50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Part 4

We all would be better off if we understood more about how our brains can mislead us when it comes to seeing and remembering. Perhaps, then, visual miscues and memory mistakes wouldn't trip us up so often. But this necessary knowledge can be harsh. Sometimes after learning what scientists have discovered about the workings of the human brain, I want to curl up in the fetal position and cry. Much of what I had a.s.sumed about the way in which we perceive the world around us has turned out to be far off the mark. For example, we don't actually "see" anything. What really happens is that the mind processes patterns received from the optic nerves and then the mind creates pictures of what it decides the scene being stared at is-or should be.7 And memories? Forget about it.

A 2011 study found that more than half of the public, 63 percent, think that memory works like a video camera.8 However, as mentioned in chapter 1, our brains do not record what we see, hear, and experience; and memory is not a simply playback of the recording. That's not even close to what happens when we remember things. There is not some sort of organic high-tech audio-visual record and playback system in your head. The way in which human memory actually works is more like having a little old man who lives inside your skull and tells you stories about what you saw or experienced in the past. But every time he tells you one of these stories about your past, he changes it by leaving out some parts and adding other parts that never happened. He might even decide to change the order of events, which means that the storyline in your head won't match reality. The old man in your head does this because he decides it's best for you to remember it that way. He alters your memories in ways he believes make them more sensible and more useful to you. Usually he's right, most of our memories do need to be edited and condensed to be functional. But sometimes this process causes problems, like in courtrooms, for example, where many innocent people have been sent to prison based on the inaccurate memories of witnesses. This is one more reason to be skeptical when considering eyewitness accounts of UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, angels, and so on, no matter how credible and sincere the person telling the story may be.

WHAT GORILLA?.

Ever heard of inattentional blindness? If not, you better get up to speed on it because things are happening in front of your eyes all the time that you aren't seeing. Wizards, magicians, shamans, and pickpockets figured this out centuries ago. Because of the way the brain functions, we can be shockingly bad at noticing things. For details on inattentional blindness and other important brain phenomena that impact how we perceive reality, I recommend the books Sleights of Mind (by neuroscientists Stephen L. Macknic and Susana Martinez-Conde) and Invisible Gorilla (by cognitive psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons). The authors of Invisible Gorilla are the researchers who conducted the now-famous experiment in which they asked people to count the number of times players on one team pa.s.sed a basketball in a short film. (If you want to test yourself, don't read any further until after viewing the video.9) The test is challenging, as players circle while pa.s.sing the ball while another team is doing the same thing. In the middle of the film, a woman in a gorilla suit walks into view, thumps her chest, lingers for a moment in the middle of the scene, and then walks off. The gorilla is on screen for about nine seconds. This experiment has been conducted numerous times with consistent results. About half of test subjects fail to notice the gorilla. It seems impossible, but it's true, half never see a gorilla right in front of their alert mind and open eyes! And it's not a question of intelligence or education. Harvard students fared no better than nonstudents. This is the "illusion of attention," scary stuff if you think about. It means we can stare directly at an object and miss something very unusual or important that is literally right next to or even pa.s.sing in front of the target of our attention. We may think we see everything we need to see when something is right front of our open eyes, but often this is not the case. This is how human brains work, and it has obvious implications for many things-including UFO sightings.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE.

Virtually anyone can be fooled by an unexpected object or light in the sky. Philip Plait, a popular astronomer and skeptic, once had his own encounter with UFOs. He was waiting to watch a shuttle night-launch in Florida when he noticed a dozen or so unusual lights hovering in the distance. Even with binoculars he couldn't tell what they were. He eliminated likely objects such as planes or satellites and became increasingly excited until he was finally able to see that they were ducks. Yes, a world-cla.s.s astronomer who lectures and writes with great pa.s.sion about the virtues of skepticism-especially when it comes to UFO sightings-was perilously close to thinking a flock of waterfowl was the advance strike force of an alien invasion fleet. For the record, Plait says that, even in the heat of the moment, he never allowed himself to believe that the lights were extraterrestrials, but he does admit to having an "odd feeling" in the pit of his stomach and then feeling vaguely disappointed when the quacking former UFOs flew by. By the way, the birds glowed because of reflected light from bright lights at the launch pad.10 If something like that can (almost) happen to an elite sky watcher like Plait, is anyone safe from being fooled? And just imagine if the birds had not flown his way but changed course and faded out of sight before he was able to identify them. Or imagine if it wasn't a skeptical astronomer observing them but instead was someone with a prior belief in UFOs/s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps. Most likely it would be very difficult to convince that person that he or she probably only saw something as simple as flares, escaped birthday party balloons, planes, meteors, or a flock of birds.

I have waded through many books on this subject. One of the more intriguing UFOs-are-s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps books I have read is UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on Record, by investigative journalist Leslie Kean. I think it promotes unjustified belief in UFOs and would have been much better if the author had balanced it with skeptical critiques of UFO claims. It's still an interesting book though, with accounts of some of the more credible UFO sightings. Kean complains that UFO claims are too often suppressed by governments and automatically dismissed by skeptics. I can't speak for how governments handle UFO sightings, but I certainly disagree that this is the case with most skeptics. No UFO skeptic I know, myself included, would reject a claim of an unusual sighting without first listening and thinking it over. We also don't feel the need to explain away every sighting because we understand that the absence of an explanation is not in itself proof of anything. I believe I'm in sync with the vast majority of UFO skeptics when I say we are open-minded about the possibility of a UFO being an extraterrestrial s.p.a.cecraft but are not impressed by claims without evidence. Most UFO skeptics tend to be fans of science and would love to discover that we are not alone in the universe. Show us compelling evidence and you will have our undivided attention. Show us a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p and our skepticism about visiting extraterrestrials will vanish in an instant.

