Reality shopping; a consumer's guide to new age hokum

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Alan M. MacRobert

An immediate cause for suspicion is the presence of whole museum loads of clearly false relics from the Middle Ages, when practically every church had to have a wood clip from the True Cross, a plate from the Last Supper, or one of Jesus' sandals -- any single item of which would be as hard to evaluate as the Shroud itself. The Shroud appeared in the middle of all this noise. Ray N. Rogers, a leading Shroud advocate, once said that he could hardly think of a better way for the deity to prove His existence to a skeptical modern world than to leave us the Shroud. I can think of plenty of better ways, perhaps something clean and clear like materializing as a figure 50 miles tall and speaking loud enough to rattle the earth. The Shroud was a pretty forlorn miracle by comparison, lost in the trivia of the Middle Ages like a needle in a haystack -- a speck of dubious data extracted from a sea of noise.

Cloaks of noise by themselves are not proof of the Shroud's inauthenticity -- nor that mind power doesn't occassionally tilt a zirconium die, nor that the moon is not covered with artificial objects just a little smaller than the best photographs can show. "Noise" in information theory swamped in noise are unworthy of belief, and it is suspicious that evidence for the paranormal is consistently cloaked in this way.

3. Believers

Watch out for "believers." Watch out for stories told and retold. Francis Bacon said, "Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true." A believer doesn't have to be a zealot. Anyone qualifies who possesses imagination enough to get excited at the idea that the mysterious crashing sounds in the woods just beyond the campfire might be Bigfoot.

Or that Venus sparkling in the clear dawn sky might be a flying saucer. Our beliefs may predispose us to misnterpret the facts, when ideally the facts should serve as the evidence upon which we base our beliefs.

Garden-variety flying saucer sighting based on such misperceptions clutter up the UFO literature. Some UFO investigators, like the late astronomer J. Allen Hynek, have concluded that after the garbage is sorted out, a few unexplainable cases still remain. Others, like Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine editor Philip J. Klass, don't agree. "In twelve years of investigating some of the most famous and highly acclaimed UFO reports," says Klass, "I have yet to find one that could not be explained in prosaic terms . . . I'm not skeptical on principle, just on evidence."

Often a paranormal claim gets thoroughly debunked but continues to travel far and wide. Belief, not evidence, supplies the fuel. Lawrence Kusche, a pilot and investigator of Claims of the Paranormal, scrupulously examined every allegedly mysterious disappearance in the so-called "Bermuda Triangle," for example, and found nothing really mysterious about any of them. He reported his findings in two books, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery -- Solved and The Disappearance of Flight 19. These books have sold very poorly compared to sensationalistic works like Charles Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle. "I assumed that people who read the weird books would naturally want to read the other side of the story and find out the truth," he commented. "I was wrong." Bermuda Triangle lore continues to percolate through American popular culture. A movie on the Triangle was released a couple of years ago, claiming to be factual. Its television ads were filled with flying saucers, underwater horrors, time warps, and planeloads of screaming people.