

is often presented

as a matter of learning principles and applying them by

routine procedures. It is learned from textbooks, not by

reading the works of great scientists or even the day-to-day

contributions to the scientific literature ...

The beginning

scientist, unlike the beginning humanist, does not have an

immediate contact with genius. Indeed ...

school courses

can attract quite the wrong sort of person into science -

unimaginative boys and girls who like routine. I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does

315

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

no more than spark the sense of wonder. To do that, it is sufficient

to provide a glimpse of the findings of science without thoroughly

explaining how those findings were achieved. It is easier to

portray the destination than the journey. But, where possible,

popularizers should try to chronicle some of the mistakes, false

starts, dead ends and apparently hopeless confusion along the

way. At least every now and then, we should provide the evidence

and let the reader draw his or her own conclusion. This converts

obedient assimilation of new knowledge into personal discovery. When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last

person on Earth to see the light - you never forget it. As a youngster, I was inspired by the popular science books

and articles of George Gamow, James Jeans, Arthur Edding-

ton, J. B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Rachel Carson and Arthur

C. Clarke - all of them trained in, and most of them leading

practitioners of science. The popularity of well-written, well-

explained, deeply imaginative books on science that touch our

hearts as well as our minds seems greater in the last twenty

years than ever before, and the number and disciplinary

diversity of scientists writing these books is likewise unprec-

edented. Among the best contemporary scientist-popularizers,

I think of Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas and

Richard Dawkins in biology; Steven Weinberg, Alan Lightman

and Kip Thorne in physics; Roald Hoffmann in chemistry; and

the early works of Fred Hoyle in astronomy. Isaac Asimov

wrote capably on everything. (And while requiring calculus, the

most consistently exciting, provocative and inspiring science

popularization of the last few decades seems to me to be

Volume I of Richard Feynman's Introductory Lectures on

Physics.) Nevertheless, current efforts are clearly nowhere near

commensurate with the public good. And, of course, if we can't

read, we can't benefit from such works, no matter how inspiring

they are. I want us to rescue Mr 'Buckley' and the millions like him. I also

want us to stop turning out leaden, incurious, uncritical and

unimaginative high school seniors. Our species needs, and

deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic under-

standing of how the world works. 316

No Such Thing as a Dumb Question

Science, I maintain, is an absolutely essential tool for any

society with a hope of surviving well into the next century with its

fundamental values intact - not just science as engaged in by its

practitioners, but science understood and embraced by the entire

human community. And if the scientists will not bring this about,

who will?

317

House on Fire*

The Lord [Buddha] replied to the Venerable Sariputra:

'In some village, city, market town, country district,

province, kingdom, or capital there lived a householder,

old, advanced in years, decrepit, weak in health and

strength, but rich, wealthy, and well-to-do. His house was a

large one, both extensive and high, and it was old, having

been built a long time ago. It was inhabited by many living

beings, some two, three, four, or five hundred. It had one

single door only. It was thatched with straw, its terraces had

fallen down, its foundations were rotten, its walls,

matting-screens, and plaster were in an advanced state of

decay. Suddenly a great blaze of fire broke out, and the

house started burning on all sides. And that man had many

young sons, five, or ten, or twenty, and he himself got out of

the house. 'When that man saw his own house ablaze all around with

the great mass of fire, he became afraid and trembled, his

mind became agitated, and he thought to himself: "I, it is

true, have been competent enough to run out of the door,

and to escape from my burning house, quickly and safely,

without being touched or scorched by that great mass of fire. But what about my sons, my young boys, my little sons?

* Written with Ann Druyan. 318

House on Fire

There, in this burning house, they play, sport, and amuse

themselves with all sorts of games. They do not know that

this dwelling is afire, they do not understand it, do not

perceive it, pay no attention to it, and so they feel no

agitation. Though threatened by this great [fire], though in

such close contact with so much ill, they pay no attention to

their danger, and make no efforts to get out." '

from The Saddharmapundarika,

in Buddhist Scriptures, Edward Conze, ed. (Penguin Books, 1959)

O ne of the reasons it's so interesting to write for Parade

magazine is feedback. With eighty million readers you can

really sample the opinion of the citizens of the United States. You

can understand how people think, what their anxieties and hopes

are, and even perhaps where we have lost our way. An abbreviated version of the preceding chapter, emphasizing

the performance of students and teachers, was published in

Parade. I was flooded with mail. Some people denied there was a

problem; others said that Americans were losing cutting-edge

intelligence and know-how. Some thought there were easy solu-

tions; others, that the problems were too deeply ingrained to fix. Many opinions were a surprise to me. A tenth-grade teacher in Minnesota handed out copies of the

article and asked his students to tell me what they thought. Here's

what some American high school students wrote (spelling, gram-

mar and punctuation as in the original letters):

• Not a Americans are stupid We just rank lower in school big deal. • Maybe that's good that we are not as smart as the other

countries. So then we can just import all of our products and

then we don't have to spend all of our money on the parts for

the goods. • And if other countries are doing better, what does it matter,

their most likely going to come over the U. S. anyway?

• Our society is doing just fine with what discoveries we are

making. It's going slowly, but the cure for cancer is coming

right along. 319

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

The U. S. has its own learning system and it may not be as

advanced as theirs, but it is just as good. Otherwise I think your

article is a very educating one. Not one kid in this school likes science. 1 really didn't under-

stand the point of the article. 1 thought that it was very boring. I'm just not into anything like that. 1 am studying to be a lawyer and frankly 1 do agree with my

parents when they say 1 have an attitude problem toward science. It's true that some American kids don't try, but we could be

smarter than any other country if we wanted to. Instead of homework, kids will watch TV. 1 have to agree that 1

do it. 1 have cut it down from about 4 hrs. a day. 1 don't believe it is the school systems fault, 1 think the whole

country is brought up with not enough emphasis on school. 1

know my mom would rather be watching me play basketball or

soccer, instead of helping me with an assignment. Most of the

kids 1 know could care less about making sure there doing there

work right. 1 don't think American kids are stupid. It just they don't study

hard enough because most of kids work ...

Lots of people said

that Asian people are smarter than American and they are

good at everything, but that's not true. They are not good at

sports. They don't have time to play sports. I'm in sports myself, and I feel that the other kids on my team

push to you to excel more in that sport than in school. If we want to rank first, we could go to school all day and not

have any social life. I can see why a lot of science teachers would get mad at you for

insulting there job. Maybe if the teachers could be more exciting, the children will

want to learn ...

If science is made to be fun, kids will want to

learn. To accomplish this, it needs to be started early on, not

just taught as facts and figures. I really find it hard to believe those facts about the U. S. in

science. If we are so far behind, how come Michael Gorbachev came to

Minnesota and Montana to Control Data to see how we run are

computers and thing?

320

House on Fire

• Around 33 hours for fifth graders!

In my opinion thats too

much that's almost as many hours as a Ml job practically. So

instead of homework we can be making money. • When you put down how far behind we are in science and

math, why don't you try tell us this in a little nicer manner?...

Have a little pride in your country and its capabilities. • 1 think your facts were inconclusive and the evidence very

flimsy. All in all, you raised a good point. All in all, these students don't think there's much of a problem;

and if there is, not much can be done about it. Many also

complained that the lectures, classroom discussions and home-

work were 'boring'.

Especially for an MTV generation beset by

attention deficit disorders in various degrees of severity, it is

boring. But spending three or four grades practising once again

the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of fractions

would bore anyone, and the tragedy is that, say, elementary

probability theory is within reach of these students. Likewise for

the forms of plants and animals presented without evolution;

history presented as wars, dates and kings without the role of

obedience to authority, greed, incompetence and ignorance;

English without new words entering the language and old words

disappearing; and chemistry without where the elements come

from. The means of awakening these students are at hand and

ignored. Since most school children emerge with only a tiny

fraction of what they've been taught permanently engraved in

their long-term memories, isn't it essential to infect them with

consumer-tested topics that aren't boring ...

and a zest for

learning?

Most adults who wrote thought there's a substantial problem. I

received letters from parents about inquisitive children willing to

work hard, passionate about science but with no adequate com-

munity or school resources to satisfy their interests. Other letters

told of parents who knew nothing about science sacrificing their

own comfort so their children could have science books, micro-

scopes, telescopes, computers or chemistry sets; of parents teach-

ing their children that hard work will get them out of poverty; of a

grandmother bringing tea to a student up late at night still doing

321

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

homework; of peer pressure not to do well in school because 'it

makes the other kids look bad'.

Here's a sampling - not an opinion poll, but representative

commentary - of other responses by parents:

• Do parents understand that you can't be a full human being if

you're ignorant?

Are there books at home?

How about a

magnifying glass?

Encyclopedia?

Do they encourage children

to learn?

• Parents have to teach patience and perseverance. The most

important gift they can give their children is the ethos of hard

work, but they can't just talk about it. The kids who learn to

work hard are the ones who see their parents work hard and

never give up. • My child is fascinated by science, but she doesn't get any in

school or on TV. • My child is identified as gifted, but the school has no program

for science enrichment. The guidance counselor told me to send

her to a private school, but we can't afford a private school. • There's enormous peer pressure; shy children don't want to

'stand out' by doing well in science. When my daughter reached

13 and 14, her life-long interest in science seemed to disappear. Parents also had much to say about teachers, and some of the

comments by teachers echoed the parents. For example, people

complained that teachers are trained how to teach but not what to

teach: that a large number of physics and chemistry teachers have

no degree in physics or chemistry and are 'uncomfortable and

incompetent' in teaching science; that teachers themselves have

too much science and maths anxiety; that they resist being asked

questions, or they answer, 'It's in the book. Look it up.' Some

complained that the biology teacher was a 'Creationist'; some

complained that he wasn't. Among other comments by or about

teachers:

• We are breeding a collection of half-wits. • It's easier to memorize than to think. Kids have to be taught to

think. 322

House on Fire

The teachers and curricula are 'dumbing down' to the lowest

common denominator. Why is the basketball coach teaching chemistry?

Teachers are required to spend much too much time on

discipline and on 'social curricula'.

There's no incentive to use

our own judgment. The 'brass' are always looking over our

shoulders. Abandon tenure in schools and colleges. Get rid of the

deadwood. Leave hiring and firing to principals, deans, and

superintendents. My joy in teaching was repeatedly thwarted by militaristic-type

principals. Teachers should be rewarded on the basis of performance -

especially student performance on standardized, nationwide

tests, and improvements in student performance on such tests

from one year to the next. Teachers are stifling our children's minds by telling them

they're not 'smart' enough - for example, for a career in

physics. Why not give the students a chance to take the course?

My son was promoted even though he's reading two grade

levels behind the rest of his class. The reason given was social,

not educational. He'll never catch up unless he's left back. Science should be required in all school (and especially high

school) curricula. It should be carefully coordinated with the

math courses the students are taking at the same time. Most homework is 'busy work' rather than something that

makes you think. 1 think Diane Ravitch [New Republic, 6 March 1989] tells it like

it is: 'As a female student at Hunter High School in New York

City recently explained, "1 make straight As, but 1 never talk

about it ...It's cool to do really badly. If you are interested in

school and you show it, you're a nerd" ...

The popular culture

- through television, movies, magazines, and videos - inces-

santly drums in the message to young women that it is better to

be popular, sexy, and "cool" than to be intelligent, accom-

plished, and outspoken ...'In 1986 researchers found a similar

anti-academic ethos among both high school and female students

in Washington, D. C. They noted that able students faced

323

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

strong peer pressure not to succeed in school. If they did well in

their studies, they might be accused of 'acting white'.

• Schools could easily give much more recognition and rewards

to kids who are outstanding in science and math. Why don't

they?

Why not special jackets with school letters?

Announce-

ments in assembly and the school newspaper and the local

press?

Local industry and social organizations to give special

awards?

This costs very little and could overcome peer pressure

not to excel. • Headstart is the single most effective ...

program for improv-

ing children's understanding of science and everything else. There were also many passionate, highly controversial opinions

expressed which, at the very least, give a sense of how deeply

people feel about the subject. Here's a smattering:

• All the smart kids are looking for the fast buck these days, so

they become lawyers, not scientists. • I don't want you to improve education. Then there'd be nobody

to drive the cabs. • The problem in science education is that God isn't sufficiently

honored. • The fundamentalist teaching that science is 'humanism' and is

to be mistrusted is the reason nobody understands science. Religions are afraid of the sceptical thinking at the heart of

science. Students are brainwashed not to accept scientific

thinking long before they get to college. • Science has discredited itself. It works for politicians. It makes

weapons, it lies about marijuana 'hazards', it ignores about the

dangers of agent orange, etc. • The public schools don't work. Abandon them. Let's have

private schools only. • We have let the advocates of permissiveness, fuzzy thinking

and rampant socialism destroy what was once a great educa-

tional system. • The school system has enough money. The problem is that the

white males, usually coaches, who run the schools would never

(and I mean never) hire an intellectual ...

They care more

324

House on Fire

about the football team than the curriculum and hire only

submediocre, flag-waving, God-loving automatons to teach. What kind of students can emerge from schools that oppress,

punish and neglect logical thinking?

• Release schools from the stranglehold of the ACLU [American

Civil Liberties Union], NEA [National Education Association],

and others engaged in the breakdown of the discipline and

competence in the schools. • I'm afraid you have no understanding of the country in which

you live. The people are incredibly ignorant and fearful. They

will not tolerate listening to any [new] idea ...

Don't you get

it?

The system survives only because it has an ignorant God-

fearing population. There's a reason lots of [educated people]

are unemployed. • I'm sometimes required to explain technological issues to

Congressional staffers. Believe me, there's a problem in science

education in this country. There is no single solution to the problem of illiteracy in science -

or maths, history, English, geography, and many of the other

skills which our society needs more of. The responsibilities are

broadly shared - parents, the voting public, local school boards,

the media, teachers, administrators, federal, state and logical

governments, plus, of course, the students themselves. At every

level teachers complain that the problem lies in earlier grades. And first-grade teachers can with justice despair of teaching

children with learning deficits because of malnutrition, or no

books in the home, or a culture of violence in which the leisure to

think is unavailable. I know very well from my own experience how much a child can

benefit from parents who have a little learning and are able to pass

it on. Even small improvements in the education, communication

skills and passion for learning in one generation might work much

larger improvements in the next. I think of this every time I hear a

complaint that school and collegiate 'standards' are falling, or that

a Bachelor's degree doesn't 'mean' what it once did. Dorothy Rich, an innovative teacher from Yonkers, New York,

believes that far more important than specific academic subjects is

325

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the honing of key skills which she lists as: 'confidence, persever-

ance, caring, teamwork, common sense and problem-solving.' To

which I'd add sceptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder. At the same time, children with special abilities and skills need

to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programmes for the 'gifted' are sometimes decried as

'elitism'.

Why aren't intensive practice sessions for varsity foot-

ball, baseball and basketball players and interschool competition

deemed elitism?

After all, only the most gifted athletes partici-

pate. There is a self-defeating double-standard at work here,

nationwide. The problems in public education in science and other subjects

run so deep that it's easy to despair and conclude that they can

never be fixed. And yet, there are institutions hidden away in big

cities and small towns that provide reason for hope, places that

strike the spark, awaken slumbering curiosities and ignite the

scientist that lives in all of us:

• The enormous metallic iron meteorite in front of you is as hill

of holes as a Swiss cheese. Gingerly you reach out to touch it. It

feels smooth and cold. The thought occurs to you that this is a

piece of another world. How did it get to Earth?

What

happened in space to make it so beat up?

• The display shows maps of eighteenth-century London, and the

spread of a horrifying cholera epidemic. People in one house

got it from people in neighbouring houses. By running the wave

of infection back, you can see where it started. It's like being a

detective. And when you pinpoint the origin you find it's a

place with open sewers. It occurs to you that there's a life and

death reason why modern cities have adequate sanitation. You

think of all those cities and towns and villages in the world that

don't. You get to thinking maybe there's a simpler, cheaper

way to do it ...

• You're crawling through a long, utterly black tunnel. There are

sudden turns, ups and downs. You go through a forest of

feathery things, beady things, big solid round things. You

imagine what it must be like to be blind. You think about how

326

House on Fire

little we rely on our sense of touch. In the dark and the quiet,

you're alone with your thoughts. Somehow the experience is

exhilarating ...

• You examine a detailed reconstruction of a procession of

priests climbing up one of the great ziggurats of Sumer, or a

gorgeously painted tomb in the Valley of the Kings in ancient

Egypt, or a house in ancient Rome, or a full-scale turn-of-the-

century street in small town America. You think of all those

civilizations, so different from yours, how if you'd been born

into them you would have thought them completely natural,

how you'd consider our society - if you had somehow been told

of it - as weird ...

• You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips

out on to the microscope stage. You look at the projected

image. The drop is full of life, strange beings swimming,

crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph

and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more

exotic than in any science-fiction movie ...

• Seated in the theatre, you find yourself inside the head of an

eleven-year-old boy. You look out through his eyes. You

encounter his typical daily crises: bullies, authoritarian adults,

crushes on girls. You hear the voice inside his head. You

witness his neurological and hormonal responses to his social

environment. And you get to wonder how you work on the

inside ...

• Following the simple instructions, you type in the commands. What will the Earth look like if we continue to burn coal, oil

and gas, and double the amount of carbon dioxide in the

atmosphere?

How much hotter will it be?

How much polar ice

will melt?

How much higher will the oceans be?

Why are we

pouring so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

What if

we put five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

Also, how could anybody know what the future climate will be

like?

It gets you thinking ...

In my childhood, I was taken to the American Museum of Natural

History in New York City. I was transfixed by the dioramas -

lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the

327

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

world. Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice; okapi in the bright

African veldt; a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest, in a

shaded forest glade; an American grizzly bear standing on his hind

legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye. These

were three-dimensional freeze-frames captured by some genie of

the lamp. Did the grizzly move just then?

Did the gorilla blink?

Might the genie return, lift the spell and permit this gorgeous

array of living things to go on with their lives as, jaws agape, I

watch?

Kids have an irresistible urge to touch. Back in those days, the

most commonly heard two words in museums were 'don't touch'.