The most important point to be made about Kean's book is that it presents an impressive collection of highly credible eyewitnesses, people in positions of authority with professional aviation experience. However, after an initial flash of excitement while reading their stories, it's a quick return to Earth. One only has to remember that fighter pilots, airline pilots, generals, and aviation officials are human too. And as such they are vulnerable to the same natural mistakes of perception, interpretation, and memory that the rest of us are. An example of this would be police officers. They are trained to look for details that typical citizens would miss, but they still can and do make significant mistakes in seeing and recalling important aspects of events they witness.11 If training, skill, and experience formed an impenetrable fire wall against misperception, illusion, hallucination, and faulty memories, then UFO stories from military and professional pilots would be all the solid evidence we need. But we know that this is not the case.

An astounding forty million Americans say they have seen a UFO.12 a.s.suming respondents defined UFO as s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, that's a lot of people who are seeing what they think are alien visitors. But if extraterrestrials really are constantly buzzing around above all these witnesses, then where are all the high-quality photos and HD video of them? Think about the age we now live in. Who doesn't have a cell phone with a camera in it these days? Have you been to Disney World or a kid's birthday party lately? Virtually everyone is armed with a camera of some kind. We can add to these hundreds of millions of potential UFO photographers and videographers the hundreds of satellites and UAVs (unmanned drones) that are constantly monitoring and photographing the Earth. Shouldn't they be able to detect or capture images of all these low-flying s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps that are supposed to be here? Finally, astronomer Andrew Fraknoi asks why the tens of thousands of amateur astronomers around the world who look up every night are not the ones who are responsible for the majority of UFO claims. He suspects the reason for this is because they almost always know what they are looking at. They, for example, are unlikely to mistake Venus or a meteor shower for s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps.13 Seth Shostak of the SETI Inst.i.tute points out that not only is the case for even one extraterrestrial visit unproven, but there is also nothing to show for all these decades of research and attention.

"Despite the fact that about one-third of the populace believes that aliens are visiting our planet, we've really learned nothing from that," he explained. "If the aliens are really here-which I strongly doubt-there's been precious little effect on us. But s.p.a.ce exploration has revealed countless new, fabulously interesting facts. As a simple example: Until the 1970s, the moons of Jupiter were just bright points of light in our telescopes. Now we know them in detail and have reason to think that some of them could be habitable. The same could be said of the Saturnian system, and of course Mars. s.p.a.ce exploration does lots more than merely fuel conspiracy theories and provide us with tales of strange lights in the sky."14 Since UFO sightings seem largely culture driven-why aren't unidentified flying objects a.s.sumed to be high-flying harpies or dragons?-I'll make a prediction. For the last five or six decades, virtually all UFO sightings have suggested large vehicles with roughly human-sized aliens aboard. Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being utilized increasingly by the US military and CIA around the world. Other countries such as Great Britain, Israel, and Russia are investing in UAVs too. Now the US military is adding insect-sized UAVs to conduct surveillance, and who knows what else, to their robotic fleet. Some are pure machines while others are living insects turned into obedient cyborgs. As the popular culture eventually becomes aware of these new technologies in the coming years, I predict we will begin to see new waves of UFO reports that describe extremely small extraterrestrial vehicles with tiny aliens aboard. Wait and see.

GO DEEPER...

Bennett, Jeffrey. Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Its Astonis.h.i.+ng Implications for Our Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown, 2010.

Darling, David. Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Macknik, Stephen, and Susana Martinez-Conde. Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in s.p.a.ce. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.

Sheaffer, Robert. UFO Sightings: The Evidence. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Shostak, Seth. Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Was.h.i.+ngton, DC: National Geographic, 2009.

Webb, Stephen. If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens...Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. New York: Springer, 2010.

Other Sources Bad UFO (blog), http://badufos.blogspot.com/.

Roswell is the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim. It's far past time for UFOlogists to admit it and move on.

-B. D. Gildenberg, Project Mogul partic.i.p.ant It is one of the most important events in all of history. Technologically advanced extraterrestrials traveled some vast unknown distance to reach our planet in the summer of 1947. Tragically, however, the s.p.a.cecraft crashed, killing the entire crew. The cause of the disaster remains a mystery. Perhaps a collision with a flock of birds doomed them, or maybe the alien crew made the mistake of opening a window and then lost control after being infected by Earth germs, a la H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Whatever the reason, their journey ended tragically in a lonely field near the small town of Roswell, New Mexico.

Some witnesses say there were multiple crash sites, indicating that more than one s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p went down. A rancher discovered strange metallic debris, providing hard evidence of at least one downed s.p.a.ce vehicle. The US military was quick to recover the wreckage and a few alien bodies as well. Initially, the army said it had "captured a flying disc," and this was reported by the local newspaper.1 Afraid that an unhinged public would panic and riot in the streets if people learned what had happened in New Mexico, the government made the decision to execute a cover-up and initiate a strict policy of denial that continues to this day.

OK, SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?.

The Roswell crash is a great story. Much as I would love to believe it, however, I can't. The story is just not good enough because there are very sensible, credible, and more believable alternative explanations for what happened. When one learns the real story of the 1947 incident and the way in which the Roswell myth was rehashed years later and then nurtured by the media and a town that likes tourism dollars, it becomes clear that if there's one place we can be sure aliens did not crash in 1947, it would be Roswell, New Mexico. After all, no other location on Earth has been as scrutinized and a.n.a.lyzed-without uncovering any evidence-as Roswell has been by UFO believers, UFO skeptics, military investigators, and journalists.

Something did happen near Roswell in the summer of 1947. A strange object really did fall from the sky, and the US military really did lie about what it was. Unfortunately for s.p.a.ce enthusiasts like me, flying saucers and aliens had nothing to do with it. In the late 1940s, the US military was concerned about the Soviet Union becoming the second nation to have nuclear weapons. It was just two years after World War II and the Cold War was already under way. In the days before spy satellites, the Army Air Force (the US Air Force did not yet exist as a separate branch) established Project Mogul, a top-secret program to develop ways of monitoring Soviet nuclear bomb tests. Project Mogul used high-alt.i.tude balloons to carry electronic listening devices that were designed to detect the sound of distant explosions. An aboveground nuclear blast is so loud that researchers believed they could pick up the sound waves at high alt.i.tudes even halfway around the world.

According to Project Mogul partic.i.p.ant B. D. Gildenberg, the work was extremely sensitive. It was so secretive, in fact, that many of the people involved didn't even know the name of project until many years later.2 It was not decla.s.sified until 1972. The concern was that if the Soviets learned about what was going on, they would move their testing underground and make detection even more difficult.

