Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

seven (actually, to be philatelically correct, they are termed “souvenir sheets”) commemorating Mars exploration. This set was hyped by a philatelic huckster named Alan Shawn Feinstein, who claimed that the set of stamps could be worth a fortune. And it was none other than Robert Hoagland who supported these claims, stating that the stamp could be worth $10,000 (Posner 2000). In fact, according to Michael Laurence (2001), editor of Linn’s Stamp News, a widely read and highly authoritative philatelic weekly, the Sierra Leone Face on Mars stamp was worth $2.50 as of September 24, 2001, and is “one of the most overhyped labels ever foisted on a gullible public.” As is so often the case with collectibles promoted to noncollectors, the promoted items are essentially worthless, but then these items are obviously never promoted to people who would know enough not to waste their money on them.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA

The fact that the released CIA documents relating to UFOs clearly showed that the claim of a government cover-up was nonsense didn’t stop Ground Saucer Watch from issuing a press release stating just the opposite. A profound lack of respect for the facts is nothing new among UFO groups—especially when the facts don’t fit the belief that UFOs are extraterrestrial—so GSW’s “big lie” technique is not all that surprising. What is both surprising and disturbing is that several major newspapers around the country carried GSW’s press release essentially verbatim and made no attempt to check whether the astonishing statements made therein were true. The New York Times ran the release on January 14, 1979, under the headline “C.LA. Papers Detail U.FO. Surveillance.” According to the story, the released CIA papers showed that “the Government has been lying to us all these years.” GSW director William Spaulding also made the absurd claim that “he has sworn statements from retired air force colonels that at least two U.F.O.s have crashed and been recovered by the air force. One crash, he said, was in Mexico in 1948 and the other was near Kingman, Arizona, in 1953. He said the retired officers claimed they got a glimpse of dead aliens who were in both cases about four feet tall with silverish complexions and wearing silver outfits that seemed fused to the body from the heat.” This, then, was reported by the New York Times as serious news. It’s obvious that the Times never believed a word of it; otherwise, it would have launched the biggest journalistic investigation in the history of the paper to come up with the story of the century. Where UFOs are concerned, it is almost impossible to distinguish the editorial policies and ethics of the New York Times or the Washington Post from those of the National Enquirer or the Globe. The most absurd UFO reports are accepted at face value and published as news stories. Attempts are seldom made to verify the truth of the report or to seek comment from skeptical investigators.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) sent out its own press release refuting the claims of GSW Neither the Times nor any other paper saw fit to print it. Sheaffer (1981) correctly sums up the situation as follows: “Wild and unfounded claims of massive UFO cover-ups are news, it seems. Reasoned refutations of such claims are not” (p. 141).

An excellent example of such shoddy journalism comes from the Washington Post, the paper that broke the Watergate story and is worldrenowned for its excellent staff of investigative journalists. In its April 30, 1977, issue it ran on the front page a story about a UFO sighting by President Jimmy Carter that had occurred in Georgia in 1973. Sheaffer (1981) pointed out to a Washington Post reporter who contacted him about the story that it “was not news” as reports of the sighting had appeared in several other papers, including the National Enquirer (p. 140). Nonetheless, the story appeared on the front page and contained nothing but rehashed old news. A few days later Sheaffer, who had been working on the Carter sighting for months, positively identified the UFO that Carter had seen as the planet Venus. Sheaffer reported this to the Washington Post, which reported his identification in a tiny item in the gossip column in the May 9, 1977, issue. The front-page story reporting the sighting received ten times more space, while the report of the solution to the mystery was given minimal treatment.

Whatever the reasons for the perverse editorial policy of not checking UFO stories (a check would certainly be made on any major story on nonpseudoscientific or nonparanormal topics), the result is to badly mislead readers. One reason why so many people think that there is “something to” the extraterrestrial explanation for UFOs is that they “hear so much about it.” By reporting as factual news stories wild, unsubstantiated, and false claims, many newspapers shirk their responsibility to correctly inform their readers.

The print media are certainly not alone in their irresponsibility where UFO stories are concerned. The electronic media are, if anything, even more irresponsible in presenting unverified and clearly false material as fact to their listeners and viewers. William Spaulding, the Ground Saucer Watch director whose incorrect claims about the released CIA documents made the New York Times, appeared on Tom Snyder’s television show Tomorrow on February 2, 1979. He continued to spread his fantasies about a government cover-up and to distort the facts. NBC-TV made no attempt to have a responsible critic dispute these unfounded claims.

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…