Decades ago there was almost nothing 'hands-on' in museums of

science or natural history, not even a simulated tidal pool in which

you could pick up a crab and inspect it. The closest thing to an

interactive exhibit that I knew were the scales in the Hayden

Planetarium, one for each planet. Weighing a mere forty pounds

on Earth, there was something reassuring in the thought that if

only you lived on Jupiter, you would weigh a hundred pounds. But sadly, on the Moon you would weigh only seven pounds; on

the Moon it seemed you would hardly be there at all. Today, children are encouraged to touch, to poke, to run

through a branched contingency tree of questions and answers via

computer, or to make funny noises and see what the sound waves

look like. Even kids who don't get everything out of the exhibit,

or who don't even get the point of the exhibit, usually extract

something valuable. You go to these museums and you're struck

by the wide-eyed looks of wonder, by kids racing from exhibit to

exhibit, by the triumphant smiles of discovery. They're wildly

popular. Almost as many of us go to them each year as attend

professional baseball, basketball and football games combined. These exhibits do not replace instruction in school or at home,

but they awaken and excite. A great science museum inspires a

child to read a book, or take a course, or return to the museum

again to engage in a process of discovery - and, most important, to

learn the method of scientific thinking. Another glorious feature of many modern scientific museums is

a movie theatre showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some

cases the screen is ten storeys tall and wraps around you. The

328

House on Fire

Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, the most popular

museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of

the best of these films. To Fly brings a catch to my throat even

after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many

denominations witness Blue Planet and be converted on the spot

to the need to protect the Earth's environment. Not every exhibit and science museum is exemplary. A few still

are commercials for firms that have contributed money to pro-

mote their products - how an automobile engine works or the

'cleanliness' of one fossil fuel as compared to another. Too many

museums that claim to be about science are really about tech-

nology and medicine. Too many biology exhibits are still afraid to

mention the key idea of modern biology: evolution. Beings

'develop' or 'emerge', but never evolve. The absence of humans

from the deep fossil record is underplayed. We are shown nothing

of the anatomical and DNA near-identity between humans and

chimps or gorillas. Nothing is displayed on complex organic

molecules in space and on other worlds, nor about experiments

showing the stuff of life forming in enormous numbers in the

known atmospheres of other worlds and the presumptive atmos-

phere of the early Earth. A notable exception: the Natural

History Museum of The Smithsonian Institution once had an

unforgettable exhibit on evolution. It began with two cockroaches

in a modern kitchen with open cereal boxes and other food. Left

alone for a few weeks, the place was crowded with cockroaches,

buckets of them everywhere, competing for the little food now

available, and the long-term hereditary advantage that a slightly

better adapted cockroach might have over its competitors became

crystal clear. Also, too, many planetaria are still devoted to

picking out constellations rather than travelling to other worlds,

and depicting the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets; they

also have an insect-like projector always visible which robs the sky

of its reality. Perhaps the grandest museum exhibit can't be seen. It has no

home: George Awad is one of the leading architectural model

makers in America, specializing in skyscrapers. He is also a

dedicated student of astronomy who has made a spectacular

model of the Universe. Starting with a prosaic scene on Earth, and

329

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

following a scheme proposed by the designers Charles and Ray

Eames, he goes progressively by factors of ten to show us the

whole Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Universe. Every astronomical body is meticulously detailed. You can lose

yourself in them. It's one of the best tools I know of to explain the

scale and nature of the Universe to children. Isaac Asimov

described it as 'the most imaginative representation of the uni-

verse that I have ever seen, or could have conceived of. 1 could

have wandered through it for hours, seeing something new at

every turn that 1 hadn't observed before.' Versions of it ought to

be available throughout the country - for stirring the imagination,

for inspiration and for teaching. But instead, Mr Awad cannot

give this exhibit to any major science museum in the country. No

one is willing to devote to it the floor space needed. As I write, it

still sits forlornly, crated in storage. The population of my town, Ithaca, New York, doubles to a grand

total of about 50,000 when Cornell University and Ithaca College

are in session. Ethnically diverse, surrounded by farmland, it has

suffered, like so much of the northeast, the decline of its

nineteenth-century manufacturing base. Half the children at Bev-

erly J. Martin elementary school, which our daughter attended,

live below the poverty line. Those are the kids that two volunteer

science teachers, Debbie Levin and lima Levine, worried about

most. It didn't seem right that for some, the children of Cornell

faculty, say, even the sky wasn't the limit. For others there was no

access to the liberating power of science education. Starting in the

1960s, they made regular trips to the school, dragging their

portable library cart, laden with household chemicals and other

familiar items to convey something of the magic of science. They

dreamed of creating a place for kids to go, where they could get a

personal, hands-on feel for science. In 1983 Levin and Levine placed a small ad in our local paper

inviting the community to discuss the idea. Fifty people showed

up. From that group came the first board of directors of the

Sciencenter. Within a year they secured exhibition space in the

first floor of an unrented office building. When the owner found a

paying tenant, the tadpoles and litmus paper were packed up

House on Fire

again and carted off to a vacant shop. Moves to other empty shops followed until an Ithacan named

Bob Leathers, an architect world-renowned for designing innova-

tive community-built playgrounds, drew up and donated the plans

for a permanent Sciencenter. Gifts from local firms provided

enough money to purchase an abandoned lot from the city and

then hire an executive director, Charles Trautmann, a Cornell

civil engineer. He and Leathers travelled to the annual meeting of

the National Association of Homebuilders in Atlanta. Trautmann

relates how they told the story 'of a community eager to take

responsibility for the education of its youth and secured donations

of many key items such as windows, skylights and lumber'.

Before they could start building, some of the old pumphouse on

the site had to be torn down. Members of a Cornell fraternity

were enlisted. With hardhats and sledge-hammers, they demol-

ished the place joyfully. 'This is the kind of thing,' they said, 'we

usually get into trouble for doing.' In two days, they carted away

200 tons of rubble. What followed were images straight out of an America that

many of us fear has vanished. In the tradition of pioneer barnrais-

ing, members of the community - bricklayers, doctors, carpen-

ters, university professors, plumbers, farmers, the very young and

the very old - all rolled up their sleeves to build the Sciencenter. 'The continuous seven-days-a-week schedule was maintained,'

says Trautmann, 'so that anyone would be able to help anytime. Everyone was given a job. Experienced volunteers built stairs,

laid carpet and tile, and trimmed windows. Others painted, nailed

and carried supplies.' Some 2,200 townspeople donated more than

40,000 hours. Roughly ten per cent of the construction work was

performed by people convicted of minor offences; they preferred

to do something for the community than to sit idle in jail. Ten

months later, Ithaca had the only community-built science

museum in the world. Among the seventy-five interactive exhibits emphasizing both

the processes and principles of science are: the Magicam, a

microscope that visitors can use to view on a colour monitor and

then photograph any object at 40 times magnification; the world's

only public connection to the satellite-based National Lightning

331

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Detection Network; a 6 x 9 ft walk-in camera; a fossil pit seeded

with local shale where visitors hunt for fossils from 380 million

years ago and keep their finds; an eight-foot-long boa constrictor

named 'Spot'; and a dazzling array of other experiments, comput-

ers and activities. Levin and Levine can still be found there, full-time volunteers

teaching the citizens and scientists of the future. The DeWitt

Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund supports and extends their dream

of reaching kids who would ordinarily be denied their scientific

birthright. Through the Fund's nationwide Youth-ALIVE pro-

gramme, Ithaca teenagers receive intensive mentoring to develop

their science, conflict resolution and employment skills. Levin and Levine thought science should belong to everyone. Their community agreed and made a commitment to realize that

dream. In the Sciencenter's first year, 55,000 people came from all

fifty states and sixty countries. Not bad for a small town. It makes

you wonder what else we could do if we worked together for a

better future for our kids. 332

The Path to Freedom*

We must not believe the many, who say that only free

people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe

the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. Epictetus, Roman philosopher

and former slave, Discourses

F ederick Bailey was a slave. As a boy in Maryland in the

1820s, he had no mother or father to look after him. ('It is a

common custom,' he later wrote, 'to part children from their

mothers ...

before the child has reached its twelfth month.') He

was one of countless millions of slave children whose realistic

prospects for a hopeful life were nil. What Bailey witnessed and experienced in his growing up

marked him forever: 'I have often been awakened at the dawn

of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of

mine, whom [the overseer] used to tie up to a joist, and whip

upon her naked back till she was literally covered with

blood ...

From the rising till the going down of the sun he was

cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the

field ...

He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiend-

ish barbarity.'

The slaves had drummed into them, from plantation and pulpit

* Written with Ann Druyan. 333

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

alike, from courthouse and statehouse, the notion that they were

hereditary inferiors, that God intended them for their misery. The

Holy Bible, as countless passages confirmed, condoned slavery. In

these ways the 'peculiar institution' maintained itself despite its

monstrous nature - something even its practitioners must have

glimpsed. There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiter-

ate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read

were severely punished. '[To] make a contented slave,' Bailey

later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is

necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as

possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the

slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This

is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subver-

sive, in an unjust society. So now picture Frederick Bailey in 1828 - a 10-year-old

African-American child, enslaved, with no legal rights of any

kind, long since torn from his mother's arms, sold away from the

tattered remnants of his extended family as if he were a calf or a

pony, conveyed to an unknown household in the strange city of

Baltimore, and condemned to a life of drudgery with no prospect

of reprieve. Bailey was sent to work for Capt Hugh Auld and his wife,

Sophia, moving from plantation to urban bustle, from field

work to housework. In this new environment, he came every

day upon letters, books and people who could read. He

discovered what he called 'this mystery' of reading: there was a

connection between the letters on the page and the movement

of the reader's lips, a nearly one-to-one correlation between the

black squiggles and the sounds uttered. Surreptitiously, he

studied from young Tommy Auld's Webster’s Spelling Book. He memorized the letters of the alphabet. He tried to under-

stand the sounds they stood for. Eventually, he asked Sophia

Auld to help him learn. Impressed with the intelligence and

dedication of the boy, and perhaps ignorant of the prohibitions,

she complied. By the time Frederick was spelling words of three and four

letters, Captain Auld discovered what was going on. Furious,

334

The Path to Freedom

he ordered Sophia to stop. In Frederick's presence he

explained:

A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master - to do

as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the

world. Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there would

be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. Auld chastised Sophia in this way as if Frederick Bailey were not

there in the room with them, or as if he were a block of wood. But Auld had revealed to Bailey the great secret: '1 now

understood ...

the white man's power to enslave the black man. From that moment, 1 understood the pathway from slavery to

freedom.'

Without further help from the now reticent and intimidated

Sophia Auld, Frederick found ways to continue learning how to

read, including buttonholing white schoolchildren on the streets. Then he began teaching his fellow slaves: 'Their minds had been

starved ...

They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught

them, because it was the delight of my soul.'

With his knowledge of reading playing a key role in his escape,

Bailey fled to New England, where slavery was illegal and black

people were free. He changed his name to Frederick Douglass

(after a character in Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake), eluded

the bounty hunters who tracked down escaped slaves, and became

one of the greatest orators, writers and political leaders in

American history. All his life, he understood that literacy had

been the way out. For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could

read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except

for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed

on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over

tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be

distorted and lost. Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit

us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of

our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just

335

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

those in power; to contemplate - with the best teachers - the

insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds

that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our

history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we

are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many

times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are

key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic

society. By some standards, African-Americans have made enormous

strides in literacy since Emancipation. In 1860, it is estimated,

only about five per cent of African-Americans could read and

write. By 1890, 39 percent were judged literate by the US census;

and by 1969, 96 per cent. Between 1940 and 1992, the fraction of

African-Americans who had completed high school soared from

seven per cent to 82 per cent. But fair questions can be asked

about the quality of that education, and the standards of literacy

tested. These questions apply to every ethnic group. A national survey done for the US Department of Education

paints a picture of a country with more than 40 million barely

literate adults. Other estimates are much worse. The literacy of

young adults has slipped dramatically in the last decade. Only

three to four per cent of the population scores at the highest of

five reading levels (essentially everybody in this group has gone to

college).

The vast majority have no idea how bad their reading is. Only four per cent of those at the highest reading level are in

poverty, but 43 per cent of those at the lowest reading level are. Although it's not the only factor, of course, in general the better

you read, the more you make - an average of about $12,000 a year

at the lowest of these reading levels, and about $34,000 a year at

the highest. It looks to be a necessary if not a sufficient condition

for making money. And you're much more likely to be in prison if

you're illiterate or barely literate. (In evaluating these facts, we

must be careful not to improperly deduce causation from correla-

tion.)

Also, marginally literate poorer people tend not to understand

ballot initiatives that might help them and their children, and in

stunningly disproportionate numbers fail to vote at all. This works

336

The Path to Freedom

to undermine democracy at its roots. If Frederick Douglass as an enslaved child could teach himself

into literacy and greatness, why should anyone in our more

enlightened day and age remain unable to read?

Well, it's not that

simple, in part because few of us are as brilliant and courageous as

Frederick Douglass, but for other important reasons as well. If you grow up in a household where there are books, where

you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins

read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read, if no one

close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's

worth the effort?

If the quality of education available to you is

inadequate, if you're taught rote memorization rather than how to

think, if the content of what you're first given to read comes from

a nearly alien culture, literacy can be a rocky road. You have to internalize, so they're second nature, dozens of

upper- and lower-case letters, symbols and punctuation marks;

memorize thousands of dumb spellings on a word-by-word basis;

and conform to a range of rigid and arbitrary rules of grammar. If

you're preoccupied by the absence of basic family support or

dropped into a roiling sea of anger, neglect, exploitation, danger

and self-hatred, you might well conclude that reading takes too

much work and just isn't worth the trouble. If you're repeatedly

given the message that you're too stupid to learn (or, the

functional equivalent, too cool to learn), and if there's no one

there to contradict it, you might very well buy this pernicious

advice. There are always some children - like Frederick Bailey -

who beat the odds. Too many don't. But, beyond all this, there's a particularly insidious way in

which, if you're poor, you may have another strike against you in

your effort to read - and even to think. Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding

poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our

grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence

farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read

for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and

the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York

Public Schools. They followed prescriptions on childhood nutri-

tion recommended by the US Department of Agriculture as if

337

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

they had been handed down from Mount Sinai. Our government

book on children's health had been repeatedly taped together as

its pages fell out. The corners were tattered. Key advice was

underlined. It was consulted in every medical crisis. For a while,

my parents gave up smoking - one of the few pleasures available

to them in the Depression years - so that their infant could have

vitamin and mineral supplements. Ann and I were very lucky. Recent research shows that many children without enough to

eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn

('cognitive impairment').

Children don't have to be starving for

this to happen. Even mild undernourishment, the kind most

common among poor people in America, can do it. This can

happen before the baby is born (if the mother isn't eating

enough), in infancy or in childhood. When there isn't enough

food, the body has to decide how to invest the limited foodstuffs

available. Survival comes first. Growth comes second. In this

nutritional triage, the body seems obliged to rank learning last. Better to be stupid and alive, it judges, than smart and dead. Instead of showing an enthusiasm, a zest for learning as most

healthy youngsters do, the undernourished child becomes bored,

apathetic, unresponsive. More severe malnutrition leads to lower

birth weights and, in its most extreme forms, smaller brains. However, even a child who looks perfectly healthy but has not

enough iron, say, suffers an immediate decline in the ability to

concentrate. Iron-deficiency anaemia may affect as much as a

quarter of all low-income children in America; it attacks the

child's attention span and memory, and may have consequences

reaching well into adulthood. What once was considered relatively mild undernutrition is now

understood to be potentially associated with lifelong cognitive

impairment. Children who are undernourished even on a short-

term basis have a diminished capacity to learn. And millions of

American children go hungry every week. Lead poisoning, which

is endemic in inner cities, also causes serious learning deficits. By

many criteria, the prevalence of poverty in America has been

steadily increasing since the early 1980s. Almost a quarter of

American children now live in poverty - the highest rate of

childhood poverty in the industrialized world. According to one

338

The Path to Freedom

estimate, between 1980 and 1985 alone more American infants

and children died of preventable disease, malnutrition and other

consequences of dire poverty than all American battle deaths

during the Vietnam War. Some programmes wisely instituted on the Federal or state level

in America deal with malnutrition. The Special Supplemental

Food Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), school

breakfast and lunch programmes, the Summer Food Service

Program - all have been shown to work, although they do not get

to all the people who need them. So rich a country is well able to

provide enough food for all its children. Some deleterious effects of undernutrition can be undone;

iron-repletion therapy, for example, can repair some conse-

quences of iron-deficiency anaemia. But not all of the damage is

reversible. Dyslexia - various disorders that impair reading skills -

may affect fifteen per cent of us or more, rich and poor alike. Its

causes (whether biological, psychological or environmental) are

often undetermined. But methods now exist to help many with

dyslexia to learn to read. No one should be unable to learn to read because education is

unavailable. But there are many schools in America in which

reading is taught as a tedious and reluctant excursion into the

hieroglyphics of an unknown civilization, and many classrooms in

which not a single book can be found. Sadly, the demand for adult

literacy classes far outweighs the supply. High-quality early educa-

tion programmes such as Head Start can be enormously successful

in preparing children for reading. But Head Start reaches only a

third to a quarter of eligible pre-schoolers, many of its pro-

grammes have been enfeebled by cuts in funding, and it and the

nutrition programmes mentioned are under renewed Congres-

sional attack as I write. Head Start is criticized in a 1994 book called The Bell Cui~ve by

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Their argument has been

characterized by Gerald Coles of the University of Rochester:

First, inadequately fund a program for poor children, then

deny whatever success is achieved in the face of over-

whelming obstacles, and finally conclude that the program

339

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

must be eliminated because the children are intellectually

inferior. The book, which received surprisingly respectful attention from

the media, concludes that there is an irreducible hereditary gap

between blacks and whites - about 10 or 15 points on IQ tests. In a

review, the psychologist Leon J. Kamin concludes that '[t]he

authors repeatedly fail to distinguish between correlation and

causation' - one of the fallacies of our baloney detection kit. The National Center for Family Literacy, based in Louisville,

Kentucky, has been implementing programmes aimed at low-

income families to teach both children and their parents to read. It

works like this: the child, 3 to 4 years old, attends school three

days a week along with a parent, or possibly a grandparent or

guardian. While the grown-up spends the morning learning basic

academic skills, the child is in a preschool class. Parent and child

meet for lunch and then 'learn how to learn together' for the rest

of the afternoon. A follow-up study of fourteen such programmes in three states

revealed: (1) although all of the children had been designated as

being at risk for school failure as pre-schoolers, only ten per cent

were still rated at risk by their current elementary school teachers. (2) More than 90 per cent were considered by their current

elementary school teachers as motivated to learn. (3) Not one of

the children had to repeat any grade in elementary school. The growth of the parents was no less dramatic. When asked to

describe how their lives had changed as a result of the family

literacy programme, typical responses described improved self-

confidence (nearly every participant) and self-control, passing

high-school equivalency exams, admission to college, new jobs,

and much better relations with their children. The children are

described as more attentive to parents, eager to learn and - in

some cases for the first time - hopeful about the future. Such

programmes could also be used in later grades for teaching

mathematics, science and much else. Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy,

learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They

340

The Path to Freedom

can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of

their subjects. The British Royal Governor of the Colony of

Virginia wrote in 1671:

I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope

we shall not have [them] these [next] hundred years; for

learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into

the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against

the best government. God keep us from both!