The official explanation Project Mogul researchers gave to anyone who asked what they were up to was simply, "weather balloon research." But these were much more than basic weather balloons. For some flights, several very large high-alt.i.tude balloons were joined together with cords to form a "flight train" that could be as long as six hundred feet. And then there was the equipment hanging beneath the balloons, including spiked silver-foil-covered reflectors that enabled the balloons to be tracked by radar. Gildenberg says these elaborate balloon trains were the cause of many UFO sightings in the region during the project's run.3 Project Mogul was active in multiple locations. One place where balloon trains were launched was Alamogordo Army Air Base in New Mexico-just one hundred miles west-southwest of Roswell. Gildenberg is certain that the famed Roswell wreckage was nothing more than the remains of a Project Mogul radar reflector. When rancher Mack Brazel found the debris scattered across the ground on June 14, 1947, he initially ignored it. Several days later, however, the modern UFO craze took flight when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot flying over Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton State, reported seeing unusual objects that came to be known as "flying saucers." Soon after Arnold's story was published in newspapers nationwide, UFO sightings began pouring in across America. Gildenberg believes Brazel heard about these sightings after driving into town on July 5, nearly three weeks after he had found the wreckage. He then reevaluated the debris he had initially thought was unimportant and told the Roswell sheriff about it. The sheriff reported it to Roswell Army Air Field, a base that had nothing to do with Project Mogul and knew nothing about it.4 Then somebody at Roswell Air Base gave the gift that keeps on giving to UFO believers everywhere. An overly enthusiastic press officer at the base issued a press release stating that recent rumors of "flying discs" had become reality and the Roswell Army Airfield had recovered one. The next edition of the Roswell Daily Record carried a front-page story with the headline: RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER IN ROSWELL REGION. At this point, it's worth pointing out that "flying saucer" did not automatically mean "extraterrestrial s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p" to everyone in 1947. Furthermore, Kenneth Arnold, the private pilot who made the famous "flying saucer" sighting several days before the Roswell "incident" never said he saw a flying saucer or disc. He said he saw flying objects that were shaped like large boomerangs. The press incorrectly reported his description, however, so what should have been the beginning of the "flying boomerang" craze became instead the "flying saucer" craze.

In the meantime, Major Jesse Marcel flew the material recovered from Brazel's ranch to Fort Worth Army Air Base. Once there, it was immediately identified by people who knew what it was. Photographs were taken of the material, and the press was told it was from a weather balloon. The media reported this to everyone's satisfaction. End of story-or it should have been.

It has to be emphasized that there was nothing exotic or mysterious about the debris. It consisted of balsa wood, thin aluminum foillike material, and rubber-hardly the stuff of interstellar flight. If it really was wreckage from a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, it means that the aliens are smarter than we could ever imagine because they would have traveled across the galaxy in something similar to a child's kite.

"The Roswell debris was simply and obviously a radar reflector from a balloon," states Gildenberg. "Once available, this official explanation was accepted as self-evident. All one had to do was look at the photo to be convinced."5 And that was it; the Roswell crash story was dead. By the way, notice that there was no mention by anyone at the time of alien bodies being carried away from the crash site, no alien autopsies, no multiple crashes, nothing said about strange metal, and so on. All those claims came later, much later.

In fairness, conspiracy theorists are technically correct about the military covering up the truth and lying when they said the wreckage was from a "weather balloon." Clearly it was not. It was wreckage from a "spy balloon." Most people probably will agree, however, that this was not an evil or significant lie, certainly understandable during the early days of the Cold War.

A MYTH IS BORN.

The big "flying saucer crash" of 1947 was exciting for about twenty-four hours. Then Americans moved on and forgot about it. But sometimes you just can't keep a good story down. The Roswell legend roared back with a vengeance thirty years later and doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. Energized by decades of UFO sightings, science fiction books, TV shows and films, and some very questionable journalism, the story has become deeply entrenched in pop culture. Today Roswell, New Mexico, has a museum, bus tours to the "crash site," and even an annual festival dedicated to the 1947 non-event. The "crash" is often mentioned on TV and in films.

How did a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p crash that never happened become part of America's unofficial history? How did this happen? It certainly wasn't due to new and compelling evidence that emerged after 1947, that's for sure. The Roswell story returned from the dead because a few people made the decision to "reopen the case" and start asking people what they remembered. In 1978, UFO believer Stanton Friedman interviewed the major who recovered the material, Jesse Marcel. The National Enquirer also interviewed Marcel, who now added new information to his story, claiming that the debris was unusual and couldn't be burned, for example. Charles Berlitz, the same guy who wrote books about the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, coauth.o.r.ed a popular book about the Roswell crash.6 This time the story was too hot, and too profitable, to flame out. The timing was convenient as well. In the late 1970s, the festering wounds of Watergate and the Vietnam War left many Americans well primed to believe that their government was lying to them about h.o.a.rding the wreckage in a secret facility somewhere. All this new attention led to more witnesses coming forward with increasingly astonis.h.i.+ng claims.

In the 1980s, the Roswell story grew to include the recovery and autopsy of alien bodies. This is particularly interesting since nothing had been said about this by anyone back in 1947. Why now, after so many years, did people remember alien bodies? It would seem that witnesses were either lying or really did see military personnel recover dead aliens from the crash site. But there is a third possibility, one that makes a lot of sense.

In the 1950s, the US Air Force conducted more unusual balloon projects in the region. Some of these involved dropping equipment, test dummies in silver suits, and even a real live human from high alt.i.tudes. The test dummies in particular-falling from the sky and then being picked up and carried away by military personnel-likely played a role in feeding the Roswell myth.

MY INTERVIEW WITH A ROSWELL ALIEN.

