Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

As noted above, the New Zealand UFO films showing nothing more than the planet Venus or a Japanese squid-fishing fleet were shown on American network television. Both NBC and CBS presented such films as “real” UFO films during their evening news broadcasts. Neither made any attempt to contact responsible critics or to check whether the films showed what they purported to show.

In May 1984 a symposium titled “Edges of Science” was held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This symposium featured UFOs among other topics. Speakers were J. Allen Hynek, James Oberg, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. The symposium received considerable media coverage. Hynek appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America , but no one was invited to challenge his specious claims. United Press International (UP!) distributed two stories on the symposium over its wires. One contained twelve paragraphs, all devoted to the view that UFOs are extraterrestrial. No hint was given the reader that any other viewpoint existed. The second UPI story consisted of ten paragraphs touting the extraterrestrial hypothesis and three sentences noting that some disagree with this hypothesis. MacDougall (1983, chap. 27) has further documented that where UFOs or other pseudoscientific or paranormal topics are concerned, even otherwise respectable newspapers, television programs, and the like sink to the lowest levels of sensationalism. Meyer (1986) makes the same point in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review .

Since the first edition of this book, things have improved somewhat. As mere UFO sightings have become less and less “sexy,” the print media have tended to ignore them. In the UFO movement, sightings have, of course, been replaced by abductions. The mainstream print media apparently can’t bring themselves to be so uncritical as to take the abduction claims seriously. The same cannot be said of television. So-called documentaries about aliens are frequent, as the discussion of the “alien autopsy” film illustrates (pp. 293–95). One of the most absurd “documentaries” regarding aliens was UFO—The Unsolved Mystery, which aired on Fox in 1990. Hosted by Mike Farrell, from the television show M*A*S*H , it was totally uncritical and accepted the most outlandish stories about alien visitation at face value. (My favorite factoid from the show was that the alien’s favorite flavor of ice cream was strawberry!)

This and the preceding chapter have shown that the evidence for UFOs as extraterrestrial spacecraft “rests entirely on… uncorroborated human testimony” (Sheaffer 1978–79, p. 67), the most unreliable type of evidence to be found. In more than fifty years of investigation, not one authentic photo of a UFO has been taken and not one piece of genuine debris or other physical evidence has been found. Impressive-sounding sightings are reported year after year and, year after year, when carefully examined, they disappear into the mists of misperceptions, misidentifications, and hoaxes. This has no effect on true believers; there is always another case to be sloppily investigated and trumpeted in the media as—finally—the conclusive proof that UFOs are “real.” Upon investigation, this new case joins the multitude of others that were caused by misidentification of Venus, advertising aircraft, or hoaxes. Soon, however, there is another case that proves beyond a doubt…

This chapter covers three pseudoscientific theories that share a number of similarities. All three emerged suddenly and rapidly became very popular with readers who, while otherwise well educated, had little background in the specific fields the theories are concerned with. All three theories were developed by articulate but scientifically untrained individuals who had little knowledge of how scientific theories are really validated. Finally, even after thorough refutations, all three theories still command dedicated bands of followers whose belief in them has an almost religious fervor.

The “ancient astronaut” theory of Erich von Daniken was amazingly popular during the 1970s and has adherents to this day. Von Daniken proposed that Earth was repeatedly visited in the historic past by intelligent beings from other worlds. The “ancient astronauts” gave ancient cultures the knowledge and skills that enabled them to create some of the great wonders of the ancient world such as the Great Pyramid, the statues on Easter Island, and the huge markings on Peru’s Nazca Desert. Von Däniken claimed that there was clear evidence of these ancient astronauts (whom primitive humans viewed as gods) in the drawings, carvings, myths, and legends of ancient peoples and that the ancient astronaut theory solves many archeological mysteries.

Von Däniken was not the first promoter of this theory (Krupp 1981; Story 1976), but he is certainly the most successful. He made millions of dollars from his numerous books, movies, television shows, and lectures. Von Däniken was a master of that popular technique among proponents of pseudoscience, looking for mysteries where none exist (Radner and Radner 1982). He searched the archeological literature to find unexplained reports, objects, and phenomena and then attributed them to the ancient astronauts. His style of writing was such as to direct readers’ thoughts away from other possible explanations for the phenomena in question. “How could such and such have been produced,” he asks rhetorically, “if not by ancient astronauts?” The reader, whose knowledge of archeology is limited, doesn’t know how the object was actually produced and so accepts the ancient astronauts explanation. Von Däaniken developed this technique further: He may fabricate a mystery where one never existed in the first place. His comments about the Piri Re‘is map, a map dated to 1513 showing the Mediterranean area, illustrate this technique. Von Däniken claims that the map is “absolutely accurate” and that “the coasts of North and South America and even the contours of the Antarctic were also perfectly delineated” (von Däniken 1970, p. 30). What is the explanation for this great accuracy? “Comparisons with modern photographs of our globe taken from satellites showed that the original of the Piri Re’is maps [sic] must have been aerial photographs taken from a very great height. How can that be explained? A spaceship hovers high above Cairo and points its camera straight down” (p. 31).

Even if the reader of the above scenario doesn’t immediately accept von Däniken’s explanation for the great accuracy of the Piri Re‘is map (in spite of von Däniken’s frequent use of the plural, there is only one map), the mystery of the map’s great accuracy will certainly stay in mind. But there is no mystery that needs explaining in the first place. The Piri Re’is map is a very good map—but only in comparison with other maps of its day (Story, 1976). Hapgood (1966) has pointed out numerous inaccuracies in the map, such as leaving off half of the island of Cuba. This would hardly be expected from the advanced civilization von Däniken proposes. In this instance, as in so many others, von Däniken lies to his readers. He fabricates evidence and distorts the facts with the sole purpose of supporting his theories. Readers unaware of the detailed archeological research on the various pseudomysteries that von Däniken makes up are tricked into thinking that the evidence for the ancient astronaut theory is much stronger than it really is. Another nonmystery concerns an island in the Nile called Elephantine. Von Däniken (1970) says it is called Elephantine “even in the oldest texts” because the island is shaped “like an elephant.” But how, he asks, “did the ancient Egyptians know that? This shape can be recognized only from an airplane at a great height” (p. 84). In fact, the island is not shaped like an elephant. A glance at a map reveals it to be rather long and pointed at one end. The island bears the name it does because there may have been elephants on it at one time and because it was the site of ivory trading (Story 1976). Again, von Däniken has lied to his readers.