But the American colonists, understanding where liberty lies,

would have none of this. In its early years, the United States boasted one of the highest -

perhaps the highest - literacy rates in the world. (Of course, slaves

and women didn't count in those days.) As early as 1635, there

had been public schools in Massachusetts, and by 1647 compul-

sory education in all townships there of more than fifty 'house-

holds'.

By the next century and a half, educational democracy had

spread all over the country. Political theorists came from other

countries to witness this national wonder: vast numbers of ordi-

nary working people who could read and write. The American

devotion to education for all propelled discovery and invention, a

vigorous democratic process, and an upward mobility that

pumped the nation's economic vitality. Today, the United States is not the world leader in literacy. Many

of those judged literate are unable to read and understand very

simple material - much less a sixth-grade textbook, an instruction

manual, a bus schedule, a mortgage statement, or a ballot initiative. And the sixth-grade textbooks of today are much less challenging

than those of a few decades ago, while the literacy requirements at

the workplace have become more demanding than ever before. The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-

esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that

grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear

the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery

experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is

341

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

severe - the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost

in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost

productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help

solve the dilemmas besetting us. Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery

to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of

freedom. But reading is still the path. Frederick Douglass After the Escape

W hen he was barely twenty, he ran away to freedom. Settling in New Bedford with his bride, Anna Murray,

he worked as a common labourer. Four years later Douglass

was invited to address a meeting. By that time, in the North,

it was not unusual to hear the great orators of the day - the

white ones, that is - railing against slavery. But even many of

those opposed to slavery thought of the slaves themselves as

somehow less than human. On the night of 16 August 1841,

on the small island of Nantucket, the members of the mostly

Quaker Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society leaned forward

in their chairs to hear something new: a voice raised in

opposition to slavery by someone who knew it from bitter

personal experience. His very appearance and demeanour destroyed the then-

prevalent myth of the 'natural servility' of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was

one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history. William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat

in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech. Garrison

rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with

a shouted question: 'Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel

personal, or a man?'

'A man!

A man!' the audience roared back as one voice. 342

The Path to Freedom

'Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?' called

out Garrison. 'No!

No!' shouted the audience. And even louder, Garrison asked: 'Shall such a man ever be

sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?'

And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out 'No!

No!

No!'

He never did return to slavery. Instead, as an author, editor

and publisher of journals, as a speaker in America and abroad,

and as the first African-American to occupy a high advisory

position in the US government, he spent the rest of his life

fighting for human rights. During the Civil War, he was a

consultant to President Lincoln. Douglass successfully advo-

cated the arming of ex-slaves to fight for the North, Federal

retaliation against Confederate prisoners-of-war for Confeder-

ate summary execution of captured African-American soldiers,

and freedom for the slaves as a principal objective of the war. Many of his opinions were scathing, and ill-designed to win

him friends in high places:

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the

South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes - a

justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of

the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under

which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal

deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were 1 to be again reduced to the chains of slavery,

next to that enslavement, I should regard being the

slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that

could befall me ...

1 ...

hate the corrupt, slavehold-

ing, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and

hypocritical Christianity of this land. Compared to some of the religiously inspired racist rhetoric of

that time and later, Douglass's comments do not seem hyper-

bolic. 'Slavery is of God' they used to say in antebellum times. As one of many loathsome post-Civil War examples, Charles

Carroll's The Negro a Beast (American Book and Bible House)

taught its pious readers that 'the Bible and Divine Revelation,

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

as well as reason, all teach that the Negro is not human'.

more modern times, some racists still reject the plain testimony

written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but

nearly indistinguishable with appeals to the Bible as an 'impreg-

nable bulwark' against even examining the evidence. It is worth noting, though, that much of the abolitionist

ferment arose out of Christian, especially Quaker, communi-

ties of the North; that the traditional black Southern Chris-

tian churches played a key role in the historic American civil

rights struggle of the 1960s; and that many of its leaders -

most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. - were ministers

ordained in those churches. Douglass addressed the white community in these words:

[Slavery] fetters your progress, it is the enemy of

improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters

pride; it breeds indolence; it promotes vice; it shelters

crime; it is a curse of the earth that supports it, and yet

you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your

hopes. In 1843, on a speaking tour of Ireland shortly before the potato

famine, he was moved by the dire poverty there to write home

to Garrison: 'I see much here to remind me of my former

condition, and I confess 1 should be ashamed to lift my voice

against American slavery, but that 1 know the cause of human-

ity is one the world over.' He was outspoken in opposition to the

policy of extermination of the Native Americans. And in 1848,

at the Seneca Falls Convention, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton*

had the nerve to call for an effort to secure the vote for women,

he was the only man of any ethnic group to stand in support. On the night of 20 February 1895 - more than thirty years

after Emancipation - following an appearance at a women's

rights rally with Susan B. Anthony, he collapsed and died, a

true American hero. * Years later, she wrote of the Bible in words reminiscent of Douglass's: 'I know

of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women.'

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Significance Junkies

We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder

whether delusion is not more consoling. Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

I hope no one will consider me unduly cynical if 1 assert that a

good first-order model of how commercial and public television

programming work is simply this: money is everything. In prime

time, a single rating point difference is worth millions of dollars in

advertising. Especially since the early 1980s, television has

become almost entirely profit-motivated. You can see this, say, in

the decline of network news and news specials, or in the pathetic

evasions that the major networks offered to circumvent a Federal

Communications Commission mandate that they improve the

level of children's programming. (For example, educational vir-

tues were asserted for a cartoon series that systematically misrep-

resents the technology and lifestyles of our Pleistocene ancestors,

and that portrays dinosaurs as pets.) As 1 write, public television

in America is in real danger of losing government support, and the

content of commercial programming is in the course of a steep,

long-term dumbing down. In this perspective, fighting for more real science on television

seems naive and forlorn. But owners of networks and television

producers have children and grandchildren about whose future

they rightly worry. They must feel some responsibility for the

345

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

future of their nation. There is evidence that science programming

can be successful, and that people hunger for more of it. 1 remain

hopeful that sooner or later we'll see real science skilfully and

appealingly presented as regular fare on major network television

worldwide. Baseball and soccer have Aztec antecedents. Football is a thinly

disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were

human. Lacrosse is an ancient Native American game, and

hockey is related to it. But basketball is new. We've been making

movies longer than we've been playing basketball. At first, they didn't think to make a hole in the peach basket so

the ball could be retrieved without climbing a flight of stairs. But

in the brief time since then, the game has evolved. In the hands

mainly of African-American players, basketball has become - at

its best - the paramount synthesis in sport of intelligence, preci-

sion, courage, audacity, anticipation, artifice, teamwork, elegance

and grace. Five-foot-three-inch Muggsy Bogues negotiates a forest of

giants: Michael Jordan sails in from some outer darkness

beyond the free-throw line; Larry Bird threads a precise,

no-look pass; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unleashes a skyhook. This

is not fundamentally a contact sport like football. It's a game of

finesse. The full-court press, passes out of the double-team, the

pick-and-roll, cutting off the passing lanes, a tip-in from a

high-flying forward soaring from out of nowhere all constitute a

coordination of intellect and athleticism, a harmony of mind

and body. It's not surprising that the game has caught fire in

America. Ever since National Basketball Association games became a

television staple, it's seemed to me that it could be used to teach

science and mathematics. To appreciate a free-throw average of

0.926, you must know something about converting fractions into

decimals. A lay-up is Newton's first law of motion in action. Every

shot represents the launching of a basketball on a parabolic arc, a

curve determined by the same gravitational physics that specifies

the flight of a ballistic missile, or the Earth orbiting the Sun, or a

spacecraft on its rendezvous with some distant world. The centre

Significance Junkies

of mass of the player's body during a slam dunk is briefly in orbit

about the centre of the Earth. To get the ball in the basket, you must loft it at exactly the right

speed; a one per cent error and gravity will make you look bad. Three-point shooters, whether they know it or not, compensate

for aerodynamic drag. Each successive bounce of a dropped

basketball is nearer to the ground because of the Second Law of

Thermodynamics. Daryl Dawkins or Shaquille O'Neal shattering

a backboard is an opportunity for teaching - among some other

things - the propagation of shock waves. A spin shot off the glass

from under the backboard goes in because of the conservation of

angular momentum. It's an infraction of the rules to touch the

basketball in 'the cylinder' above the basket; we're now talking

about a key mathematical idea: generating n-dimensional objects

by moving (n - l)-dimensional objects. In the classroom, in newspapers and on television, why aren't

we using sports to teach science?

When 1 was growing up, my father would bring home a daily

paper and consume (often with great gusto) the baseball box

scores. There they were, to me dry as dust, with obscure abbrevia-

tions (W, SS, K, W-L, AB, RBI), but they spoke to him. Newspapers everywhere printed them. I figured maybe they

weren't too hard for me. Eventually 1 too got caught up in the

world of baseball statistics. (I know it helped me in learning

decimals, and I still cringe a little when I hear, usually at the very

beginning of the baseball season, that someone's 'batting a

thousand'.

But 1.000 is not 1,000.

The lucky player is batting one.)

Or take a look at the financial pages. Any introductory mate-

rial?

Explanatory footnotes?

Definitions of abbreviations?

Almost none. It's sink or swim. Look at those acres of statistics!

Yet people voluntarily read the stuff. It's not beyond their ability. It's only a matter of motivation. Why can't we do the same with

maths, science and technology?

In every sport the players seem to perform in streaks. In basket-

ball it's called the hot hand. You can do no wrong. I remember a

play-off game in which Michael Jordan, not ordinarily a superb

long-range shooter, was effortlessly making so many consecutive

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

three-point baskets from all over the floor that he shrugged his

shoulders in amazement at himself. In contrast, there are times

when you're cold, when nothing goes in. When a player is in the

groove he seems to be tapping into some mysterious power, and

when ice-cold he's under some kind of jinx or spell. But this is

magical, not scientific thinking. Streakiness, far from being remarkable, is expected, even for

random events. What would be amazing would be no streaks. If 1

flip a penny ten times in a row, 1 might get this sequence of heads

and tails: HHHTHTHHHH. Eight heads out of ten, and four

in a row!

Was 1 exercising some psychokinetic control over my

penny?

Was I in a heads groove?

It looks much too regular to be

due to chance. But then 1 remember that I was flipping before and after 1 got

this run of heads, that it's embedded in a much longer and less

interesting sequence: HHTHTTHHHTHTHHHHTHT

T H T H T T. If I'm permitted to pay attention to some results and

ignore others, I'll always be able to 'prove' there's something

exceptional about my streak. This is one of the fallacies in the

baloney detection kit, the enumeration of favourable circum-

stances. We remember the hits and forget the misses. If your

ordinary field goal shooting percentage is 50 per cent and you

can't improve your statistics by an effort of will, you're exactly as

likely to have a hot hand in basketball as I am in coin-flipping. As

often as I get eight out of ten heads, you'll get eight out of ten

baskets. Basketball can teach something about probability and

statistics, as well as critical thinking. An investigation by my colleague Tom Gilovich, professor of

psychology at Cornell, shows persuasively that our ordinary

understanding of the basketball streak is a misperception. Gilovich studied whether shots made by NBA players tend to

cluster more than you'd expect by chance. After making one or

two or three baskets, players were no more likely to succeed than

after a missed basket. This was true for the great and the

near-great, not only for field goals but for free throws - where

there's no hand in your face. (Of course some attenuation of

shooting streaks can be attributed to increased attention by the

defence to the player with the 'hot hand'.) In baseball, there's the

348

Significance Junkies

related but contrary myth that someone batting below his average

is 'due' to make a hit. This is no more true than that a few heads in

a row makes the chance of flipping tails next time anything other

than 50 per cent. If there are streaks beyond what you'd expect

statistically, they're hard to find. But somehow this doesn't satisfy. It doesn't feel true. Ask the

players, or the coaches, or the fans. We seek meaning, even in

random numbers. We're significance junkies. When the cel-

ebrated coach Red Auerbach heard of Gilovich's study, his

response was: 'Who is this guy?

So he makes a study. I couldn't

care less.' And you know exactly how he feels. But if basketball

streaks don't show up more often than sequences of heads or tails,

there's nothing magical about them. Does this reduce players to

mere marionettes, manipulated by the laws of chance?

Certainly

not. Their average shooting percentages are a true reflection of

their personal skills. This is only about the frequency and duration

of streaks. Of course, it's much more fun to think that the gods have

touched the player who's on a streak and scorned the one with a

cold hand. So what?

What's the harm of a little mystification?

sure beats boring statistical analyses. In basketball, in sports, no

harm. But as a habitual way of thinking, it gets us into trouble in

some of the other games we like to play. 'Scientist, yes; mad, no' giggles the mad scientist on 'Gilligan's

Island' as he adjusts the electronic device that permits him to

control the minds of others for his own nefarious purpose. 'I'm sorry, Dr Nerdnik, the people of Earth will not appreciate

being shrunk to three inches high, even if it will save room and

energy ...' The cartoon superhero is patiently explaining an

ethical dilemma to the typical scientist portrayed on Saturday-

morning children's television. Many of these so-called scientists - judging from the pro-

grammes I've seen (and plausible inference about ones I

haven't, such as the Mad Scientist's 'Toon Club) - are moral

cripples driven by a lust for power or endowed with a spectacu-

lar insensitivity to the feelings of others. The message conveyed

to the moppet audience is that science is dangerous and

349

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

scientists worse than weird: they're crazed. The applications of science, of course, can be dangerous, and,

as I've tried to stress, virtually every major technological advance

in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone

tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous. These advances can be used by ignorant or evil people for

dangerous purposes or by wise and good people for the benefit of

the human species. But only one side of the ambiguity ever seems

to be presented in these offerings to our children. Where in these programmes are the joys of science?

The

delights in discovering how the universe is put together?

The

exhilaration in knowing a deep thing well?

What about the crucial

contributions that science and technology have made to human

welfare, or the billions of lives saved or made possible by medical

and agricultural technology?

(In fairness, though, I should men-

tion that the Professor in 'Gilligan's Island' often used his knowledge

of science to solve practical problems for the castaways.)

We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face

can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a

deep understanding of science and technology. Modern society

desperately needs the finest minds available to devise solutions to

these problems. I do not think that many gifted youngsters will be

encouraged towards a career in science or engineering by watch-

ing Saturday-morning television - or much of the rest of the

available American video menu. Over the years, a profusion of credulous, uncritical TV series

and 'specials' - on ESP, channelling, the Bermuda Triangle,

UFOs, ancient astronauts, Big Foot, and the like - have been

spawned. The style-setting series 'In Search of ...' begins with a

disclaimer disavowing any responsibility to present a balanced

view of the subject. You can see a thirst for wonder here

untempered by even rudimentary scientific scepticism. Pretty

much whatever anyone says on camera is true. The idea that there

might be alternative explanations to be decided among by the

weight of evidence never surfaces. The same is true of 'Sightings'

and 'Unsolved Mysteries' - in which, as the very title suggests,

prosaic solutions are unwelcome - and innumerable other clones. 'In Search of ...' frequently takes an intrinsically interesting

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Significance Junkies

subject and systematically distorts the evidence. If there is a

mundane scientific explanation and one which requires the most

extravagant paranormal or psychic explanation, you can be sure

which will be highlighted. An almost random example: an author

is presented who argues that a major planet lies beyond Pluto. His

evidence is cylinder seals from ancient Sumer, carved long before

the invention of the telescope. His views are increasingly accepted

by professional astronomers, he says. Not a word is mentioned of

the failure of astronomers - studying the motions of Neptune,

Pluto and the four spacecraft beyond - to find a trace of the

alleged planet. The graphics are indiscriminate. When an offscreen narrator is

talking about dinosaurs, we see a woolly mammoth. The narrator

describes a hovercraft; the screen shows a shuttle liftoff. We hear

about lakes and flood plains, but are shown mountains. It doesn't

matter. The visuals are as indifferent to the facts as is the voice-over. A series called 'The X Files', which pays lip-service to sceptical

examination of the paranormal, is skewed heavily towards the

reality of alien abductions, strange powers and government com-

plicity in covering up just about everything interesting. Almost

never does the paranormal claim turn out to be a hoax or a

psychological aberration or a misunderstanding of the natural

world. Much closer to reality, as well as a much greater public

service, would be an adult series ('Scooby Doo' does it for children)

in which paranormal claims are systematically investigated and

every case is found to be explicable in prosaic terms. The dramatic

tension would be in uncovering how misapprehension and hoax

could generate apparently genuine paranormal phenomena. Per-

haps one of the investigators would always be disappointed, hoping

that next time an unambiguously paranormal case will survive

sceptical scrutiny. Other shortcomings are evident in television science fiction

programming. 'Star Trek', for example, despite its charm and

strong international and interspecies perspective, often ignores

the most elementary scientific facts. The idea that Mr Spock could

be a cross between a human being and a life form independently

evolved on the planet Vulcan is genetically far less probable than a

successful cross of a man and an artichoke. The idea does,

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

however, provide a precedent in popular culture for the

extraterrestrial/human hybrids that later became so central a

component of the alien abduction story. There must be dozens of

alien species on the various 'Star Trek' TV series and movies. Almost all we spend any time with are minor variants of humans. This is driven by economic necessity, costing only an actor and a

latex mask, but it flies in the face of the stochastic nature of the

evolutionary process. If there are aliens, almost all of them 1 think

will look devastatingly less human than Klingons and Romulans

(and be at widely different levels of technology).

'Star Trek'

doesn't come to grips with evolution. In many TV programmes and films, even the casual science -

the throwaway lines that are not essential to a plot already

innocent of science - is done incompetently. It costs very little to

hire a graduate student to read the script for scientific accuracy. But, so far as 1 can tell, this is almost never done. As a result we

have such howlers as 'parsec' mentioned as a unit of speed instead

of distance in the - in many other ways exemplary - film Star

Wars, if such things were done with a modicum of care, they

might even improve the plot; certainly, they might help convey a

little science to a mass audience. There's a great deal of pseudoscience for the gullible on TV,

a fair amount of medicine and technology, but hardly any

science, especially on the big commercial networks, whose

executives tend to think that science programming means

ratings declines and lost profits, and nothing else matters. There are network employees with the title 'Science Corre-

spondent', and an occasional news feature said to be devoted to

science. But we almost never hear any science from them, just

medicine and technology. In all the networks, 1 doubt if there's

a single employee whose job it is to read each week's issue of

Nature or Science to see if anything newsworthy has been

discovered. When the Nobel Prizes in science are announced

each fall, there's a superb news 'hook' for science: a chance to

explain what the prizes were given for. But, almost always, all

we hear is something like '...

may one day lead to a cure for

cancer. Today in Belgrade ...'

How much science is there on the radio or television talk shows,

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Significance Junkies

or on those dreary Sunday morning programmes in which middle-

aged white people sit around agreeing with each other?

When is

the last time you heard an intelligent comment on science by a

President of the United States?