In 2001, I interviewed Joe Kittinger, one of the great aviation pioneers of the last century. He had a remarkable career as a test pilot, fighter pilot, and balloonist. Kittinger was first to solo across the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon, and he performed a successful parachute jump from the upper edge of the atmosphere in 1960. That spectacular leap from a balloon at 102,800 feet (nineteen miles) still stands as the highest parachute jump ever. Kittinger broke six hundred miles per hour during a free fall that lasted more than four minutes. In total, it took nearly fourteen minutes for him to reach the ground. With so much adventure and history to talk about, I was reluctant to even bring up Roswell during the interview. I eventually did, however, because I had heard that he may have inadvertently contributed to the myth by being mistaken for an alien. I sensed in his voice a bit of frustration over the subject but, to his credit, he seemed eager to clear the air.

"It never happened," Kittinger said. "There was a very top secret army project that was designed to detect when the Russians detonated a nuclear weapon. They sent a balloon aloft with a very long antenna array, almost five hundred feet long. It had very exoticlooking equipment on it. The balloon landed on a ranch near Roswell. The so-called alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p was that balloon. It's turned into a cottage industry, and it put Roswell on the map. A lot of people want to believe it was aliens, and they want to believe there was a big cover-up. But I'll tell you, it never happened."7 Kittinger, it turns out, was the closest thing to a real alien back then, having plunged to Earth from the edge of s.p.a.ce himself. He is certain that high-alt.i.tude balloons and those test dummies inspired the Roswell myth.

"Absolutely they did. These dummies that we dropped from balloons were dressed in pressure suits, so they looked unusual. One time we dropped one and it fell way up in the mountains. These dummies weighed more than two hundred fifty pounds. So how do you carry one out of the mountains? We put it on a stretcher and carried it to the back of an ambulance to take away. Now if somebody is back in the weeds watching this they are going to say, 'Wow, look at that alien they have there.' We think that a lot of the alien sightings were actually us doing our work with the test dummies."8 Project Mogul veteran Gildenberg also believes the dummies were behind the eyewitness accounts that came out decades after 1947: "Many aliens were described wearing flight suits identical in color and detailing to suits used on our dummies."9 Additionally, the crash of a large KC-97 Stratotanker airplane in 1956 might have contributed to stories of alien bodies showing up at the Roswell Army Hospital. That accident killed eleven men. Their badly burned and disfigured bodies were recovered and taken to the hospital, where they may have been seen by future "Roswell witnesses." This possible explanation for some of the alien body sightings is detailed in the US Air Force's official study on it, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed," published in the 1990s.10 Kittinger strongly endorses the report as the final answer to this myth. "Anyone who has any doubts about what happened at Roswell should read it," he said of the official Air Force report. "When you get to the end of it, you won't have any doubts. Anyone who is interested in the truth and the real facts should read that report."11 I know what you are thinking. The dates don't add up. There is an obvious problem with the timeline when the supposed crash happened a number of years before the military was using test dummies in that area and the KC-97 crashed. a.s.suming the witnesses are being honest, how could they remember seeing things in 1947 that actually took place in the 1950s or 1960s? By being human, that's how. Don't forget how memory works! The human mind doesn't file away archival footage of everything we see and hear, in correct order, and then wait for us to request a perfect playback. Our memories are constructed. This means they are edited, embellished, and shuffled around. And because memories are a.s.sociative as well, details that were not part of the original event as it really happened often get tossed in. Connections our brains "think" make sense are made in an effort to give us coherent and useful memories. It may seem like we are being constantly lied to by our own brains, but they don't do all this to fool or harm us. They do it because we don't need to remember every detail about everything. It would be inefficient to spend time and energy trying to recall everything, so the brain does its best to give us what it thinks we need. This is why it would not be so unusual or unexpected for someone to blend a 1947 memory with the memory of something they saw, read, or imagined they saw, years later.

Some readers may find all this a bit hard to believe. I have no such doubts, however, because I once caught my brain feeding me a memory it thought made sense but didn't match reality. In the summer of 2011, I was driving in my car listening to Colin Cowherd's ESPN radio talk show. The topic was baseball and Cowherd mentioned Pete Rose's run at Joe DiMaggio's revered fifty-six-game hitting streak. Immediately I remembered the night Rose came up short after getting a hit in forty-four games. The scene was crystal clear in my mind. It was during my college days and I was in a friend's dorm room while that game was on his TV. I even remember pausing our conversation when Rose came up to bat so I could watch. Rose struck out and DiMaggio's record survived. But then Cowherd mentioned the date for that game: 1978. "Ha," I thought to myself. "He blew it. He's way off. That happened in the mid or late 1980s." The year 1978 couldn't possibly be right, because I saw Rose's streak snapped on TV in a friend's dorm room when I was in college in the 1980s. In 1978 I was a soph.o.m.ore in high school. I a.s.sumed the commentator just made a simple mistake with the year. Later, however, I was curious enough about the exact year to check, and what I found shocked me. Pete Rose's. .h.i.t streak was stopped in a game that took place in 1978! Even then, even after seeing the date verified by a credible source, I still remembered it incorrectly. I could still "see" myself, in college, in my friend's dorm room, watching Pete Rose strike out. But it couldn't have happened that way. I wasn't in college then and didn't even know that particular friend back in 1978. I was just a kid then, and that game was probably on past my bedtime. What happened? The likely answer is that my constructed memory of Pete Rose striking out was edited, shuffled, and put together for recall by my brain in a way that totally violated the integrity of the actual time line. Maybe I was in that dorm room with my friend in the 1980s and glimpsed a program that included video of Pete Rose's career highlights, including that specific strikeout. My subconscious mind then combined the real 1978 event with the viewing of a replay of it years later to create one memory that seemed to make sense-except that it was not accurate. The gap of at least six or eight years was compressed and eliminated-without my conscious permission, by the way. After experiencing this phenomenon firsthand, I have no problem understanding how someone around during the Roswell incident in 1947 might end up with a memory of it that also includes memories of events that occurred years later.

It is also possible for a person to be prompted into a false memory just by exposure to a compelling presentation. This was shown by a 2011 study that revealed how disturbingly easy it is to fool human memory. Researchers found that simply showing people a commercial would lead many of them, just a week later, to remember trying the product advertised even though they never could have because the product was fictional. They call it the "false experience effect."12 When I read about this, I immediately thought of the Roswell claim and other strange things people remember seeing or experiencing. Given the popularity of attention-grabbing alien stories that spread through popular culture like wildfire in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, how many Roswell witness accounts might be attributable to the "false experience effect"?

