Help Stamp Out Absurd Beliefs

As an investigator of unusual claims, I’m accustomed to being confronted with incredible examples of medieval thinking in the 20th century. Everywhere we look, we find antiscientific bias and belief in the unbelievable — from demons causing susceptible serial killers to act up to researchers who find top-secret code words in George Bush’s speeches when they are played backward, leading them to the conclusion that the President and others thereby unconsciously reveal this information. Thousands of Americans think bacteria do not cause disease, and are convinced that death is an aberration; they are known as Christian Scientists.

Local police departments all over the U.S. regularly consult clairvoyants, who they feel give them supernatural clues in tough cases. In Washington weekly parties of goggle-eyed believers sit about caressing spoons so that their mind power can cause the silverware to bend, paying $30 for half an hour of this mind-expansion instruction. Late-night TV viewers can call a 900 number to be advised on their future — for a price — by soothsayers whom they will meet only by telephone, introduced by Israeli “superpsychic” Uri Geller. Blissful devotees of meditation techniques sit for endless hours in yogic positions in ashrams, bouncing about on mattresses and trying to fly with mental power. With my experiences of these and hundreds of other incredible examples of human credulity, the notion of foreign agents’ playing presidential speeches backward is hardly surprising.

The scorecard for the crazies is not very impressive. “Police psychics” have been investigated scientifically and found to be of absolutely no use; in fact, they impede investigations. Yet they flourish, are consulted by law officers and promoted lavishly in the press. Spoons vigorously stroked all the way to a high polish don’t deform unless a little actual physical bending is applied, but that fact doesn’t interfere with the parties taking place in Washington. The “flyers” of transcendental meditation spend $5,000 and up to learn how to bounce around on a rubber mattress, but they never get airborne. No amount of evidence against any transcendental claims will dampen the fervor of the believers.

We in the U.S. are not alone in our credulity. In China a large percentage of the public visits “Qi Gong” hospitals for diagnosis and treatment by a mystic who never touches them; he merely waves his hands about. If a patient is in a remote location and cannot visit an expert in person, he merely mails a slip of paper with his name written on it, and the practitioner performs both the diagnosis and the cure — an exotic hand-and-body dance designed to “re-establish the balance of yin and yang” — from any distance away. Thousands of visitors pour into the Philippine Islands to have local sleight- of-hand artists apparently dip bare-handed into their body to remove cancerous tumors. They dip into their bank accounts rather dramatically too.

Currently, German science is agog with its exciting discovery of “E rays,” which are said to come from deep within the earth and cause cancer and which cannot be detected by any known scientific instrument. Fortunately, they can be sensed by a dowser carrying a forked willow stick. The trusting viewer in what was the Soviet Union places a bottle of water atop his TV set every morning so that a faith healer can “charge” the contents with curative power via Channel 6. In Finland and Sweden the private, expensive and government- accredited Rudolf Steiner schools teach children to cast horoscopes and believe that sprites inhabit trees and rocks.

Why are the populaces of every culture so eagerly embracing claptrap that should have been left behind with the superstitious and emotional burdens that brought about the Dark Ages? The reason is to be found in the uncritical acceptance and promotion of these notions by the media, prominent personalities and government agencies.

Those Washington spoon-bending parties are regularly attended by top brass from the Pentagon. The German government paid DM 400,000 (about $250,000) in 1990 to hire dowsers to scan federal offices and hospitals so that desks and beds could be relocated out of the path of the deadly E rays that authorities have accepted as real. Our own Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, has urged government funding for supernatural research, fearful that Russian scientists might be ahead of the U.S. in paranormal matters. Until recently, Pell retained a special assistant with top-secret security clearance who devoted himself solely to such research, for a paycheck of $49,000 a year. And, can we ever forget, a U.S. President and his First Lady arranged even their official schedules on the advice of an astrologer in San Francisco? Even TIME magazine sometimes slips into the trap, as it did in a recent cover story on alternative medicine when it included the absurdity of “crystal healing” as a possible medical remedy.

Acceptance of nonsense as a harmless aberration can be dangerous to us. We live in a society that is enlarging the boundaries of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, and we cannot keep up with much more than a small portion of what is made available to us. To mix our data input with childish notions of magic and fantasy is to cripple our perception of the world around us. We must reach for the truth, not for the ghosts of dead absurdities.

At the risk of being unbearably realistic, I must tell you that Elvis is really dead, the sky is not falling, the earth is not flat, and the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.