Why in all America is there no TV

drama that has as its hero someone devoted to figuring out how

the Universe works?

When a highly publicized murder trial has

everyone casually mentioning DNA testing, where are the prime-

time network specials devoted to nucleic acids and heredity?

can't even recall seeing an accurate and comprehensible descrip-

tion on television of how television works. By far the most effective means of raising interest in science is

television. But this enormously powerful medium is doing close to

nothing to convey the joys and methods of science, while its 'mad

scientist' engine continues to huff and puff away. In American polls in the early 1990s, two-thirds of all adults had

no idea what the 'information superhighway' was; 42 per cent

didn't know where Japan is; and 38 per cent were ignorant of the

term 'holocaust'.

But the proportion was in the high 90s who had

heard of the Menendez, Bobbit and O. J. Simpson criminal cases;

99 per cent had heard that the singer Michael Jackson had

allegedly sexually molested a boy. The United States may be the

best-entertained nation on Earth, but a steep price is being paid. Surveys in Canada and the United States in the same period

show that television viewers wish there were more science pro-

gramming. In North America, often there's a good science

programme in the 'Nova' series of the Public Broadcasting

System, and occasionally on the Discovery or Learning Channels,

or the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Bill Nye's 'The Science

Guy' programmes for young children on PBS are fast-paced,

feature arresting graphics, range over many realms of science, and

sometimes even illuminate the process of discovery. But the depth

of public interest in science engrossingly and accurately presented

- to say nothing of the immense good that would result from

better public understanding of science - is not yet reflected in

network programming. How could we put more science on television?

Here are some

possibilities:

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• The wonders and methods of science routinely presented on

news and talk programmes. There's real human drama in the

process of discovery. • A series called 'Solved Mysteries', in which tremulous specula-

tions have rational resolutions, including puzzling cases in

forensic medicine and epidemiology. • 'Ring My Bells Again' - a series in which we relive the media

and the public falling hook, line and sinker for a coordinated

government lie. The first two episodes might be the Bay of

Tonkin 'incident' and the systematic irradiation of unsuspecting

and unprotected American civilians and military personnel in

the alleged requirements of 'national defence' following 1945.

• A separate series on fundamental misunderstandings and mis-

takes made by famous scientists, national leaders and religious

figures. • Regular exposes of pernicious pseudoscience, and audience-

participation 'how-to' programmes: how to bend spoons, read

minds, appear to foretell the future, perform psychic surgery,

do cold reads, and press the TV viewers' personal buttons. How we're bamboozled: learn by doing. • A state-of-the-art computer graphics facility to prepare in advance

scientific visuals for a wide range of news contingencies. • A set of inexpensive televised debates, each perhaps an hour

long, with a computer graphics budget for each side provided

by the producers, rigorous standards of evidence required by

the moderator, and the widest range of topics broached. They

could address issues where the scientific evidence is over-

whelming, as on the matter of the shape of the Earth; contro-

versial matters where the answer is less clear, such as the

survival of one's personality after death, or abortion, or animal

rights, or genetic engineering; or any of the presumptive

pseudosciences mentioned in this book. There is a pressing national need for more public knowledge of

science. Television cannot provide it all by itself. But if we want to

make short-term improvements in the understanding of science,

television is the place to start. 354

Maxwell and The Nerds

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?

Ronald Reagan,

campaign speech, 1980

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage

than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is

in every country the surest basis of public happiness. George Washington,

address to Congress, 8 January 1790

S tereotypes abound. Ethnic groups are stereotyped, the citizens

of other nations and religions are stereotyped, the genders and

sexual preferences are stereotyped, people born in various times

of the year are stereotyped (Sun-sign astrology), and occupations

are stereotyped. The most generous interpretation ascribes it to a

kind of intellectual laziness: instead of judging people on their

individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of

information about them, and then place them in a small number of

previously constructed pigeonholes. This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of

committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper

from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity

of ways of being human. Even if stereotyping were valid on

average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases: human

355

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

variation runs to bell-type curves. There's an average value of any

quality, and smaller numbers of people running off in both

extremes. Some stereotyping is the result of not controlling the variables,

of forgetting what other factors might be in play. For example, it

used to be that there were almost no women in science. Many

male scientists were vehement: this proved that women lacked the

ability to do science. Temperamentally, it didn't fit them, it was

too difficult, it required a kind of intelligence that women don't

have, they're too emotional to be objective, can you think of any

great women theoretical physicists?...

and so on. Since then the

barriers have come tumbling down. Today women populate most

of the subdisciplines of science. In my own fields of astronomy and

planetary studies, women have recently burst upon the scene,

making discovery after discovery, and providing a desperately

needed breath of fresh air. So what data were they missing, all those famous male scientists

of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier who had pronounced so

authoritatively on the intellectual deficiencies of women?

Plainly,

society was preventing women from entering science, and then

criticizing them for it, confusing cause and effect:

You want to be an astronomer, young woman?

Sorry. Why can't you?

Because you're unsuited. How do we know you're unsuited?

Because women have never

been astronomers. Put so baldly, the case sounds absurd. But the contrivances of

bias can be subtle. The despised group is rejected by spurious

arguments, sometimes done with such confidence and contempt

that many of us, including some of the victims themselves, fail to

recognize it as self-serving sleight of hand. Casual observers of meetings of sceptics, and those who glance

at the list ofCSICOP Fellows, have noted a great preponderance

of men. Others claim disproportionate numbers of women among

believers in astrology (horoscopes in most 'women's' but few

'men's' magazines), crystals, ESP and the like. Some commenta-

tors suggest that there is something peculiarly male about scepti-

cism. It's hard-driving, competitive, confrontational, tough-

minded - whereas women, they say, are more accepting,

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Maxwell and The Nerds

consensus-building, and uninterested in challenging conventional

wisdom. But in my experience women scientists have just as finely

honed sceptical senses as their male counterparts; that's just part

of being a scientist. This criticism, if that's what it is, is presented

to the world in the usual ragged disguise: if you discourage women

from being sceptical and don't train them in scepticism, then sure

enough you may find that many women aren't sceptical. Open the

doors and let them in, and they're as sceptical as anybody else. One of the stereotyped occupations is science. Scientists are

nerds, socially inept, working on incomprehensible subjects that

no normal person would find in any way interesting - even if he

were willing to invest the time required, which, again, no sensible

person would. 'Get a life,' you might want to tell them. I asked for a fleshed-out contemporary characterization of

science-nerds from an expert on eleven-year-olds of my acquaint-

ance. I should stress that she is merely reporting, not necessarily

endorsing, the conventional prejudices:

Nerds wear their belts just under their rib cages. Their short-sleeve

shirts are equipped with pocket protectors in which is displayed a

formidable array of multicoloured pens and pencils. A programma-

ble calculator is carried in a special belt holster. They all wear thick

glasses with broken nose-pieces that have been repaired with Band-

Aids. They are bereft of social skills, and oblivious or indifferent to

the lack. When they laugh, what comes out is a snort. They jabber at

each other in an incomprehensible language. They'll jump at the

opportunity to work for extra credit in all classes except gym. They

look down on normal people, who in turn laugh at them. Most nerds

have names like Norman. (The Norman Conquest involved a horde

of high-belted, pocket-protected, calculator-carrying nerds with bro-

ken glasses invading England.) There are more boy nerds than girl

nerds, but there are plenty ofboth. Nerds don't date. If you're a nerd

you can't be cool. Also vice versa. This of course is a stereotype. There are scientists who dress

elegantly, who are devastatingly cool, who many people long to date,

who do not carry concealed calculators to social events. Some you'd

never guess were scientists if you invited them to your home. But other scientists do match the stereotype, more or less. They're pretty socially inept. There may be, proportionately,

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many more nerds among scientists than among backhoe operators

or fashion designers or traffic wardens. Perhaps scientists are

more nerdish than bartenders or surgeons or short-order cooks. Why should this be?

Maybe people untalented in getting along

with others find a refuge in impersonal pursuits, particularly

mathematics and the physical sciences. Maybe the serious study of

difficult subjects requires so much time and dedication that very

little is left over for learning more than the barest social niceties. Maybe it's a combination ofboth. Like the mad-scientist image to which it's closely related, the

nerd-scientist stereotype is pervasive in our society. What's wrong

with a little good-natured fun at the expense of scientists?

If, for

whatever reason, people dislike the stereotypical scientist, they are

less likely to support science. Why subsidize geeks to pursue their

absurd and incomprehensible little projects?

Well, we know the

answer to that: science is supported because it provides spectacular

benefits at all levels in society, as 1 have argued earlier in this book. So those who find nerds distasteful, but at the same time crave the

products of science, face a kind of dilemma. A tempting resolution is

to direct the activities of the scientists. Don't give them money to go

off in weird directions; instead tell them what we need - this

invention, or that process. Subsidize not the curiosity of the nerds,

but what will benefit society. It seems simple enough. The trouble is that ordering someone to go out and make a specific

invention, even if price is no object, hardly guarantees that it gets

done. There may be an underpinning of knowledge that's unavail-

able, without which no one will ever build the contrivance you have

in mind. And the history of science shows that often you can't go

after the underpinnings in a directed way, either. They may emerge

out of the idle musings of some lonely young person off in the

boondocks. They're ignored or rejected even by other scientists,

sometimes until a new generation of scientists comes along. Urging

major practical inventions while discouraging curiosity-driven

research would be spectacularly counterproductive. Suppose you are, by the Grace of God, Victoria, Queen of the

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Defender of

the Faith in the most prosperous and triumphant age of the British

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Maxwell and The Nerds

Empire. Your dominions stretch across the planet. Maps of the

world are abundantly splashed with British pink. You preside over

the world's leading technological power. The steam engine is

perfected in Great Britain, largely by Scottish engineers, who

provide technical expertise on the railways and steamships that

bind up the Empire. Suppose in the year 1860 you have a visionary idea, so daring it

would have been rejected by Jules Verne's publisher. You want a

machine that will carry your voice, as well as moving pictures of

the glory of the Empire, into every home in the kingdom. What's

more, the sounds and pictures must come not through conduits or

wires, but somehow out of the air, so people at work and in the

field can receive instantaneous inspirational offerings designed to

insure loyalty and the work ethic. The Word of God could also be

conveyed by the same contrivance. Other socially desirable appli-

cations would doubtless be found. So with the Prime Minister's support, you convene the Cabinet,

the Imperial General Staff, and the leading scientists and engi-

neers of the Empire. You will allocate a million pounds, you tell

them - big money in 1860.

If they need more, just ask. You don't

care how they do it; just get it done. Oh, yes, it's to be called the

Westminster Project. Probably there would be some useful inventions emerging out

of such an endeavour - 'spin-off. There always are when you

spend huge amounts of money on technology. But the Westmin-

ster Project would almost certainly fail. Why?

Because the

underlying science hadn't been done. By 1860 the telegraph was in

existence. You could imagine at great expense telegraphy sets in

every home, with people ditting and dahing messages out in

Morse code. But that's not what the Queen asked for. She had

radio and television in mind but they were far out of reach. In the real world, the physics necessary to invent radio and

television would come from a direction that no one could have

predicted. James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831.

At age two he found that he could use a tin plate to bounce an

image of the Sun off the furniture and make it dance against the

walls. As his parents came running he cried out, 'It's the Sun!

I got

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it with the tin plate!' In his boyhood, he was fascinated by bugs,

grubs, rocks, flowers, lenses, machines. 'It was humiliating,' later

recalled his Aunt Jane, 'to be asked so many questions one

couldn't answer by a child like that.'

Naturally, by the time he got to school he was called 'Dafty' -

not quite right in the head. He was an exceptionally handsome

young man, but he dressed carelessly, for comfort rather than

style, and his Scottish provincialisms in speech and conduct were a

cause for derision, especially by the time he reached college. And

he had peculiar interests. Maxwell was a nerd. He fared little better with his teachers than

with his fellow students. Here's a poignant couplet he wrote at the

time:

Ye years roll on, and haste the expected time

When flogging boys shall be accounted crime. Many years later, in 1872, in his inaugural lecture as professor of

experimental physics at Cambridge University, he alluded to the

nerdish stereotype:

It is not so long ago since any man who devoted himself to

geometry, or to any science requiring continued application,

was looked upon as necessarily a misanthrope, who must

have abandoned all human interests, and betaken himself to

abstractions so far removed from all the world of life and

action that he has become insensible alike to the attractions

of pleasure and to the claims of duty. 1 suspect that 'not so long ago' was Maxwell's way of recalling the

experiences of his youth. He then went on to say,

In the present day, men of science are not looked upon with

the same awe or with the same suspicion. They are supposed

to be in league with the material spirit of the age, and to form

a kind of advanced Radical party among men of learning. We no longer live in a time of untrammelled optimism about the

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Maxwell and The Nerds

benefits of science and technology. We understand that there is a

downside. Circumstances today are much closer to what Maxwell

remembered from his childhood. He made enormous contributions to astronomy and physics -

from the conclusive demonstration that the rings of Saturn are

composed of small particles, to the elastic properties of solids,

to the disciplines now called the kinetic theory of gases and

statistical mechanics. It was he who first showed that an

enormous number of tiny molecules, moving on their own and

incessantly colliding with each other and bouncing elastically,

leads not to confusion, but to precise statistical laws. The

properties of such a gas can be predicted and understood. (The

bell-shaped curve that describes the speeds of molecules in a

gas is now called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.) He

invented a mythical being, now 'Maxwell's demon', whose

actions generated a paradox that took modern information

theory and quantum mechanics to resolve. The nature of light had been a mystery since antiquity. There

were acrimonious learned debates on whether it was a particle

or a wave. Popular definitions ran to the style, 'Light is

darkness - lit up'.

Maxwell's greatest contribution was his

discovery that electricity and magnetism, of all things, join

together to become light. The now conventional understanding

of the electromagnetic spectrum - running in wavelength from

gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light to visible light to

infrared light to radio waves - is due to Maxwell. So is radio,

television and radar. But Maxwell wasn't after any of this. He was interested in how

electricity makes magnetism and vice versa. I want to describe

what Maxwell did, but his historic accomplishment is highly

mathematical. In a few pages, I can at best give you only a flavour. If you do not hilly understand what I'm about to say, please bear

with me. There's no way we can get a feeling for what Maxwell did

without looking at a little mathematics. Mesmer, the inventor of 'mesmerism', believed he had

discovered a magnetic fluid, 'almost the same thing as the

electric fluid', that permeated all things. On this matter as well,

he was mistaken. We now know that there is no special

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magnetic fluid, and that all magnetism - including the power

that resides in a bar or horseshoe magnet - is due to moving

electricity. The Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted had

performed a little experiment in which electricity was made to

flow down a wire and induce a nearby compass needle to waver

and tremble. The wire and the compass were not in physical

contact. The great English physicist Michael Faraday had done

the complementary experiment: he made a magnetic force turn

on and off and thereby generated a current of electricity in a

nearby wire. Time-varying electricity had somehow reached out

and generated magnetism, and time-varying magnetism had

somehow reached out and generated electricity. This was called

'induction' and was deeply mysterious, close to magic. Faraday proposed that the magnet had an invisible 'field' of

force that extended into surrounding space, stronger close to the

magnet, weaker farther away. You could track the form of the

field by placing tiny iron filings on a piece of paper and waving a

magnet underneath. Likewise, your hair after a good combing on

a low-humidity day generates an electric field which invisibly

extends out from your head, and which can even make small

pieces of paper move by themselves. The electricity in a wire, we now know, is caused by

submicroscopic electrical particles, called electrons, which

respond to an electric field and move. The wires are made of

materials like copper which have lots of free electrons -

electrons not bound within atoms, but able to move. Unlike

copper, though, most materials, say, wood, are not good

conductors; they are instead insulators or 'dielectrics'.

In them,

comparatively few electrons are available to move in response

to the impressed electric or magnetic field. Not much of a

current is produced. Of course there's some movement or

'displacement' of electrons, and the bigger the electric field, the

more displacement occurs. Maxwell devised a way of writing what was known about

electricity and magnetism in his time, a method of summarizing

precisely all those experiments with wires and currents and

magnets. Here they are, the four Maxwell equations for the

behaviour of electricity and magnetism in matter:

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Maxwell and The Nerds

V ■ E = p/eo

V • B = 0

V x E = -B

V x b = m j + m-o6()E

It takes a few years of university-level physics to understand these

equations. They are written using a branch of mathematics called

vector calculus. A vector, written in bold-face type, is any

quantity with both a magnitude and a direction. Sixty miles an

hour isn't a vector, but sixty miles an hour due north on Highway

1 is. E and B represent the electric and magnetic fields. The

triangle, called a nabla (because of its resemblance to a certain

ancient Middle Eastern harp), expresses how the electric or

magnetic fields vary in three-dimensional space. The 'dot product'

and the 'cross product' after the nablas are statements of two

different kinds of spatial variation. E and B represent the time variation, the rate of change of the

electric and magnetic fields, j stands for the electrical current. The

lower-case Greek letter p (rho) represents the density of electrical

charges, while e 0 (pronounced 'epsilon zero') and pi, (pronounced

'mu zero') are not variables, but properties of the substance E and

B are measured in, and determined by experiment. In a vacuum,

£„ and |i„ are constants of nature. Considering how many different quantities are being brought

together in these equations, it's striking how simple they are. They

could have gone on for pages, but they don't. The first of the four Maxwell equations tells how an electric

field due to electrical charges (electrons, for example) varies with

distance (it gets weaker the farther away we go).

But the greater

the charge density (the more electrons, say, in a given space), the

stronger the field. The second equation tells us that there's no comparable state-

ment in magnetism, because Mesmer's magnetic 'charges' (or

magnetic 'monopoles') do not exist: saw a magnet in half and you

won't be holding an isolated 'north' pole and an isolated 'south'

pole; each piece now has its own 'north' and 'south' pole. The third equation tells us how a changing magnetic field

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

The fourth describes the converse - how a changing electric

field (or an electrical current) induces a magnetic field. The four equations are essentially distillations of generations of

laboratory experiments, mainly by French and British scientists. What I've described here vaguely and qualitatively, the equations

describe exactly and quantitatively. Maxwell then asked himself a strange question: what would

these equations look like in empty space, in a vacuum, in a place

where there were no electrical charges and no electrical currents?

We might very well anticipate no electric and no magnetic fields in

a vacuum. Instead, he suggested that the right form of the

Maxwell equations for the behaviour of electricity and magnetism

in empty space is this:

V • E =0

V • B = 0

V x E = -B

V x B = m*>E

He set p equal to zero, indicating that there are no electrical

charges. He also setj equal to zero, indicating that there are no

electrical currents. But he didn't discard the last term in the fourth

equation, jjqjtoE, the feeble displacement current in insulators. Why not?