It's not difficult to manufacture convincing memories of things people don't really remember at all. There is a cute little story about my youngest daughter that I occasionally share with anyone who will listen. When she was around one year old, Marissa had a fever and I carried her around the house while singing some silly made-up song in the hope of distracting her from the discomfort. At one point I paused, held her up, face-to-face at eye level, and thought about how wonderful and perfect she appeared. Even while sick she was impossibly beautiful. Her little face was the cutest thing in all the universe-and then she showered me with vomit. My little angel unleashed a relentless stream of foul demonic fluid, so much of it that I would've sworn it exceeded her body weight. And then she smiled and giggled. I stood there for a long time, soaked with milk and half-digested baby food, unsure what to do.

The interesting thing is that Marissa, now ten years old, remembers that incident very well. But after talking with her about it, I'm convinced that her memory of drenching daddy is not of the actual event but is a constructed memory created from hearing me tell the story. A story heard today can shape tomorrow's memories. What if I had added into each retelling of that story that it was raining, there were seven puppies in our living room, and I was dressed up like an Elvis impersonator at that time? Would she "remember" those details if she heard the story several times over the years? Probably. It's easy to imagine how Roswell witnesses might have heard or read stories about aliens and then subconsciously constructed convincing memories that mix in elements of those stories with their real experiences at Roswell decades ago.

WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A LACK OF TRUST.

The absence of good evidence and the availability of reasonable alternative explanations have not stopped millions of people from believing that a s.p.a.cecraft crashed in Roswell more than sixty years ago. A staggering 75 percent of Americans reject the military's official explanation of the Roswell story.13 This figure of 75 percent is odd because only 24 percent of Americans polled by Gallup believe that "extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past."14 It seems, therefore, that a significant number of people hold the strange position of not believing aliens crashed at Roswell while also not believing the government when it says that aliens didn't crash at Roswell. This suggests that much of the Roswell story's popularity is owed to a general mistrust of government. If everything had happened in roughly the same way, minus government involvement, the incident probably would have been forgotten long ago.

Do governments lie? Of course they do. Sometimes it's for good reasons and sometimes it's because politicians, military leaders, and civil servants want to get away with things the rest of us would not approve of. This does not mean, however, that governments lie all the time about everything. Sometimes when a government says it did not recover an alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p and hide extraterrestrial bodies, it just might be telling the truth.

GO DEEPER...

Books Frazier, Kendrick, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell, eds. The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Cover-ups. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997.

Kaufman, Marc. First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life beyond Earth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

Kittinger, Joe, and Craig Ryan. Come Up and Get Me: An Autobiography of Colonel Joseph Kittinger. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011.

Kla.s.s, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Cover-up. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997.

McAndrew, James. Roswell Report: Case Closed. Grand Prairie, TX: Books Express Publis.h.i.+ng, 2011.

Ryan, Craig. Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of s.p.a.ce. Annapolis, MD: US Naval Inst.i.tute Press, 2003.

Saler, Benson, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore. UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. Was.h.i.+ngton, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010.

Other Sources Skeptic 10, no. 1 (2003).

We had demons from ancient Greece, G.o.ds who came down and mated with humans, incubi and succubi in the Middle Ages who s.e.xually abused people while they were sleeping. We had fairies. And now we have aliens. To me, it all seems very familiar.

-Carl Sagan The extraordinary claim that aliens have not only made contact with people but also abducted or restrained some of them in order to conduct strange and horrifying procedures is one of the more important paranormal beliefs, in my opinion. Often mocked and dismissed without a second thought, these beliefs are so extreme that they deserve close scrutiny. It is one thing to imagine that the position of stars and planets influence daily human life or that some fuzzy light in the sky is an alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, but it is something else entirely to believe that extraterrestrials came into your bedroom and experimented on you. To "remember" a visitor from s.p.a.ce having s.e.x with you, extracting s.e.m.e.n from you, or placing an electronic device up a nostril or in your a.n.u.s takes things to an entirely new level. Perhaps these remarkable stories, made by many people at least since the 1960s, can tell us something important about paranormal claims in general. Maybe there is a lesson here about the power of cultural influence and the remarkable ability of a human mind to create its own "reality."

First of all, let's be fair and address whether or not alien abduction incidents could have happened. The only sensible answer to that is that it is possible. There are trillions of stars in the universe, and the discovery of planets...o...b..ting stars has become routine in recent years. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old and it's very large. We might be alone, but it seems unlikely given all the chances for life out there. There likely are trillions of worlds within the three hundred billion or so galaxies spread across the observable universe. Of course there could be extraterrestrial life, but we might be the only intelligent life capable of s.p.a.ce travel. Maybe we are the first intelligent life so far. Maybe we are the last. But if there is life in the universe and it's smart enough to figure out an efficient way to travel here, then maybe we have been visited. And maybe some humans were selected for study. This is an extraordinary claim and, as we shall see, there is nothing remotely approaching proof, but it is possible. For example, on a scale of "what has a better chance of being real," I certainly would place alien visitations ahead of astrology, ghosts, and people who have conversations with dead people. At least the idea of extraterrestrials existing doesn't conflict with the laws of nature. For this reason I tend to be a bit defensive on behalf of people who believe in alien abductions. Why are these stories a big joke to so many people when other more unlikely claims enjoy considerable respect? Shouldn't abduction believers get at least as much respect as, say, the 75 percent of Americans who believe in angels?1 While there is no evidence at this time indicating that life, intelligent or otherwise, exists anywhere else but Earth, the only sensible position is to maintain an open mind on that issue. Having an open mind, however, does not mean one should let every wild belief creep in. Since childhood I have had a strong attraction to both astronomy and science fiction. The possibility of alien life thrills me. I couldn't ignore an alien abduction story if my life depended on it. But after I have heard the story and there is no evidence to back it up, then I know it's just a story and nothing more. Anecdotes are not evidence. Never forget that stories alone do not prove anything.