As you can see from the equations, Maxwell's

intuition preserved the symmetry between the magnetic and

electric fields. Even in a vacuum, in the total absence of electric-

ity, or even matter, a changing magnetic field, he proposed, elicits

an electric field and vice versa. The equations were to represent

Nature, and Nature is, Maxwell believed, beautiful and elegant. (There was also another, more technical reason for preserving the

displacement current in a vacuum, which we pass over here.) This

essentially aesthetic judgement by a nerdish physicist, entirely

unknown except to a few other academic scientists, has done more

to shape our civilization than any ten recent presidents and prime

ministers. Briefly, the four Maxwell equations for a vacuum say (1) there

are no electrical charges in a vacuum; (2) there are no magnetic

monopoles in a vacuum; (3) a changing magnetic field generates

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Maxwell and The Nerds

an electrical field; and (4) vice versa. When the equations were written down like this, Maxwell was

readily able to show that E and B propagated through empty space

as if they were waves. What's more, he could calculate the speed

of the wave. It was just 1 divided by the square root of e 0 times p 0 .

But e 0 and |i„ had been measured in the laboratory. When you

plugged in the numbers you found that the electric and magnetic

fields in a vacuum ought to propagate, astonishingly, at the same

speed as had already been measured for light. The agreement was

too close to be accidental. Suddenly, disconcertingly, electricity

and magnetism were deeply implicated in the nature of light. Since light now appeared to behave as waves and to derive from

electric and magnetic fields, Maxwell called it electromagnetic. Those obscure experiments with batteries and wires had some-

thing to do with the brightness of the Sun, with how we see, with

what light is. Ruminating on Maxwell's discovery many years

later, Albert Einstein wrote, 'To few men in the world has such an

experience been vouchsafed.'

Maxwell himself was baffled by the results. The vacuum seemed

to act like a dielectric. He said that it can be 'electrically

polarized'.

Living in a mechanical age, Maxwell felt obliged to

offer some kind of mechanical model for the propagation of an

electromagnetic wave through a perfect vacuum. So he imagined

space filled with a mysterious substance he called the aether,

which supported and contained the time-varying electric and

magnetic fields - something like a throbbing but invisible Jell-0

permeating the Universe. The quivering of the aether was the

reason that light travelled through it - just as water waves

propagate through water and sound waves through air. But it had to be very odd stuff, this ether, very thin, ghostly,

almost incorporeal. The Sun and the Moon, the planets and the

stars had to pass through it without being slowed down, without

noticing. And yet it had to be stiff enough to support all these

waves propagating at prodigious speed. The word 'aether' is still, in a desultory fashion, in use - in

English mainly in the adjective ethereal, residing in the aether. It

has some of the same connotations as the more modern 'spacy' or

'spaced out'.

When, in the early days of radio, they would say 'On

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

the air', the aether is what they had in mind. (The Russian phrase

is quite literally 'on the aether', v efir.) But of course radio readily

travels through a vacuum, one of Maxwell's main results. It

doesn't need air to propagate. The presence of air is, if anything,

an impediment. The whole idea of light and matter moving through the aether

was to lead in another forty years to Einstein's Special Theory of

Relativity, E = me’, and a great deal else. Relativity, and

experiments leading up to it, showed conclusively that there is no

aether supporting the propagation of electromagnetic waves, as

Einstein writes in the extract from his famous paper that 1

reproduced in Chapter 2.

The wave goes by itself. The changing

electric field generates a magnetic field; the changing magnetic

field generates an electric field. They hold each other up, by their

bootstraps. Many physicists were deeply troubled by the demise of the

'luminiferous' ether. They had needed some mechanical model to

make the whole notion of the propagation of light in a vacuum

reasonable, plausible, understandable. But this is a crutch, a

symptom of our difficulties in reconnoitring realms in which

common sense no longer serves. The physicist Richard Feynman

described it this way:

Today, we understand better that what counts are the equa-

tions themselves and not the model used to get them. We may

only question whether the equations are true or false. This is

answered by doing experiments, and untold numbers of

experiments have confirmed Maxwell's equations. If we take

away the scaffolding he used to build it, we find that

Maxwell's beautiful edifice stands on its own. But what are these time-varying electric and magnetic fields

permeating all of space?

What do E and B mean!

We feel so

much more comfortable with the idea of things touching and

jiggling, pushing and pulling, rather than 'fields' magically moving

objects at a distance, or mere mathematical abstractions. But, as

Feynman pointed out, our sense that at least in everyday life we

can rely on solid, sensible physical contact to explain, say, why the

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Maxwell and The Nerds

butter knife comes to you when you pick it up, is a misconception. What does it mean to have physical contact?

What exactly is

happening when you pick up a knife, or push a swing, or make a

wave in a waterbed by pressing down on it periodically?

When we

investigate deeply, we find that there is no physical contact. Instead, the electrical charges on your hand are influencing the

electrical charges on the knife or swing or waterbed, and vice

versa. Despite everyday experience and common sense, even

here, there is only the interaction of electric fields. Nothing is

touching anything. No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions,

eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that

could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead,

they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-

sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we

no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but

instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we

find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not?

Because

our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works

were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters

and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide

because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding

time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolu-

tionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our

time it's different. Maxwell's equations show that a rapidly varying electric field

(making E large) ought to generate electromagnetic waves. In

1888 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz did the experiment and

found that he had generated a new kind of radiation, radio waves. Seven years later, British scientists in Cambridge transmitted

radio signals over a distance of a kilometre. By 1901, Guglielmo

Marconi of Italy was using radio waves to communicate across the

Atlantic Ocean. The linking-up of the modern world economically, culturally

and politically by broadcast towers, microwave relays and commu-

nication satellites traces directly back to Maxwell's judgement to

include the displacement current in his vacuum equations. So does

television, which imperfectly instructs and entertains us; radar,

367

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

which may have been the decisive element in the Battle of Britain

and in the Nazi defeat in World War Two (which 1 like to think of

as 'Dafty', the boy who didn't fit in, reaching into the future and

saving the descendants of his tormentors); the control and naviga-

tion of airplanes, ships and spacecraft; radio astronomy and the

search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and significant aspects of

the electrical power and microelectronics industries. What's more, Faraday's and Maxwell's notion of fields has been

enormously influential in understanding the atomic nucleus, quan-

tum mechanics, and the fine structure of matter. His unification of

electricity, magnetism and light into one coherent mathematical

whole is the inspiration for subsequent attempts - some success-

ful, some still in their rudimentary stages - to unify all aspects of

the physical world, including gravity and nuclear forces, into one

grand theory. Maxwell may fairly be said to have ushered in the

age of modern physics. Our current view of the silent world of Maxwell's varying

electric and magnetic vectors is described by Richard Feynman in

these words:

Try to imagine what the electric and magnetic fields look like

at present in the space of this lecture room. First of all, there

is a steady magnetic field; it comes from the currents in the

interior of the earth - that is, the earth's steady magnetic

field. Then there are some irregular, nearly static electric

fields produced perhaps by electric charges generated by

friction as various people move about in their chairs and rub

their coat sleeves against the chair arms. Then there are other

magnetic fields produced by oscillating currents in the electri-

cal wiring - fields which vary at a frequency of 60 cycles per

second, in synchronism with the generator at Boulder Dam. But more interesting are the electric and magnetic fields

varying at much higher frequencies. For instance, as light

travels from window to floor and wall to wall, there are little

wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields moving along at

186,000 miles per second. Then there are also infrared waves

travelling from the warm foreheads to the cold blackboard. And we have forgotten the ultraviolet light, the X-rays, and

368

Maxwell and The Nerds

the radiowaves travelling through the room. Flying across the room are electromagnetic waves which

carry music of a jazz band. There are waves modulated by a

series of impulses representing pictures of events going on in

other parts of the world, or of imaginary aspirins dissolving in

imaginary stomachs. To demonstrate the reality of these

waves it is only necessary to turn on electronic equipment

that converts these waves into pictures and sounds. If we go into further detail to analyze even the smallest

wiggles, there are tiny electromagnetic waves that have come

into the room from enormous distances. There are now tiny

oscillations of the electric field, whose crests are separated by

a distance of one foot, that have come from millions of miles

away, transmitted to the earth from the Mariner [2] space

craft which has just passed Venus. Its signals carry summaries

of information it has picked up about the planets (informa-

tion obtained from electromagnetic waves that travelled from

the planet to the space craft).

There are very tiny wiggles of the electric and magnetic

fields that are waves which originated billions of light years

away - from galaxies in the remotest corners of the universe. That this is true has been found by 'filling the room with

wires' - by building antennas as large as this room. Such

radiowaves have been detected from places in space beyond

the range of the greatest optical telescopes. Even they, the

optical telescopes, are simply gatherers of electromagnetic

waves. What we call the stars are only inferences, inferences

drawn from the only physical reality we have yet gotten from

them - from a careful study of the unendingly complex

undulations of the electric and magnetic fields reaching us on

earth. There is, of course, more: the fields produced by lightning

miles away, the fields of the charged cosmic ray particles as

they zip through the room, and more, and more. What a

complicated thing is the electric field in the space around you!

If Queen Victoria had ever called an urgent meeting of her

counsellors, and ordered them to invent the equivalent of radio

369

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

and television, it is unlikely that any of them would have

imagined the path to lead through the experiments of Ampere,

Biot, Oersted and Faraday, four equations of vector calculus,

and the judgement to preserve the displacement current in a

vacuum. They would, 1 think, have gotten nowhere. Mean-

while, on his own, driven only by curiosity, costing the govern-

ment almost nothing, himself unaware that he was laying the

ground for the Westminster Project, 'Dafty' was scribbling

away. It's doubtful whether the self-effacing, unsociable Mr

Maxwell would even have been thought of to perform such a

study. If he had, probably the government would have been

telling him what to think about and what not, impeding rather

than inducing his great discovery. Late in life, Maxwell did have one interview with Queen

Victoria. He worried about it beforehand - essentially about his

ability to communicate science to a non-expert - but the Queen

was distracted and the interview was short. Like the four other

greatest British scientists of recent history, Michael Faraday,

Charles Darwin, P. A.M. Dirac and Francis Crick, Maxwell was

never knighted (although Lyell, Kelvin, J. J. Thomson, Ruther-

ford, Eddington and Hoyle in the next tier were).

In Maxwell's

case, there was not even the excuse that he might hold opinions at

variance with the Church of England: he was an absolutely

conventional Christian for his time, more devout than most. Maybe it was his nerdishness. The communications media - the instruments of education and

entertainment that James Clerk Maxwell made possible - have

never, so far as 1 know, offered even a mini-series on the life and

thought of their benefactor and founder. By contrast, think of

how difficult it is to grow up in America without television

teaching you about, say, the life and times of Davy Crockett or

Billy the Kid or A1 Capone. Maxwell married young, but the bond seems to have been

passionless as well as childless. His excitement was reserved for

science. This founder of the modern age died in 1879 at the age of

47.

While he is almost forgotten in popular culture, radar astrono-

mers who map other worlds have remembered: the greatest

mountain range on Venus, discovered by sending radio waves

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Maxwell and The Nerds

from Earth, bouncing them off Venus, and detecting the faint

echoes, is named after him. Less than a century after Maxwell's prediction of radio waves, the

first quest was initiated for signals from possible civilizations on

planets of other stars. Since then there have been a number of

searches, some of which 1 referred to earlier, for the time-varying

electric and magnetic fields crossing the vast interstellar distances

from possible other intelligences - biologically very different from

us - who had also benefited sometime in their histories from the

insights of local counterparts of James Clerk Maxwell. In October 1992, in the Mojave Desert, and in a Puerto Rican

karst valley, we initiated by far the most promising, powerful and

comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

For

the first time NASA would organize and operate the programme. The entire sky would be examined over a ten-year period with

unprecedented sensitivity and frequency range. If, on a planet of

any of the 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way

galaxy, anyone had been sending us a radio message, we might

have had a pretty fair chance of hearing them. Just one year later, Congress pulled the plug. SETI was not of

pressing importance; its interest was limited; it was too expensive. But every civilization in human history has devoted some of its

resources to investigating deep questions about the Universe, and

it's hard to think of a deeper one than whether we are alone. Even

if we never decrypted the message contents, the receipt of such a

signal would transform our view of the Universe and ourselves. And if we could understand the message from an advanced

technical civilization, the practical benefits might be unprec-

edented. Far from being narrowly based, the SETI programme,

strongly supported by the scientific community, is also embedded

in popular culture. The fascination with this enterprise is broad

and enduring, and for very good reason. And far from being too

expensive, the programme would have cost about one attack

helicopter per year. 1 wonder why those members of Congress concerned about

price tags don't devote greater attention to the Department of

Defense, which, with the Soviet Union gone and the Cold War

371

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

over, still spends, when all costs are tallied, well over $300 billion

a year. (And elsewhere in government there are many pro-

grammes that amount to welfare for the well-to-do.) Perhaps our

descendants will look back on our time and marvel at us,

possessed of the technology to detect other beings, but closing our

ears because we insisted on spending the national wealth to

protect us from an enemy that no longer exists.*

David Goodstein, a physicist at Cal Tech, notes that science has

been growing nearly exponentially for centuries and that it cannot

continue such growth, because then everybody on the planet

would have to be a scientist, and then the growth would have to

stop. He speculates that for this reason, and not because of any

fundamental disaffection from science, the growth in funding of

science has slowed measurably in the last few decades. Nevertheless, I'm worried about how research funds are distrib-

uted. I'm worried that cancelling government funds for SETI is

part of a trend. The government has been pressuring the National

Science Foundation to move away from basic scientific research

and to support technology, engineering, applications. Congress is

suggesting doing away with the US Geological Survey, and

slashing support for study of the Earth's fragile environment. NASA support for research and analysis of data already obtained

is increasingly constrained. Many young scientists are not only

unable to find grants to support their research; they are unable to

find jobs. Industrial research and development funded by American com-

panies has slowed across the board in recent years. Government

funding for research and development has declined in the same

period. (Only military research and development increased in the

decade of the 1980s.) In annual expenditures, Japan is now the

world's leading investor in civilian research and development. In

such fields as computers, telecommunications equipment, aero-

space, machine tools, robotics, and scientific precision equipment,

the US share of global exports has been declining, while the

Japanese share has been increasing. In that same period the

* The SETI programme was briefly resurrected, using $7 million in private

contributions, in 1995 under the appropriate name Project Phoenix. 372

Maxwell and The Nerds

United States lost its lead to Japan in most semiconductor

technologies. It experiences severe declines in market share in

colour TVs, VCRs, phonographs, telephone sets and machine

tools. Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their

curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical

end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Scientists of

course have a vested interest in basic research. It's what they like

to do, in many cases why they became scientists in the first place. But it is in society's interest to support such research. This is how

the major discoveries that benefit humanity are largely made. Whether a few grand and ambitious scientific projects are a better

investment than a larger number of small programmes is a

worthwhile question. We are rarely smart enough to set about on purpose making the

discoveries that will drive our economy and safeguard our lives. Often, we lack the fundamental research. Instead, we pursue a

broad range of investigations of Nature, and applications we never

dreamed of emerge. Not always, of course. But often enough. Giving money to someone like Maxwell might have seemed the

most absurd encouragement of mere 'curiosity-driven' science,

and an imprudent judgement for practical legislators. Why grant

money now, so nerdish scientists talking incomprehensible gibber-

ish can indulge their hobbies, when there are urgent unmet

national needs?

From this point of view it's easy to understand the

contention that science is just another lobby, another pressure

group anxious to keep the grant money rolling in so the scientists

don't ever have to do a hard day's work or meet a payroll. Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar and television when he

first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnet-

ism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communications

satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon;

Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he inves-

tigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it 'X-rays';

Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly

extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende;

Fleming wasn't planning on saving the lives of millions with

antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a

373

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

growth of mould; Watson and Crick weren't imagining the cure of

genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry

of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren't planning to implicate

CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of

halogens in stratospheric photochemistry. Members of Congress and other political leaders have from

time to time found it irresistible to poke fun at seemingly

obscure scientific research proposals that the government is

asked to fund. Even as bright a senator as William Proxmire, a

Harvard graduate, was given to making episodic 'Golden

Fleece' awards, many commemorating ostensibly useless scien-

tific projects including SETI. I imagine the same spirit in

previous governments - a Mr Fleming wishes to study bugs in

smelly cheese; a Polish woman wishes to sift through tons of

Central African ore to find minute quantities of a substance she

says will glow in the dark; a Mr Kepler wants to hear the songs

the planets sing. These discoveries and a multitude of others that grace and

characterize our time, to some of which our very lives are

beholden, were made ultimately by scientists given the opportu-

nity to explore what in their opinion, under the scrutiny of their

peers, were basic questions in Nature. Industrial applications, in

which Japan in the last two decades has done so well, are

excellent. But applications of what?

Fundamental research,

research into the heart of Nature, is the means by which we

acquire the new knowledge that gets applied. Scientists have an obligation, especially when asking for big

money, to explain with great clarity and honesty what they're

after. The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) would have been

the preeminent instrument on the planet for probing the fine

structure of matter and the nature of the early Universe. Its price

tag was $10 to $15 billion. It was cancelled by Congress in 1993

after about $2 billion had been spent - a worst of both worlds

outcome. But this debate was not, 1 think, mainly about declining

interest in the support of science. Few in Congress understood

what modern high energy accelerators are for. They are not for

weapons. They have no practical applications. They are for

something that is, worrisomely from the point of view of many,

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Maxwell and The Nerds

called 'the theory of everything'.

Explanations that involve enti-

ties called quarks, charm, flavour, colour, etc. sound as if

physicists are being cute. The whole thing has an aura, in the view

of at least some Congresspeople I've talked to, of 'nerds gone

wild' - which I suppose is an uncharitable way of describing

curiosity-based science. No one asked to pay for this had the

foggiest idea of what a Higgs boson is. I've read some of the

material intended to justify the SSC. At the very end, some of it

wasn't too bad, but there was nothing that really addressed what

the project was about on a level accessible to bright but sceptical

non-physicists. If physicists are asking for $10 or $15 billion to

build a machine that has no practical value, at the very least they

should make an extremely serious effort, with dazzling graphics,

metaphors and capable use of the English language, to justify

their proposal. More than financial mismanagement, budgetary

constraints and political incompetence, I think this is the key to

the failure of the SSC. There is a growing free-market view of human knowledge,

according to which basic research should compete without govern-

ment support with all the other institutions and claimants in

society. If they couldn't have relied on government support, and

had to compete in the free-market economy of their day, it's

unlikely that any of the scientists on my list would have been able

to do their groundbreaking research. And the cost of basic

research is substantially greater than it was in Maxwell's day -

both theoretical and, especially, experimental. But that aside, would free-market forces be adequate to support

basic research?

Only about ten per cent of meritorious research

proposals in medicine are funded today. More money is spent on

quack medicine than on all of medical research. What would it be

like if government opted out of medical research?