The problem with the idea that aliens have been abducting people is that after all these years, after all these claims, there is nothing to show for it. To date, there is not one verifiable case ever of an abductee who produced hard evidence or shared important information that could only have come from a technologically advanced extraterrestrial species. There have been claims about people having alien devices implanted in them. Great! Send one of these gadgets to the New York Times science desk and we will finally know the truth. There also have been many stories about extraterrestrials giving abductees vital messages to share with all of humanity. Fine, but don't just tell us about how the aliens want us to live in peace and harmony. Anyone could make up that stuff. Let's hear something only an advanced alien species would know, like how to cure cancer, how to travel faster than light, or an explanation for dark matter.

Anyone who cares about evidence, logic, truth, and reality has no choice but to conclude that alien abduction claims are probably not true. This does not mean, however, that all those who make the claim are lying or are not worth listening to. I believe researchers and the general public should pay more attention to people who say they were abducted, not because I think their stories are accurate, but because they offer us an opportunity to learn more about delusions, sleep, false memories, and the influence of culture on beliefs. These cases are excellent examples of how easy it is to believe in things that are not real. If a person can somehow end up with vivid and authentic-feeling memories of a home invasion by a gang of big-eyed aliens with ray guns, then there should be no underestimating the brain's ability to betray us when it comes to thinking about much more mundane things like psychic readings, alternative medicine, lights in the sky, ghosts, the Bible code, and so on.

Dr. Susan A. Clancy, author of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens spent five years of her life studying hundreds of people who believe they were abducted by aliens. After listening to some of the most bizarre and disturbing stories ever told, Clancy settled on very down-to-earth explanations for why these people believe what they believe. She is not convinced that her interview subjects or anyone else have been abducted by aliens. She also does not think the vast majority of abductees are mentally ill, lying, or unintelligent. "Yes, they held some strange beliefs without any strong evidence to support those notions," she writes in her book, "But don't many of us do the same thing? They weren't much weirder than the people I see at family reunions.... The truth is that almost all of us can believe things without much evidence. The only thing unique about the alien abductees I have met is their particular belief."2 According to Clancy, what is going on in many of these cases is likely an incident of sleep paralysis mixed with false memories. Something real happened-a nightmare on steroids-and then that event was "explained and confirmed" by a hypnotherapy session. A person could walk away from such treatment with the powerful memory of an alien abduction that no lecture on the virtues of critical thinking could easily undo.

She also discovered that belief in abduction is not the starting point. In most cases people were disturbed by weird things they couldn't explain like mysterious bruises on their bodies, specific events such as waking up and finding their pajamas on the floor, or general feelings of being an outsider in society. Clancy says that often the belief is part of an "attribution process," an attempt to answer questions. "Alien abduction belief," she explains, "reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences."3 So how do people end up with the false memory of an alien abduction in their mind? It can happen far more easily than you probably think. Psychologist and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus conducted experiments in the 1990s that showed how easy it is not only to modify a person's memory but to give them an entirely false memory as well.4 A standard component of the typical abduction scenario is that the victim's memory of the event is "wiped clean" by the aliens-although they never make a complete job of it. A nagging suspicion that something terrible has happened haunts the person who then seeks out someone to help put the pieces together, maybe a hypnotherapist who specializes in retrieving memories of alien abductions. But there is a problem with the popular perception of hypnosis and memory recovery: it's not supported by good science. "A wealth of solid research, conducted over four decades, has shown that hypnosis is a bad way to refresh your memories," argues Clancy. "Not only is it generally unhelpful when you're trying to retrieve memories of actual events, but it renders you susceptible to creating false memories-memories of things that never happened, things that were suggested to you or that you merely imagined. If you or your therapist have preexisting beliefs or expectations about 'what might come up,' you're liable to recall experiences that fit with those beliefs, rather than events that actually happened. Worse, neither you nor your therapist will realize this, because the memories you do retrieve seem very, very real."5 After decades of work on false memories, Loftus concludes this: "Just because it's vivid, detailed, expressed with confidence and emotion, doesn't mean it's true."6 The smart way to proceed when confronted by an extraordinary claim or event is to look for the easy answers first. If I walk out in my driveway tomorrow morning and find that my car is missing, my first instinct will be to suspect that it was stolen, it was borrowed, or somebody is playing a trick on me. I would have to eliminate all those possibilities, and many more, before I arrive at the possibility that it has been taken by aliens.

If the extraordinary event happens to be waking up in your bed, finding yourself surrounded by strange beings and unable to move, then it seems to me that sleep paralysis with hallucinations would be an easier explanation than bringing extraterrestrials into it. Have no doubts, sleep paralysis is a real phenomenon, and it's not as rare as you may think. Some 20 percent of people are believed to have experienced at least one sleep paralysis episode with hallucinations. It happens when the natural transition between deep sleep and waking up is somehow derailed. The brain can still be in a sleep state with motor output from the brain blocked, as is normal during sleep so that body movement is restricted, but the person "wakes up" and feels paralyzed. Add to this the possibility of a dream in progress, and one could be in for a very scary ride. In an awakened state, or something close to it, a dream might be impossible to separate from reality.7 Andrea, a thirty-something Canadian schoolteacher, has had so many sleep paralysis episodes that she has learned to simply relax and ride them out. She says that it is easy for her to understand how people can be terrified and misled by a sleep paralysis experience. "It's happened so often now-about a dozen times in my life-that it's lost a bit of its edge," she explained. "Also, I'm quite sure I'd heard of it before it happened to me, so I didn't suffer long with the, 'Oh-s.h.i.+t-what's-happening-to-me?' feeling. I can't remember one stand-out episode, really, but I do know you still definitely hear and smell things. So, if you didn't know what was happening, you'd be able to hear noises in the house, the TV, voices, and things like that. It would be so terrifying if you didn't know what was going on, and being conscious but unable to move does make you feel like you're being crushed somehow. You so badly want to open your eyes, but can't. You try to imagine what's going on in the room, and it would be pretty easy to think of something terrible, since this terrible thing is happening to you. My only concern is, How long will this last? I'm pretty good at calming myself and getting back to sleep, thankfully."

Trevor, a very bright university graduate and former soccer star now in his midtwenties, says he has experienced four or five sleep paralysis episodes in his life. "Usually I feel like someone is in the room with me or lying down next to me," he said. "Sometimes I can see a face and sometimes I can only see a shadow-type figure. I always feel like I'm conscious but can't move or make any sounds. A lot of the time I'm trying to talk or yell but nothing comes out. When I really concentrate hard I can move a finger, and once I make that small movement then I wake up. The experience is d.a.m.n scary."

Based on clinical descriptions and personal experiences like Andrea's and Trevor's, an episode of sleep paralysis certainly would terrify most people. Imagine going to sleep and then "waking up" to find that you can't move your arms and legs no matter how hard you try. You can't speak or cry for help. Now imagine scary figures congregating around your bed. Maybe one of them touches you, hurts you, or even rapes you. During all of this you might feel like you are fully awake but immobilized and helpless. Maybe you can see, hear, feel, and even smell everything around you. Then you wake up in the morning feeling terrible. You are confused, tired, and maybe even haunted for weeks and months by a sense that something is very wrong. But you can't quite figure out what really happened that night. Perhaps you might become obsessed with "the problem" and begin grasping for answers anywhere you can find them. What was done to you? Who did it? Why did they do it? A few millennia ago, a mischievous G.o.d would have been a credible answer. Back then, G.o.ds came down from Mount Olympus or wherever to a.s.sist, torment, challenge, and have s.e.x with humans all the time. A few centuries ago, the suggestions that it was a witch or ghosts likely would have satisfied your curiosity. During those times, virtually any unidentified noise in the night was deemed to be a demon, a ghost, or some such supernatural creature. Today, however, we have the mythical "grays," little aliens with big brains and large, creepy dark eyes. They are the night creepers of our time. It's the ideal upgrade for the high-tech s.p.a.ce age period we now live in. Everybody knows about the agreed-upon look of aliens today. They are in books, films, and television shows, and they star in numerous contact and abductions stories. I have a rubber one posing on a bookshelf in my house right now. The standard alien abduction and experimentation storyline is near universal as well. It has spread around the world to most countries. Even most young children know how aliens are supposed to look and how the script is supposed to go when they come calling: first abduction, then experimentation, followed by memory erasure and release back into the wild. Yes, cultural saturation appears complete. This means, of course, that the stage is set for little extraterrestrials to visit many more people in their sleep.

Sleep paralysis and false memories may account for the alleged victims' belief, but what about the millions of people who do not claim to have had such an encounter but still believe these incidents occur to others? Why in the world would they choose such an improbable explanation when a far more reasonable one is available? I have been curious about this for many years and have asked every abduction believer I've ever encountered. The responses are almost always the same. First they retell a story, such as the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction that supposedly occurred in 1964, and ask why anyone would make up such a thing. I counter that some people might do it in order to get attention or possibly profit from it. Or maybe sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and manufactured dreams from hypnotherapy make the event seem real to them even though it never happened. Maybe they are not lying and really do believe it happened, but this alone does not mean it did happen. I explain that people can have hallucinations, sleep paralysis is a known phenomenon, and psychologists have proven that it's not difficult for someone to change real memories and create false memories in another person's mind. It's almost always at this point that believers try to switch lanes and pull me into a debate over the possibility of extraterrestrial life. After I make it clear that I'm a big fan of astrobiology and think there is a very good chance that the universe is teeming with life, maybe even a few million intelligent species, they accuse me of contradicting myself. How, they ask, can I be so closed-minded about alien abductions when I'm open to the possibility of alien life? My final answer is that I'm not closed-minded. The idea of advanced extraterrestrials coming here, even if they are too aggressive and s.e.xually perverted, is exciting and I would want to know all about it. But just because the possibility of contact thrills me doesn't mean I'm willing to pretend that it has happened until there is a sensible reason to believe it has.

GO DEEPER...

Clancy, Susan. Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Shostak, Seth. Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 1998.

Throw away the tarot deck and ignore the astrology column. They are products offered you by charlatans who think you are not the marvelous, capable, independent being you are.

-James Randi, Flim-Flam!

There is harm, real harm, in astrology. It weakens further people's ability to rationally look at the world, an ability we need now more than ever.

-Phil Plait, BadAstronomy.com I can remember being mildly impressed with my sign, Libra, many years ago because it seemed to offer amazing insight into my personality. According to astrology, I was intelligent, fair, resourceful, kind, funny, and charming. Yep, that's me! But just when I might have been in danger of being seduced by the power of the stars and planets, skepticism and critical thinking came to the rescue. Astrology never had a chance.

It's one thing to believe in something for no other reason than you want to or it feels good, but it amazes me how many people say astrology is scientific and supported by evidence. They don't "believe" in astrology, they "know" it's true because it's so logical. You would not believe how many people I have encountered who think astrology is synonymous with astronomy. I found this to be common in the Caribbean, where astrology and astronomy books are more often than not shelved together as the same subject in bookstores. Many Caribbean people speak of astrology like it is legitimate science. I found the same to be true throughout Asia. During a visit to Chicago's fine Adler Planetarium, I was shocked to see an astrology book in the gift shop, shelved alongside books by Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. Thousands of newspapers, including the one I currently write a column for, print horoscopes on their pages every issue.

Given the extraordinary nature of astrology's claim-that the positions of stars and planets at the time of one's birth reveal or determine both personality and future events that can be foretold-it is remarkable that so many people believe it. But believe in it they do. In the United States, for example, 25 percent of the population thinks astrology's claims are valid.1 Despite having no theory to explain it, and no evidence or scientific basis to prove it, astrology has been touted, taught, sold, bought, respected, and "used" for thousands of years with no signs of going away anytime soon. Many of history's most powerful and important people have taken this pseudoscience seriously-and not just in ancient times. For example, many of President Ronald Reagan's daily meetings and movements were set by his wife based on his horoscope.2 Many other prominent leaders in recent years have been rumored to consult the stars before making decisions. That should scare everyone who understands that astrology is worthless as a source of useful information.