A necessary aspect of basic research is that its applications lie in

the future, sometimes decades or even centuries ahead. What's

more, no one knows which aspects of basic research will have

practical value and which will not. If scientists cannot make such

predictions, is it likely that politicians or industrialists can?

free-market forces are focused only towards short-term profit - as

they certainly mainly are in an America with steep declines in

375

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

corporate research - is not this solution tantamount to abandoning

basic research?

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating

the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but

what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get

through the winters to come?

Of course there are many pressing problems facing our nation

and our species. But reducing basic scientific research is not the

way to solve them. Scientists do not constitute a voting bloc. They

have no effective lobby. However, much of their work is in

everybody's interest. Backing off from fundamental research

constitutes a failure of nerve, of imagination and of that vision

thing that we still don't seem to have a handle on. It might strike

one of those hypothetical extraterrestrials that we were planning

not to have a future. Of course we need literacy, education, jobs, adequate medical

care and defence, protection of the environment, security in our

old age, a balanced budget, and a host of other matters. But we

are a rich society. Can't we also nurture the Maxwells of our time?

To take one symbolic example, is it really true that we can't afford

one attack helicopter's worth of seed corn to listen to the stars?

376

Science and Witchcraft*

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is

freedom. Latin proverb

T he 1939 New York World's Fair - that so transfixed me as a

small visitor from darkest Brooklyn - was about 'The World

of Tomorrow'.

Merely by adopting such a motif, it promised that

there would be a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance

affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939.

Although

the nuance wholly passed me by, many people longed for such a

reassurance on the eve of the most brutal and calamitous war in

human history. 1 knew at least that 1 would be growing up in the

future. The sleek and clean 'tomorrow' portrayed by the Fair was

appealing and hopeful. And something called science was plainly

the means by which that future would be realized. But if things had gone a little differently, the Fair could have

given me enormously more. A fierce struggle had gone on behind

the scenes. The vision that prevailed was that of the Fair's

* Written with Ann Druyan. The following two chapters include more political

content than elsewhere in this book. I do not wish to suggest that advocacy of

science and scepticism necessarily leads to all the political or social conclusions

I draw. Although sceptical thinking is invaluable in politics, politics is not a

science. 377

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

President and chief spokesman, Grover Whalen - a former

corporate executive, New York City police chief in a time of

unprecedented police brutality, and public relations innovator. It

was he who had envisioned the exhibit buildings as chiefly

commercial, industrial, oriented to consumer products, and he

who had convinced Stalin and Mussolini to build lavish national

pavilions. (He later complained about how often he had been

obliged to give the fascist salute.) The level of the exhibits, as one

designer described it, was pitched to the mentality of a twelve-

year-old. However, as recounted by the historian Peter Kuznick of

American University, a group of prominent scientists, including

Harold Urey and Albert Einstein, advocated presenting science

for its own sake, not just as the route to gadgets for sale;

concentrating on the way of thinking and not just the products of

science. They were convinced that broad popular understanding

of science was the antidote to superstition and bigotry; that, as

science popularizer Watson Davis put it, 'the scientific way is the

democratic way'.

One scientist even suggested that widespread

public appreciation of the methods of science might work 'a final

conquest of stupidity' - a worthy, but probably unrealizable, goal. As events transpired, almost no real science was tacked on to

the Fair's exhibits, despite the scientists' protests and their appeals

to high principles. And yet, some of the little that was added

trickled down to me and helped to transform my childhood. The

corporate and consumer focus remained central, though, and

essentially nothing appeared about science as a way of thinking,

much less as a bulwark of a free society. Exactly half a century later, in the closing years of the Soviet

Union, Ann Druyan and 1 found ourselves at a dinner in

Peredelkino, a village outside Moscow where Communist Party

officials, retired generals and a few favoured intellectuals had

their summer homes. The air was electric with the prospect of new

freedoms - especially the right to speak your mind even if the

government doesn't like what you're saying. The fabled revolu-

tion of rising expectations was in full flower. But, despite glasnost, there were widespread doubts. Would

378

Science and Witchcraft

those in power really allow their own critics to be heard?

Would

freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, of religion, really be

permitted?

Would people inexperienced with freedom be able to

bear its burdens?

Some of the Soviet citizens present at the dinner had fought for

decades and against long odds for the freedoms that most Ameri-

cans take for granted; indeed, they had been inspired by the

American experiment, a real-world demonstration that nations,

even multicultural and multiethnic nations, could survive and

prosper with these freedoms reasonably intact. They went so far

as to raise the possibility that prosperity was due to freedom -

that, in an age of high technology and swift change, the two rise or

fall together, that the openness of science and democracy, their

willingness to be judged by experiment, were closely allied ways

of thinking. There were many toasts, as there always are at dinners in that

part of the world. The most memorable was given by a

world-famous Soviet novelist. He stood up, raised his glass,

looked us in the eye, and said, 'To the Americans. They have a

little freedom.' He paused a beat, and then added: 'And they

know how to keep it.'

Do we?

The ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights before politicians

found a way to subvert it, by cashing in on fear and patriotic

hysteria. In 1798, the ruling Federalist Party knew that the button

to push was ethnic and cultural prejudice. Exploiting tensions

between France and the US, and a widespread fear that French

and Irish immigrants were somehow intrinsically unfit to be

Americans, the Federalists passed a set of laws that have come to

be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One law upped the residency requirement for citizenship

from five to fourteen years. (Citizens of French and Irish origin

usually voted for the opposition, Thomas Jefferson's

Democratic-Republican Party.) The Alien Act gave President

John Adams the power to deport any foreigner who aroused his

suspicions. Making the President nervous, said a member of

Congress, 'is the new crime'.

Jefferson believed the Alien Act

379

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

had been framed particularly to expel C. F. Volney,* the French

historian and philosopher; Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours,

patriarch of the famous chemical family; and the British

scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and an

intellectual antecedent of James Clerk Maxwell. In Jefferson's

view, these were just the sort of people America needed. The Sedition Act made it unlawful to publish 'false or malicious'

criticism of the government or to inspire opposition to any of its

acts. Some two dozen arrests were made, ten people were

convicted, and many more were censored or intimidated into

silence. The act attempted, Jefferson said, 'to crush all political

opposition by making criticism of Federalist officials or policies a

crime'.

As soon as Jefferson was elected, indeed in the first week of his

Presidency in 1801, he began pardoning every victim of the

Sedition Act because, he said, it was as contrary to the spirit of

American freedoms as if Congress had ordered us all to fall down

and worship a golden calf. By 1802, none of the Alien and

Sedition Acts remained on the books. From across two centuries, it's hard to recapture the frenzied

mood that made the French and the 'wild Irish' seem so grave a

threat that we were willing to surrender our most precious

freedoms. Giving credit for French and Irish cultural triumphs,

advocating equal rights for them, was in effect decried in

conservative circles as sentimental - unrealistic political cor-

rectness. But that's how it always works. It always seems an

aberration later. But by then we're in the grip of the next

hysteria. Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a

fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as

* A typical passage from Volney's 1791 book Ruins:

You dispute, you quarrel, you fight for that which is uncertain, that of

which you doubt. O men!

Is this not folly?...

We must trace a line of

distinction between those [subjects] that are capable of verification, and

those that are not, and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of

fantastical beings from the w'orld of realities; that is to say, all civil effect

must be taken away from theological and religious opinions. 380

Science and Witchcraft

it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin;

different philosophies or religions; or maybe it's drug use, violent

crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or 'desecrating' (literally,

making unholy) the flag. Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom

off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, Japanese-Americans were

protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway -

after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Constitutional

prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have

a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. Yes,

there's freedom of speech, but we don't want foreign authors

here, spouting alien ideologies, do we?

The pretexts change from

year to year, but the result remains the same: concentrating more

power in fewer hands and suppressing diversity of opinion - even

though experience plainly shows the danger of such a course of

action. If we do not know what we're capable of, we cannot appreciate

measures taken to protect us from ourselves. 1 discussed the

European witch mania in the alien abduction context; 1 hope the

reader will forgive me for returning to it in its political context. It

is an aperture to human self-knowledge. If we focus on what was

considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and

secular authorities in the fifteenth- to seventeenth-century witch

hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-

century US Constitution and Bill of Rights become clear: includ-

ing trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and

against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the

press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of

Church and State. Friedrich von Spee (pronounced 'Shpay') was a Jesuit priest

who had the misfortune to hear the confessions of those accused

of witchcraft in the German city of Wurzburg (see Chapter 7).

1631, he published Cautio Criminalis (Precautions for Prosecu-

tors), which exposed the essence of this Church/State terrorism

against the innocent. Before he was punished he died of the

plague - as a parish priest serving the afflicted. Here is an excerpt

from his whistle-blowing book:

381

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Incredibly among us Germans, and especially (I am

ashamed to say) among Catholics, are popular supersti-

tions, envy, calumnies, backbiting, insinuations, and the

like, which, being neither punished nor refuted, stir up

suspicion of witchcraft. No longer God or nature, but

witches are responsible for everything. 2.

Hence everybody sets up a clamour that the magistrates

investigate the witches - whom only popular gossip has

made so numerous. 3.

Princes, therefore, bid their judges and counsellors bring

proceedings against the witches. 4.

The judges hardly know where to start, since they have

no evidence [indicia] or proof. 5.

Meanwhile, the people call this delay suspicious; and the

princes are persuaded by some informer or another to

this effect. 6.

In Germany, to offend these princes is a serious offence;

even clergymen approve whatever pleases them, not

caring by whom these princes (however well-intentioned)

have been instigated. 7.

At last, therefore, the judges yield to their wishes and

contrive to begin the trials. 8.

Other judges who still delay, afraid to get involved in this

ticklish matter, are sent a special investigator. In this

field of investigation, whatever inexperience or arro-

gance he brings to the job is held zeal for justice. His zeal

for justice is also whetted by hopes of profit, especially

with a poor and greedy agent with a large family, when

he receives as stipend so many dollars per head for each

witch burned, besides the incidental fees and perquisites

which investigating agents are allowed to extort at will

from those they summon. 9.

If a madman's ravings or some malicious and idle rumour

(for no proof of the scandal is ever needed) points to

some helpless old woman, she is the first to suffer. 10.

Yet to avoid the appearance that she is indicted solely on

the basis of rumour, without other proofs, a certain

presumption of guilt is obtained by posing the following

382

Science and Witchcraft

dilemma: either she has led an evil and improper life, or

she has led a good and proper one. If an evil one, then

she should be guilty. On the other hand, if she has led a

good life, this is just as damning; for witches dissemble

and try to appear especially virtuous. 11.

Therefore the old woman is put in prison. A new proof is

found through a second dilemma: she is afraid or not

afraid. If she is (hearing of the horrible tortures used

against witches), this is sure proof; for her conscience

accuses her. If she does not show fear (trusting in her

innocence), this too is a proof; for witches characteristi-

cally pretend innocence and wear a bold front. 12.

Lest these should be the only proofs, the investigator has

his snoopers, often depraved and infamous, ferret out all

her past life. This, of course, cannot be done without

turning up some saying or doing of hers which men so

disposed can easily twist or distort into evidence of

witchcraft. 13.

Any who have borne her ill now have ample opportunity

to bring against her whatever accusations they please;

and everyone says that the evidence is strong against her. 14.

And so she is hurried to the torture, unless, as often

happens, she was tortured on the very day of her arrest. 15.

In these trials nobody is allowed a lawyer or any means of

fair defence, for witchcraft is reckoned an exceptional

crime [of such enormity that all rules of legal procedure

may be suspended], and whoever ventures to defend the

prisoner falls himself under suspicion of witchcraft - as

well as those who dare to utter a protest in these cases

and to urge the judges to exercise prudence, for they are

forthwith labelled supporters of witchcraft. Thus every-

body keeps quiet for fear. 16.

So that it may seem that the woman has an opportunity to

defend herself, she is brought into court and the indica-

tions of her guilt are read and examined - if it can be

called an examination. 17.

Even though she denies these charges and satisfactorily

answers every accusation, no attention is paid and her

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

replies are not even recorded; all the indictments retain

their force and validity, however perfect her answers to

them. She is ordered back into prison, there to consider

more carefully whether she will persist in obstinacy - for,

since she has already denied her guilt, she is obstinate. 18.

Next day she is brought out again, and hears a decree of

torture - just as if she had never refuted the charges. 19.

Before torture, however, she is searched for amulets: her

entire body is shaved, and even those privy parts indicat-

ing the female sex are wantonly examined. 20.

What is so shocking about this?

Priests are treated the

same way. 21.

When the woman has been shaved and searched, she is

tortured to make her confess the truth - that is, to declare

what they want, for naturally anything else will not and

cannot be the truth. 22.

They start with the first degree, i .

e .

, the less severe

torture. Although exceedingly severe, it is light com-

pared to those tortures which follow. Wherefore if she

confesses, they say the woman has confessed without

torture!

23.

Now, what prince can doubt her guilt when he is told she

has confessed voluntarily, without torture?

24.

She is therefore put to death without scruple. But she

would have been executed even if she had not confessed;

for when once the torture has begun, the die is already

cast; she cannot escape, she has perforce to die. 25.

The result is the same whether she confesses or not. If

she confesses, her guilt is clear: she is executed. All

recantation is in vain, if she does not confess, the torture

is repeated - twice, thrice, four times. In exceptional

crimes, the torture is not limited in duration, severity, or

frequency. 26.

If, during the torture, the old woman contorts her

features with pain, they say she is laughing; if she loses

consciousness, she is sleeping or has bewitched herself

into taciturnity. And if she is taciturn, she deserves to be

burned alive, as lately has been done to some who,

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Science and Witchcraft

though several times tortured, would not say what the

investigators wanted. 27.

And even confessors and clergymen agree that she died

obstinate and impenitent; that she would not be con-

verted or desert her incubus, but kept faith with him. 28.

If, however, she dies under so much torture, they say the

devil broke her neck. 29.

Wherefore the corpse is buried underneath the gallows. 30.

On the other hand, if she does not die under torture, and

if some exceptionally scrupulous judge hesitates to tor-

ture her further without fresh proofs or to burn her

without her confession, she is kept in prison and more

harshly chained, there to rot until she yields, even if it

take a whole year. 3 1 .

She can never clear herself. The investigating committee

would feel disgraced if it acquitted a woman; once arrested

and in chains, she has to be guilty, by fair means or foul. 32.

Meanwhile, ignorant and headstrong priests harass the

wretched creature so that, whether truly or not, she will

confess herself guilty; unless she does so, they say, she

cannot be saved or partake of the sacraments. 33.

More understanding or learned priests cannot visit her in

prison lest they counsel her or inform the princes what goes

on. Nothing is more dreaded than that something be

brought to light to prove the innocence of the accused. Persons who try to do so are labelled troublemakers. 34.

While she is kept in prison and tortured, the judges invent

clever devices to build up new proofs of guilt to convict her

to her face, so that, when reviewing the trial, some univer-

sity faculty can confirm her burning alive. 35.

Some judges, to appear ultrascrupulous, have the woman

exorcized, transferred elsewhere, and tortured all over

again, to break her taciturnity; if she maintains silence, then

at last they can burn her. Now, in Heaven's name, I would

like to know, since she who confesses and she who does not

both perish alike, how can anybody, no matter how inno-

cent, escape?

O unhappy woman, why have you rashly

hoped?

Why did you not, on first entering prison, admit

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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

whatever they wanted?

Why, foolish and crazy woman, did

you wish to die so many times when you might have died

but once?

Follow my counsel, and, before undergoing all

these pains, say you are guilty and die. You will not escape,

for this were a catastrophic disgrace to the zeal of Germany. 36.

When, under stress of pain, the witch has confessed, her

plight is indescribable. Not only cannot she escape herself,

but she is also compelled to accuse others whom she does

not know, whose names are frequently put into her mouth

by the investigators or suggested by the executioner, or of

whom she has heard as suspected or accused. These in turn

are forced to accuse others, and these still others, so it goes

on: who can help seeing that it must go on and on?

37.

The judges must either suspend these trials (and so impute

their validity) or else burn their own folk, themselves, and

everybody else; for all sooner or later are falsely accused

and, if tortured, all are proved guilty. 38.

Thus eventually those who at first clamoured most loudly to

feed the flames are themselves involved, for they rashly

failed to see that their turn too would come. Thus Heaven

justly punishes those who with their pestilent tongues

created so many witches and sent so many innocent to the

stake ...

Von Spee is not explicit about the sickening methods of torture

employed. Here is an excerpt from an invaluable compilation. The

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Rossell Hope

Robbins (1959):

One might glance at some of the special tortures at Bamberg,

for example, such as the forcible feeding of the accused on

herrings cooked in salt, followed by denial of water - a

sophisticated method which went side by side with immersion

of the accused in baths of scalding water to which lime had

been added. Other ways with witches included the wooden

horse, various kinds of racks, the heated iron chair, leg vises

[Spanish boots], and large boots of leather or metal into

which (with the feet in them, of course) was poured boiling

386

Science and Witchcraft

water or molten lead. In the water torture, the question de

I'eau, water was poured down the throat of the accused, along

with a soft cloth to cause choking. The cloth was pulled out

quickly so that the entrails would be torn. The thumbscrews

[gresillons] were a vise designed to compress the thumbs or

the big toes to the root of the nails, so that the crushing of the

digit would cause excruciating pain. In addition, and more routinely applied, were the strappado and

squassation and still more ghastly tortures that I will avoid

describing. After torture, and with the instruments of torture in

plain view, the victim was asked to sign a statement. This was then

described as a 'free confession', voluntarily admitted to. At great personal risk, von Spee protested the witch mania. So

did a few others, mainly Catholic and Protestant clergy who had

witnessed these crimes at first hand - including Gianfrancesco

Ponzinibio in Italy, Cornelius Loos in Germany and Reginald Scot

in Britain in the sixteenth century; as well as Johann Mayfurth

('Listen, you money-hungry judges and bloodthirsty prosecutors,

the apparitions of the Devil are all lies') in Germany and Alonzo

Salazar de Frias in Spain in the seventeenth century. Along with

von Spee and the Quakers generally, they are heroes of our

species. Why are they not better known?

In A Candle in the Dark (1656), Thomas Ady addressed a key

question:

Some again will object and say, If Witches cannot kill, and do

many strange things by Witchcraft, why have many confessed

that they have done such Murthers, and other strange mat-

ters, whereof they have been accused?

To this I answer, If Adam and Eve in their innocency were

so easily overcome, and tempted to sin, how much more may

poor Creatures now after the Fall, by persuasions, promises,

and threatenings, by keeping from sleep, and continual

torture, be brought to confess that which is false and impossi-

ble, and contrary to the faith of a Christian to believe?

It was not until the eighteenth century that the possibility of

387

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

hallucination as a component in the persecution of witches was

seriously entertained; Bishop Francis Hutchinson, in his Historical

Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), wrote

Many a man hath verily believed he hath seen a spirit

externally before him, when it hath been only an internal

image dancing in his own brain. Because of the courage of these opponents of the witch mania, its

extension to the privileged classes, the danger it posed to the growing

institution of capitalism, and especially the spread of the ideas of the

European Enlightenment, witch burnings eventually disappeared. The last execution for witchcraft in Holland, cradle of the Enlighten-

ment, was in 1610; in England, 1684; America, 1692; France, 1745;

Germany, 1775; and Poland, 1793.

In Italy, the Inquisition was

condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century,

and inquisitorial torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church

until 1816.

The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft

and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches. The witch mania is shameful. How could we do it?

How could we

be so ignorant about ourselves and our weaknesses?

How could it

have happened in the most 'advanced', the most 'civilized' nations

then on Earth?

Why was it resolutely supported by conservatives,

monarchists and religious fundamentalists?

Why opposed by liberals,

Quakers and followers of the Enlightenment?

If we're absolutely

sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are

motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe

speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is

wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching

questions; that our main job is to believe and obey - then the witch

mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last

man. Note Friedrich von Spee's very first point, and the implication

that improved public understanding of superstition and scepticism

might have helped to short-circuit the whole train of causality. If we

fail to understand how it worked in the last round, we will not

recognize it as it emerges in the next. 'It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of

388

Science and Witchcraft

public opinion,' said Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minis-

ter. In George Orwell's novel 1984, the 'Big Brother' state

employs an army of bureaucrats whose only job is to alter the

records of the past so they conform to the interests of those

currently in power. 1984 was not just an engaging political fantasy;

it was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the re-writing of

history was institutionalized. Soon after Stalin took power, pic-

tures of his rival Leon Trotsky - a monumental figure in the 1905

and 1917 revolutions - began to disappear. Heroic and wholly

anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the

Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder

of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became

icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on

outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten storeys high, in muse-

ums, on postage stamps. New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older

generations began to feel that they remembered something of the

sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made

the accommodation between their real memories and what the

leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell

described as 'doublethink'.

Those who did not, those old Bolshe-

viks who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolu-

tion and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or

unreconstructed bourgeoisie or 'Trotskyites' or 'Trotsky-fascists',

and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in

public, and then executed. It is possible - given absolute control

over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of

hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to

accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold

that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or

megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey-

wrench into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase

public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guaran-

tee their eventual repetition. In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion

pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with televi-

sion in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restruc-

turing societal memories even without much attention from the

389

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining here is not that

each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special

therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather

that small numbers of people will have so much control over new

stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work

major changes in collective attitudes. We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-91, when

Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in

the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally - granted

commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intel-

ligence data - to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not

myself an admirer of Mr Hussein, but it was striking how quickly

he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard

of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for

generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we

that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always

reside in responsible hands?

Another contemporary example is the 'war' on drugs where the

government and munificently funded civic groups systematically

distort and even invent scientific evidence of adverse effects

(especially of marijuana), and in which no public official is

permitted even to raise the topic for open discussion. But it's hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, genera-

tions of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann

Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies ofTrotsky's History of

the Russian Revolution into the USSR, so our colleagues could know

a little about their own political beginnings. By the fiftieth anniver-

sary of the murder ofTrotsky (Stalin's assassin had cracked Trotsky's

head open with a hammer), Izvestia could extol Trotsky as 'a great

and irreproachable* revolutionary', and a German Communist pub-

lication went so far as to describe him as

fight[ing] for all of us who love human civilization, for whom

this civilization is our nationality. His murderer ...

tried, in

* Suggesting that the authorities have learned nothing from their history, except

substituting one historical figure for another on the list of Irreproachables. 390

Science and Witchcraft

killing him, to kill this civilization ...

[This] was a man who

had in his head the most valuable and best-organized brain

that was ever crushed by a hammer. Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a

very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include

control of major television networks and newspapers by a small

number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and indi-

viduals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in

many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in

political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the

separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media

expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations

control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers,

magazines, television, books and movies!

The proliferation of

cable television channels, cheap long-distance telephone calls, fax

machines, computer bulletin boards and networks, inexpensive

computer self-publishing and surviving instances of the traditional

liberal arts university curriculum are trends that might work in the

opposite direction. It's hard to tell how it's going to turn out. The business of scepticism is to be dangerous. Scepticism

challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, includ-

ing, say, high school students, habits of sceptical thought, they will

probably not restrict their scepticism to UFOs, aspirin commer-

cials and 35,000-year-old channellees. Maybe they'll start asking

awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or

religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of

those in power. Then where would we be?

Ethnocentrism, xenophobia and nationalism are these days rife in

many parts of the world. Government repression of unpopular

views is still widespread. False or misleading memories are

inculcated. For the defenders of such attitudes, science is disturb-

ing. It claims access to truths that are largely independent of

ethnic or cultural biases. By its very nature, science transcends

national boundaries. Put scientists working in the same field of

study together in a room and even if they share no common

391

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

spoken language, they will find a way to communicate. Science

itself is a transnational language. Scientists are naturally cosmo-

politan in attitude and are more likely to see through efforts to

divide the human family into many small and warring factions. 'There is no national science,' said the Russian playwright Anton

Chekhov, 'just as there is no national multiplication table.'

(Likewise, for many, there is no such thing as a national religion,

although the religion of nationalism has millions of adherents.)

In disproportionate numbers, scientists are found in the ranks

of social critics (or, less charitably, 'dissidents'), challenging the

policies and myths of their own nations. The heroic names of the

physicists Andrei Sakharov* in the former USSR, Albert Einstein

and Leo Szilard in the United States, and Fang Li-zhu in China

spring readily enough to mind, the first and last risking their lives. Especially in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons,

scientists have been portrayed as ethical cretins. This is an

injustice, considering all those who, sometimes at considerable

personal peril, have spoken out against their own countries'

misapplications of science and technology. For example, the chemist Linus Pauling (1901-94) was, more

than any other person, responsible for the Limited Test Ban

Treaty of 1963, which halted above-ground explosions of nuclear

weapons by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United

Kingdom. He mounted a blistering campaign of moral outrage

and scientific data, made more credible by the fact that he was a

Nobel laureate. In the American press, he was generally vilified

for his troubles, and in the 1950s the State Department cancelled

his passport because he had been insufficiently anti-communist. His Nobel Prize was awarded for the application of quantum

mechanical insights - resonances, and what is called hybridization

* As a much-decorated 'Hero' of the Soviet Union, and privy to its nuclear

secrets, Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote - in a book published

in the West and widely distributed in samizdat in the USSR - 'Freedom of

thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths,

which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demogogues, can be

transformed into bloody dictatorships.' He was thinking of both East and West. I would add that free thought is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for

democracy. 392

Science and Witchcraft

of orbitals - to explain the nature of the chemical bond that joins

atoms together into molecules. These ideas are now the bread and

butter of modern chemistry. But in the Soviet Union, Pauling's

work on structural chemistry was denounced as incompatible with

dialectical materialism and declared off-limits to Soviet chemists. Undaunted by this criticism East and West - indeed, not even

slowed down - he went on to do monumental work on how

anaesthetics work, identified the cause of sickle cell anaemia (a

single nucleotide substitution in DNA), and showed how the

evolutionary history of life might be read by comparing the DNAs

of various organisms. He was hot on the trail of the structure of

DNA; Watson and Crick were consciously rushing to get there

before Pauling. The verdict on his assessment of Vitamin C is

apparently still out. 'That man is a real genius' was Albert

Einstein's assessment. In all this time he continued to work for peace and amity. When

Ann and 1 once asked Pauling about the roots of his dedication to

social issues, he gave a memorable reply: '1 did it to be worthy of

the respect of my wife,' Helen Ava Pauling. He won a second

Nobel Prize, this one in peace, for his work on the nuclear test

ban, becoming the only person in history to win two unshared

Nobel Prizes. There were some who saw Pauling as a troublemaker. Those

unhappy about social change may be tempted to view science itself

with suspicion. Technology is safe, they tend to think, readily

guided and controlled by industry and government. But pure

science, science for its own sake, science as curiosity, science that

might lead anywhere and challenge anything, that's another story. Certain areas of pure science are the unique pathway to future

technologies - true enough - but the attitudes of science, if

applied broadly, can be perceived as dangerous. Through salaries,

social pressures, and the distribution of prestige and awards,

societies try to herd scientists into some reasonably safe middle

ground - between too little long-term technological progress and

too much short-term social criticism. Unlike Pauling, many scientists consider their job to be science,

narrowly defined, and believe that engaging in politics or social

criticism is not just a distraction from but antithetical to the

393

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

scientific life. As mentioned earlier, during the Manhattan

Project, the successful World War Two US effort to build nuclear

weapons before the Nazis did, certain participating scientists

began to have reservations, the more so when it became clear how

immensely powerful these weapons were. Some, such as Leo

Szilard, James Franck, Harold Urey and Robert R. Wilson, tried

to call the attention of political leaders and the public (especially

after the Nazis were defeated) to the dangers of the forthcoming

arms race, which they foresaw very well, with the Soviet Union. Others argued that policy matters were outside their jurisdiction. 'I was put on Earth to make certain discoveries,' said Enrico

Fermi, 'and what the political leaders do with them is not my

business.' But even so, Fermi was so appalled by the dangers of

the thermonuclear weapon Edward Teller was advocating that he

co-authored a famous document urging the United States not to

build it, calling it 'evil'.

Jeremy Stone, the president of the Federation of American

Scientists, has described Teller - whose efforts to justify thermo-

nuclear weapons I described in a previous chapter - in these

words:

Edward Teller ...

insisted, at first for personal intellectual

reasons and later for geopolitical reasons, that a hydrogen

bomb be built. Using tactics of exaggeration and even smear,

he successfully manipulated the policy-making process for

five decades, denouncing all manner of arms control meas-

ures and promoting arms-race-escalating programs of many

kinds. The Soviet Union, hearing of his H-bomb project, built its

own H-bomb. As a direct consequence of the unusual person-

ality of this particular individual and of the power of the

H-bomb, the world may have risked a level of annihilation

that might not otherwise have transpired, or might have come

later and under better political controls. If so, no scientist has ever had more influence on the

risks that humanity has run than Edward Teller, and

Teller's general behavior throughout the arms race was

reprehensible ...

394

Science and Witchcraft

Edward Teller's fixation on the H-bomb may have led him

to do more to imperil life on this planet than any other

individual in our species ...

Compared to Teller, the leaders of Western atomic science

were frequently babes in the political woods - their leader-

ship having been determined by their professional skills

rather than by, in this case, their political skills. My purpose here is not to castigate a scientist for succumbing to

very human passions, but to reiterate that new imperative: the

unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be

accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern

by the scientific community, as well as the most broadly based

public education into the importance of science and democracy. 395

Real Patriots Ask Questions*

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen

from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to

keep the government from falling into error. US Supreme Court

Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1950

I t is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread

torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are

much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic

governments. Why?

Because the rulers of the former are much

less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the

rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used

to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I

think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment?

Humans

are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress,

every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Secu-

rity Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in

funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is

an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely

* Written with Ann Druyan. 396

Real Patriots Ask Questions

available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi

Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Com-

munism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an

experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experi-

ment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science

and technology and next to nothing on defence - and finding that

their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are

available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancou-

ver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in

Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In

almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not

performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless,

to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The

great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments

because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable. There is no nation on Earth today optimized for the middle of

the twenty-first century. We face an abundance of subtle and

complex problems. We need therefore subtle and complex solu-

tions. Since there is no deductive theory of social organization,

our only recourse is scientific experiment - trying out sometimes

on small scales (community, city and state level, say) a wide range

of alternatives. One of the perquisites of power on becoming

prime minister in China in the fifth century BC was that you got to

construct a model state in your home district or province. It was

Confucius' chief life failing, he lamented, that he never got to try. Even a casual scrutiny of history reveals that we humans have a

sad tendency to make the same mistakes again and again. We're

afraid of strangers or anybody who's a little different from us. When we get scared, we start pushing people around. We have

readily accessible buttons that release powerful emotions when

pressed. We can be manipulated into utter senselessness by clever

politicians. Give us the right kind of leader and, like the most

suggestible subjects of the hypnotherapists, we'll gladly do just

about anything he wants - even things we know to be wrong. The

framers of the Constitution were students of history. In recogni-

tion of the human condition, they sought to invent a means that

397

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

would keep us free in spite of ourselves. Some of the opponents of the US Constitution insisted that it

would never work; that a republican form of government spanning

a land with 'such dissimilar climates, economies, morals, politics,

and peoples,' as Governor George Clinton ofNew York said, was

impossible; that such a government and such a Constitution, as

Patrick Henry of Virginia declared, 'contradicts all the experience

of the world'.

The experiment was tried anyway. Scientific findings and attitudes were common in those who

invented the United States. The supreme authority, outranking

any personal opinion, any book, any revelation, was - as the

Declaration of Independence puts it - 'the laws of nature and of

nature's GOD'.

Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and

America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At

the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly

appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines;

others to William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the

blood. Late in life Adams wrote, 'All mankind are chemists from

their cradles to their graves ...

The Material Universe is a

chemical experiment.' James Madison used chemical and biologi-

cal metaphors in The Federalist Papers. The American revolution-

aries were creatures of the European Enlightenment which

provides an essential background for understanding the origins

and purpose of the United States. 'Science and its philosophical corollaries,' wrote the American

historian Clinton Rossiter

were perhaps the most important intellectual force shaping

the destiny of eighteenth-century America ...

Franklin was

only one of a number of forward-looking colonists who

recognized the kinship of scientific method and democratic

procedure. Free inquiry, free exchange of information, opti-

mism, self-criticism, pragmatism, objectivity - all these ingre-

dients of the coming republic were already active in the

republic of science that flourished in the eighteenth century. Thomas Jefferson was a scientist. That's how he described him-

self. When you visit his home at Monticello, Virginia, the moment

Real Patriots Ask Questions

you enter its portals you find ample evidence of his scientific

interests - not just in his immense and varied library, but in

copying machines, automatic doors, telescopes and other instru-

ments, some at the cutting edge of early nineteenth-century tech-

nology. Some he invented, some he copied, some he purchased. He

compared the plants and animals in America with Europe's, uncov-

ered fossils, used the calculus in the design of a new plough. He

mastered Newtonian physics. Nature destined him, he said, to be a

scientist, but there were no opportunities for scientists in pre-

revolutionary Virginia. Other, more urgent, needs took precedence. He threw himself into the historic events that were transpiring

around him. Once independence was won, he said, later generations

could devote themselves to science and scholarship. Jefferson was an early hero of mine, not because of his scientific

interests (although they very much helped to mould his political

philosophy), but because he, almost more than anyone else, was

responsible for the spread of democracy throughout the world. The

idea - breathtaking, radical and revolutionary at the time (in many

places in the world, it still is) is that not kings, not priests, not big city

bosses, not dictators, not a military cabal, not a de facto conspiracy of

the wealthy, but ordinary people, working together, are to rule the

nations. Not only was Jefferson a leading theoretician of this cause;

he was also involved in the most practical way, helping to bring about

the great American political experiment that has, all over the world,

been admired and emulated since. He died at Monticello on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after

the colonies issued that stirring document, written by Jefferson,

called the Declaration of Independence. It was denounced by

conservatives worldwide. Monarchy, aristocracy and state-supported

religion - that's what conservatives were defending then. In a letter

composed a few days before his death, he wrote that it was the 'light

of science' that had demonstrated that 'the mass of mankind has not

been born with saddles on their backs', nor were a favoured few born

'booted and spurred'.

He had written in the Declaration of Inde-

pendence that we all must have the same opportunities, the same

'unalienable' rights. And if the definition of 'all' was disgracefully

incomplete in 1776, the spirit of the Declaration was generous

enough that today 'all' is far more inclusive. 399

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

Jefferson was a student of history - not just the compliant and

safe history that praises our own time or country or ethnic group,

but the real history of real humans, our weaknesses as well as our

strengths. History taught him that the rich and powerful will steal

and oppress if given half a chance. He described the governments

of Europe, which he saw at first hand as the American ambassa-

dor to France. Under the pretence of government, he said, they

had divided their nations into two classes: wolves and sheep. Jefferson taught that every government degenerates when it is left

to the rulers alone, because rulers - by the very act of ruling -

misuse the public trust. The people themselves, he said, are the

only prudent repository of power. But he worried that the people - and the argument goes back to

Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. So he advocated

safeguards, insurance policies. One was the constitutional separa-

tion of powers; accordingly, various groups, some pursuing their

own selfish interests, balance one another, preventing any one of

them from running away with the country: the Executive, Legisla-

tive and Judicial Branches; the House and the Senate; the States

and the Federal Government. He also stressed, passionately and

repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the

risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to

involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said,

the wolves will take over. Here's how he put it in Notes on

Virginia, stressing how the powerful and unscrupulous find zones

of vulnerability they can exploit:

In every government on earth is some trace of human

weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which

cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open, culti-

vate and improve. Every government degenerates when

trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people them-

selves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render

even them safe, their minds must be improved ...

Jefferson had little to do with the actual writing of the US

Constitution; as it was being formulated, he was serving as

American minister to France. When he read its provisions, he was

400

Real Patriots Ask Questions

pleased, but with two reservations. One deficiency: no limit was

provided on the number of terms the President could serve. This,

Jefferson feared, was a way for a President to become a king, in fact

if not in law. The other major deficiency was the absence of a bill of

rights. The citizen, the average person, was insufficiently protected,

Jefferson thought, from the inevitable abuses of those in power. He advocated freedom of speech, in part so that even wildly

unpopular views could be expressed, so that deviations from the

conventional wisdom could be offered for consideration. Personally

he was an extremely amiable man, reluctant to criticize even his

sworn enemies. He displayed a bust of his arch-adversary Alexander

Hamilton in the vestibule at Monticello. Nevertheless, he believed

that the habit of scepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible

citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared

to the cost of ignorance, of leaving the government to the wolves. He

taught that the country is safe only when the people rule. Part of the duty of citizenship is not to be intimidated into

conformity. 1 wish that the oath of citizenship taken by recent

immigrants, and the pledge that students routinely recite,

included something like 'I promise to question everything my

leaders tell me'.

That would be really to Thomas Jefferson's point. 'I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my

independence of thought. 1 promise to educate myself so I can

make my own judgements.'