To be crystal clear, astrology is not scientific-not even close. It was originally rooted in magical thinking when it gained popularity some four thousand years ago and, as far as I can tell, it has remained loyal to those roots to this day. Astrologers love to point out that modern astronomy grew out of ancient astrology. Sure, ancient astrologers engaged in real astronomy too, but that overused claim to fame is smothered under the weight of all the pseudoscientific baggage that astrology carries.

One only has to consider the source of astrology's alleged ability to know a person's personality and destiny to recognize that there is nothing to this. It may surprise some believers, but there is no complex mathematical formula, no ancient equation derived from the collected wisdom of previous generations, that reveals personality traits according to birth date. No, the traits a.s.sociated with a particular sign are primarily based on how ancient people viewed the creature or object that they constructed with stars after playing connect the dots with constellations. I'm a Libra, for example, which is represented by scales that somebody centuries ago imagined they saw in the sky. For this reason I'm supposed to be a fair person and very concerned about justice. I'm not joking; that's really what it is based on. The ancient Babylonians never launched a scientific quest to find a genuine link between human behavior and the locations of astronomical objects. No, they just looked up at the night sky and then made it all up. So why do people still believe in it all these years later?

Astrology endures because most people don't appreciate the need for skepticism and critical thinking when confronted with such claims. It also obviously responds to a natural human desire to know ourselves better. Who wouldn't want to know if tomorrow will be a good day or a bad, if love is on the way, or if there is danger lurking? It also feels good to have our egos stroked, something professional astrologers are well aware of and make sure to deliver to clients. This is why you will never see a horoscope like this: You are not attractive and you are probably never going to be very successful. Your dreams are unrealistic and will not come true. Maybe you should just give up now and stop wasting everybody's time. Face it, we all can't be winners. Somebody has to lose, and that somebody is you. It is also time for you to accept that n.o.body really likes you. You are annoying. Do your friends and family a favor and move to another country.

Now that's a horoscope I might respect. But we never seem to see one like that in the newspapers, do we?

I have a short list of key points that I like to share with astrology believers. I don't attempt to bully them into a corner over the unlikely effect of Venus's gravity on my pet dog's happiness or specifics like that. Not only is that tactic usually a waste of time but, as with other paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs, I figure it's best for the believer to do his own mental work and navigate his own way out of the dark and into the light. Remember that one or two well-crafted questions that are delivered in a friendly manner can do far more damage to an irrational belief than a hundred thundering facts declared by a smug skeptic. I tend to offer the following friendly advice and leave it at that: Believers should ask professional astrologers, or anyone who actively promotes astrology, to explain how they come to their conclusions. Don't read astrology books, articles, and horoscopes uncritically. Pay attention and notice that no sensible explanation is ever given for how we can know people born on June 4, for example, act one way while people born on September 4 act another way. Always ask the key questions. What causes the differences in personalities? Where does the information that horoscopes are based on come from? What specific force is exerting all this influence on us? Is it gravity? If so, how does the extremely weak gravitational effect from distant stars and planets do it? Is it altering our brains or genes? How? Once one realizes that there are no sensible and consistent answers to any of this, that it's all based on ancient superst.i.tion, it becomes much more difficult to believe in astrology.

Don't stop with your horoscope. Most people who regularly check their horoscope in the newspaper or on a website probably never think to read the other horoscopes. Pick another sign and read the horoscope for it as if it's yours. Do this every day for a month and you are bound to be amazed at how "accurate" that one is too. Horoscopes are more convincing when you only read one of them because they are intentionally written to be one-size-fits-all. Once it's revealed that one horoscope works just as well as another, it's easy to recognize what's going on.

Watch out for the trap of remembering a few predictions that came true while forgetting the hundreds and thousands that didn't come true. Astrologers, just like psychics, know that if you make enough guesses and predictions, at least some of them are bound to score.

Astronomy is like kryptonite to astrology. Learn some of it and you will see that the real science of stars and planets makes astrology wither and die out in the cold darkness of s.p.a.ce. Good riddance.

GO DEEPER...

Culver, Roger B. Gemini Syndrome! A Scientific Evaluation of Astrology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.

Culver, Roger B., and Philip A. Ianna. Astrology: True or False? A Scientific Evaluation. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.

Goldberg, Dave, and Jeff Blomquist. A User's Guide to the Universe. New York: Wiley, 2010.

Hart-Davis, Adam. The Cosmos: A Beginner's Guide. London: BBC Books, 2007.

Stewart, Joseph V. Astrology: What's Really in the Stars. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996.

There is a widely used notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of "scientifically proven." Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

-Carlo Rovelli, "The Uselessness of Certainty"

I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb.

-Richard Feynman It's a major problem that science is overlooked, underappreciated, discouraged, denied, obstructed, and outright rejected by many people around the world, but what about those who give science too much credit and respect? While there is no data I know of on how many people have an excessive faith in science and believe it can do no wrong, I suspect it is more common and more of a problem than most would think. I have traveled extensively on six continents, not as a pampered tourist in air-conditioned buses with guides paid to smile at me, but mostly as a lonely writer and photographer roaming the back alleys and hillsides of the real world. Even in lands where superst.i.tion reigns supreme, I encountered many people who possess a weird reverence for science. For them it is just another form of magic or religion, and those who do science are only more sorcerers and holy men. They believe science is always right and every scientist is a genius. They view technology, the products of science, as secular miracles and proof of some imagined infallibility among scientists. This is far from reality, of course. It is also dangerous when people place too much stock in scientists and the things they say. One of the common paths to irrational beliefs is placing too much trust in authority figures. It is not only a problem in politics and religion. Trusting the words of scientists uncritically can be just as risky.

Look hard enough and it's possible to find doctorate-holding scientists somewhere in the world who will tell you that cigarettes are not all that bad for you, UFOs are definitely alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, minds can bend spoons, and the Earth is less than ten thousand years old. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientist ever, was not content to invent calculus and figure out how planets move. He also spent a lot of his time trying to turn lead into gold and calculating the date on which the world would come to a supernatural end. Leading scientists in Europe and the United States were once convinced that the shape of a person's head was a reliable measure of intelligence and morality. Racism and s.e.xism were once sanctioned by mainstream science. How can any of this be true? Scientists are supposed to com