1 also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the

Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President

takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation. When we consider the founders of our nation - Jefferson,

Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe,

Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others - we have before

us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political

leaders. They were well educated. Products of the European

Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human

fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. They were fluent in the

English language. They wrote their own speeches. They were

realistic and practical, and at the same time motivated by high

principles. They were not checking the pollsters on what to think

this week. They knew what to think. They were comfortable with

401

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long-term thinking, planning even further ahead than the next

election. They were self-sufficient, not requiring careers as politi-

cians or lobbyists to make a living. They were able to bring out the

best in us. They were interested in and, at least two of them,

fluent in science. They attempted to set a course for the United

States into the far future - not so much by establishing laws as by

setting limits on what kinds of laws could be passed. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights have done remarkably

well, constituting, despite human weaknesses, a machine able,

more often than not, to correct its own trajectory. At that time, there were only about two and a half million

citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred

times more. So if there were ten people of the calibre of Thomas

Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas

Jeffersons today. Where are they?

One reason the Constitution is a daring and courageous document

is that it allows for continuing change, even of the form of

government itself, if the people so wish. Because no one is wise

enough to foresee which ideas may answer urgent societal needs -

even if they're counterintuitive and have been troubling in the

past - this document tries to guarantee the fullest and freest

expression of views. There is, of course, a price. Most of us are for freedom of

expression when there's a danger that our own views will be

suppressed. We're not all that upset, though, when views we

despise encounter a little censorship here and there. But within

certain narrowly circumscribed limits - Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes's famous example was causing panic by falsely crying 'fire'

in a crowded theatre - great liberties are permitted in America:

• Gun collectors are free to use portraits of the Chief Justice, the

Speaker of the House, or the Director of the FBI for target

practice; outraged civic-minded citizens are free to burn in

effigy the President of the United States. • Even if they mock Judaeo-Christian-Islamic values, even if they

ridicule everything most of us hold dear, devil-worshippers (if

402

Real Patriots Ask Questions

there are any) are entitled to practise their religion, so long as

they break no constitutionally valid law. • A purported scientific article or popular book asserting the

'superiority' of one race over another may not be censored by

the government, no matter how pernicious it is; the cure for a

fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of

ideas. • Individuals may, if they wish, praise the lives and politics of such

undisputed mass murderers as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao

Zedong. Even detestable opinions have a right to be heard. • Individuals or groups are free to argue that a Jewish or Masonic

conspiracy is taking over the world, or that the Federal

government is in league with the Devil. The system founded by Jefferson, Madison and their colleagues

offers means of expression to those who do not understand its

origins and wish to replace it by something very different. For

example, Tom Clark, Attorney General and therefore chief law

enforcement officer of the United States, in 1948 offered this

suggestion: 'Those who do not believe in the ideology of the

United States shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.'

But if there is one key and characteristic US ideology, it is that

there are no mandatory and no forbidden ideologies. Some more

recent 1990s cases: John Brockhoeft, in jail for bombing an

abortion clinic in Cincinnati, wrote, in a 'pro-life' newsletter:

I'm a very narrow-minded, intolerant, reactionary, Bible-

thumping fundamentalist ...

a zealot and fanatic ...

The

reason the United States was once a great nation, besides

being blessed by God, is because she was founded on truth,

justice, and narrow-mindedness. Randall Terry, founder of 'Operation Rescue', an organization that

blockades abortion clinics, told a congregation in August 1993:

Let a wave of intolerance wash over you ...

Yes, hate is

good ...

Our goal is a Christian nation ...

We are called by

God to conquer this country ...

We don't want pluralism. 403

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The expression of such views is protected, and properly so, under

the Bill of Rights, even if those protected would abolish the Bill of

Rights if they got the chance. The protection for the rest of us is to

use that same Bill of Rights to get across to every citizen the

indispensability of the Bill of Rights. What means to protect themselves against human fallibility,

what error-protection machinery do these alternative doctrines

and institutions offer?

An infallible leader?

Race?

Nationalism?

Wholesale disengagement from civilization, except for explosives

and automatic weapons?

How can they be sure - especially in the

darkness of the twentieth century?

Don't they need candles?

In his celebrated little book, On Liberty, the English philoso-

pher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is 'a

peculiar evil'.

If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the

'opportunity of exchanging error for truth'; and if it's wrong, we

are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in 'its collision

with error'.

If we know only our own side of the argument, we

hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by

rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth. Mill also wrote, 'If society lets any considerable number of its

members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on

by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to

blame.' Jefferson made the same point even more strongly: 'If a

nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civiliza-

tion, it expects what never was and never will be.' In a letter to

Madison, he continued the thought: 'A society that will trade a

little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.'

When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in

substantive debate, people have been known to change their

minds. It can happen. For example, Hugo Black, in his youth, was

a member of the Ku Klux Klan; he later became a Supreme Court

justice and was one of the leaders in the historic Supreme Court

decisions, partly based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitu-

tion, that affirmed the civil rights of all Americans: it was said that

when he was a young man, he dressed up in white robes and

scared black folks; when he got older, he dressed up in black robes

and scared white folks. In matters of criminal justice, the Bill of Rights recognizes the

404

Real Patriots Ask Questions

temptation that may be felt by police, prosecutors and the

judiciary to intimidate witnesses and expedite punishment. The

criminal-justice system is fallible: innocent people might be pun-

ished for crimes they did not commit; governments are perfectly

capable of framing those who, for reasons unconnected with the

purported crime, they do not like. So the Bill of Rights protects

defendants. A kind of cost -benefit analysis is made. The guilty

may on occasion be set free so that the innocent will not be

punished. This is not only a moral virtue; it also inhibits the

misuse of the criminal-justice system to suppress unpopular

opinions or despised minorities. It is part of the error-correction

machinery. New ideas, invention and creativity in general, always spearhead a

kind of freedom, a breaking out from hobbling constraints. Freedom is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment

of science which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain

a totalitarian state and be technologically competitive. At the

same time, science - or rather its delicate mix of openness and

scepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate - is a

prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in

an industrial and highly technological society. Once you questioned the religious insistence on the prevailing

view that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, why should

you accept the repeated and confident assertions by religious

leaders that God sent kings to rule over us?

In the seventeenth

century, it was easy to whip English and Colonial juries into a

frenzy over this impiety or that heresy. They were willing to

torture people to death for their beliefs. By the late eighteenth

century, they weren't so sure. Rossiter again (from Seedtime of the Republic, 1953):

Under the pressure of the American environment, Christian-

ity grew more humanistic and temperate - more tolerant with

the struggle of the sects, more liberal with the growth of

optimism and rationalism, more experimental with the rise of

science, more individualistic with the advent of democracy. Equally important, increasing numbers of colonists, as a

405

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

legion of preachers loudly lamented, were turning secular in

curiosity and skeptical in attitude. The Bill of Rights uncoupled religion from the state, in part

because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of

mind, each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth

and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others. Often, the leaders and practitioners of absolutist religions were

unable to perceive any middle ground or recognize that the truth

might draw upon and embrace apparently contradictory doctrines. The framers of the Bill of Rights had before them the example

of England, where the ecclesiastical crime of heresy and the

secular crime of treason had become nearly indistinguishable. Many of the early colonists had come to America fleeing religious

persecution, although some of them were perfectly happy to

persecute other people for their beliefs. The founders of our

nation recognized that a close relation between the government

and any of the quarrelsome religions would be fatal to freedom -

and injurious to religion. Justice Black (in the Supreme Court

decision Engel v. Vitale, 1962) described the Establishment Clause

of the First Amendment this way:

Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that

a union of government and religion tends to destroy govern-

ment and degrade religion. Moreover, here too the separation of powers works. Each sect

and cult, as Walter Savage Landor once noted, is a moral check

on the others: 'Competition is as wholesome in religion as in

commerce.' But the price is high: This competition is an

impediment to religious bodies acting in concert to address the

common good. Rossiter concludes:

the twin doctrines of separation of church and state and

liberty of individual conscience are the marrow of our democ-

racy, if not indeed America's most magnificent contribution

to the freeing of Western man. 406

Real Patriots Ask Questions

Now it's no good to have such rights if they're not used - a right of

free speech when no one contradicts the government, freedom of

the press when no one is willing to ask the tough questions, a right

of assembly when there are no protests, universal suffrage when

less than half the electorate votes, separation of church and state

when the wall of separation is not regularly repaired. Through

disuse they can become no more than votive objects, patriotic

lip-service. Rights and freedoms: use 'em or lose 'em. Due to the foresight of the framers of the Bill of Rights - and

even more so to all those who, at considerable personal risk,

insisted on exercising those rights - it's hard now to bottle up free

speech. School library committees, the immigration service, the

police, the FBI or the ambitious politician looking to score cheap

votes, may attempt it from time to time, but sooner or later the

cork pops. The Constitution is, after all, the law of the land,

public officials are sworn to uphold it, and activists and the courts

episodically hold their feet to the fire. However, through lowered educational standards, declining

intellectual competence, diminished zest for substantive debate,

and social sanctions against scepticism, our liberties can be slowly

eroded and our rights subverted. The founders understood this

well: 'The time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is

while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united,' said Thomas

Jefferson. From the conclusion of this [Revolutionary] war we shall be

going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every

moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten,

therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget

themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will

never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the

conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made

heavier and heavier, 'til our rights shall revive or expire in a

convulsion. Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you

don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them,

should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen -

or the citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such

rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're

unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands

of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their

own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country,

we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the

reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency,

humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that

we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands

between us and the enveloping darkness. 408

Acknowledgements

I t has been my great pleasure over many years to teach a Senior

Seminar on Critical Thinking at Cornell University. I've been

able to select students from all over the University on the basis

both of ability, and of cultural and disciplinary diversity. We stress

written assignments and oral argumentation. Towards the end of

the course, students select a range of wildly controversial social

issues in which they have major emotional investments. Paired

two-by-two they prepare for a succession of end-of-semester oral

debates. A few weeks before the debates, however, they are

informed that it is the task of each to present the point of view of

the opponent in a way that's satisfactory to the opponent - so the

opponent will say, 'Yes, that's a fair presentation of my views.' In

the joint written debate they explore their differences, but also

how the debate process has helped them better to understand the

opposing point of view. Some of the topics in this book were first

presented to these students; I have learned much from their

reception and criticism of my ideas, and want to thank them here. I'm also grateful to Cornell's Department of Astronomy, and its

Chair, Yervant Terzian, for permitting me to teach the course,

which, although labelled Astronomy 490, presents only a little

astronomy. Some of this book has also been presented in Parade magazine,

a supplement to Sunday newspapers all over North America, with

some 83 million readers each week. The vigorous feedback I've

409

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

received from Parade readers has greatly enhanced my under-

standing of the issues described in this book and the variety of

public attitudes. I have in several places excerpted some of my

mail from Parade readers which, it seems to me, has provided a

kind of finger on the pulse of the citizenry of the United States. The Editor-in-Chief of Parade, Walter Anderson, and the Senior

Editor, David Currier, as well as the editorial and research staff of

this remarkable magazine have in many cases greatly improved

my presentation. They also have permitted opinions to be

expressed that might not have made it into print in mass-market

publications less dedicated to the First Amendment of the US

Constitution. Some portions of the text first appeared in The

Washington Post and The New York Times. The last chapter is

based in part on an address I had the pleasure of delivering on 4

July 1992 from the East Portico at Monticello - the 'back of the

nickel' - on the occasion of the induction to US citizenship of

people from thirty-one other nations. My opinions on democracy, the method of science and public

education have been influenced by enormous numbers of people

over the years, many of whom I mention in the body of the text. But I would like to single out here the inspiration I have received

from Martin Gardner, Isaac Asimov, Philip Morrison and Henry

Steele Commager. There is not room to thank the many others

who have helped provide understanding and lucid examples, or

who have corrected errors of omission or commission, but I want

them all to know how deeply grateful I am to them. I must

however explicitly thank the following friends and colleagues for

critically reviewing earlier drafts of this book: Bill Aldridge; Susan

Blackmore; William Cromer; Fred Frankel; Kendrick Frazier;

Martin Gardner; Ira Glasser; Fred Golden; Kurt Gottfried;

Lester Grinspoon; Philip Klass; Paul Kurtz; Elizabeth Loftus;

David Morrison; Richard Ofshe; Jay Orear; Albert Pennybacker;

Frank Press; Theodore Roszak; Dorion Sagan; David Saperstein;

Robert Seiple; Steven Soter; Jeremy Stone; Peter Sturrock and

Yervant Terzian. I also am very grateful to my literary agent, Morton Janklow,

and members of his staff for wise counsel; Roger Houghton, my

editor at Headline Book Publishing; William Barnett for ushering

410

Acknowledgements

the manuscript through its final phases; Andrea Barnett, Laurel

Parker, Karenn Gobrecht, Cindi Vita Vogel, Ginny Ryan and

Christopher Ruser for their assistance; and the Cornell Library

system, including the rare books collection on mysticism and

superstition originally compiled by the University's first president,

Andrew Dickson White. Parts of four of the chapters in this book were written with my

wife and long-time collaborator, Ann Druyan, who is also the

elected Secretary of the Federation of American Scientists - an

organization founded in 1945 by the original Manhattan Project

scientists to monitor the ethical use of science and high tech-

nology. She has also provided enormously helpful guidance,

suggestions and criticism on content and style throughout the

book and at every stage of writing it over the course of nearly a

decade. 1 have learned from her more than I can say. 1 know how

lucky I am to find in the same person someone whose advice and

judgement, sense of humour and courageous vision 1 so much

admire, who is also the love of my life. 411

References

(a few citations and suggestions for further reading)

CHAPTER I The Most Precious Thing

Martin Gardner, 'Doug Henning and the Giggling Guru', Skepti-

cal Inquirer, May/June 1995, pp. 9-11, 54.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, 'The Psychology of Prefer-

ences', Scientific American, vol 246 (1982), pp. 160-173.

Ernest Mandel, Trotsky as Alternative (London: Verso, 1995), p. 110 .

Maureen O'Hara, 'Of Myths and Monkeys: A Critical Look at

Critical Mass', in Ted Schultz, ed., The Fringes of Reason (see

below), pp. 182-186.

Max Perutz, Is Science Necessary?

Essays on Science and Scientists

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Ted Schultz, ed., The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog:

A Field Guide to New Age Frontiers, Unusual Beliefs & Eccentric

Sciences (New York: Harmony, 1989).

412

References

Xianghong Wu, 'Paranormal in China', Skeptical Briefs, vol 5

(1995), no. l,pp. 1-3,14.

J. Peder Zane, 'Soothsayers as Business Advisers', New York

Times, 11 September 1994, sec. 4, p. 2.

CHAPTER 2 Science and Hope

Albert Einstein, 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies', pp. 35-65 (originally published as 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Kor-

per', Annalen der Physik 17 [1905], pp. 891-921), in H. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski and H. Weyl, The Principle of Relativity: A

Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theoiy of

Relativity (New York: Dover, 1923).

Harry Houdini, Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (Buffalo,

NY: Prometheus Books, 1981).

CHAPTER 3 The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars

John Michell, Natural Likeness: Faces and Figures in Nature (New

York: E. P. Dutton, 1979).

Carl Sagan and Paul Fox, 'The Canals of Mars: An Assessment

after Mariner 9', Icarus, vol 25 (1972), pp. 601-612.

CHAPTER 4 Aliens

E. U. Condon, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects

(New York: Bantam Books, 1969).

Philip J. Klass, Skeptics UFO Newsletter, Washington, DC, vari-

ous issues. (Address: 404 'N' St. SW, Washington, DC 20024.)

Charles Mackay, Extraordinaiy Popular Delusions and the Madness

413

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

of Crowds (first edition published in 1841) (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1974, 1932) (also, New York: Gordon Press,

1991).

Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies!

A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer

Myth (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press,

1994).

Donald B. Rice, 'No Such Thing as "Aurora" Washington Post,

27 December 1992, p. 10.

Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, eds., UFOs -A Scientific Debate

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972).

Jim Schnabel, Round in Circles: Physicists, Poltergeists, Prank-

sters and the Secret Histoiy of the Cropwatchers (London:

Penguin Books, 1994) (first published in Great Britain by

Hamish Hamilton in 1993).

CHAPTER 6 Hallucinations

K. Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, 'Sudden Religious Conversions in

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy', British Journal of Psychiatry, vol 117

(1970), pp. 497-507.

Michael A. Persinger, 'Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LV. Predicting the Details of Visitor Experiences and the Personality

of Experients: The Temporal Lobe Factor', Perceptual and Motor

Skills, vol 68 (1989), pp. 55-65.

R. K. Siegel and L. J. West, eds., Hallucinations: Behavior, Expe-

rience and Theory (New York: Wiley, 1975).

CHAPTER 7 The Demon-Haunted World

Katherine Mary Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins,

414

References

Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures (New York:

Pantheon, 1976), pp. 239-242.

Thomas E. Bullard, 'UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural

Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological Guise', Journal of

American Folklore, vol 102, no. 404 (April- June 1989), pp. 147-170.

Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (New York: Basic Books,

1975).

Ted Daniel, Millennial Prophecy Report, The Millennium Watch

Institute, P. O. Box 34201, Philadelphia, PA 19101-4021, various

issues. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

Volume I, AD 180-395 (New York: The Modern Library, n. d.),

pp. 410, 361,432.

Martin Kottmeyer, 'Entirely Unpredisposed', Magonia, January

1990.

Martin S. Kottmeyer, 'Gauche Encounters: Badfilms and the

UFO Mythos' (unpublished manuscript).

John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New

York: Scribner's, 1994).

John E. Mack, Nightmares and Human Conflict (Boston: Little

Brown, 1970), pp. 227, 228.

Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, Religion and Culture: An Introduction

to Anthropology of Religion (Prospect Heights, 1L: Waveland Press,

1989) (originally published in 1968 by Macmillan), pp. 286 IT

Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery,

1969).

415

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

CHAPTER 8 On the Distinction Between True and Fake Visions

William A. Christian, Jr, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renais-

sance Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

S. Ceci, M. L. Huffman, E. Smith and E. Loftus, 'Repeatedly

Thinking About a Non-Event: Source Misattributions Among

Pre-Schoolers', Consciousness and Cognition, vol 3 (1994) pp. 388-407.

CHAPTER 9 Therapy

Anonymous, 'Trial in Woman's Blinding Offers Chilling Glimpse

of Hoodoo', New York Times, 25 September 1994, p. 23.

Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for

Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Perennial

Library, 1988) (second and third editions, 1993 and 1994).

Richard J. Boylan and Lee K. Boylan, Close Extraterrestrial

Encounters: Positive Experiences with Mysterious Visitors (Tigard,

OR: Wild Flower Press, 1994).

Gail S. Goodman, Jainjian Qin, Bette L. Bottoms and Philip R. Shaver, 'Characteristics and Sources of Allegations of Ritualistic

Child Abuse', Final Report, Grant 90CA1405, to the National

Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1994.

David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: First-Hand Accounts of UFO

Abductions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 293.

Carl Gustav Jung, Introduction to The Unobstructed Universe by

Stewart Edward White (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941).

Kenneth V. Lanning, 'Investigator's Guide to Allegations of

"Ritual" Child Abuse' (Washington: FBI, January 1992).

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

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