Explaining Our Obsession With the Unexplained
Fringe beliefs, conspiracy theories, and the disenchanting of the world.
This story is excerpted and adapted from Colin Dickey’s new book, The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained.
June 1996, and the United States
was on edge. A year after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah
Building in Oklahoma City, the country watched anxiously as a standoff
between the FBI and a militia group unfolded in Jordan, Montana. The
Montana Freemen had declared themselves outside the reach of U.S. law,
had stopped paying taxes, and had embarked on a scheme of counterfeiting
and bank fraud. When the FBI attempted to arrest them in March, they
grabbed their weapons, and the Feds, eager to avoid the bloodshed that
ended similar standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco, settled in for a siege.
During the second month, news broke that another Montanan—Ted Kaczynski,
the Unabomber—had been caught and charged with a series of bombings
over the course of 17 years. Then, on June 14, the same day that the
last of the Montana Freemen surrendered peacefully, police in Long
Island, New York, arrested another group of dangerous men, revealing a
plot far stranger than anything the country had yet seen.
Martin Thompson, the head of Rackets for
the Suffolk County’s District Attorney’s office, had been leading an
investigation into illegal gun sales when he first learned of the plan.
Listening to a wiretap of two suspects, John J. Ford and Joe
Mazzuchelli, he suddenly found them talking about something very
different than guns.
“Once they find this stuff, on, let’s say
in Tony’s car, front seat,” Ford is heard saying on the tape, only to
be cut off by Mazzuchelli, who chimes in, “Nasty bastard glowing in the
dark.” Ford adds, “With this isotope, he’ll start glowing in 24 hours.”
Thompson and his team had stumbled on a deeply bizarre assassination
plot involving stolen radium, a forest fire, and a UFO cover-up.
In addition to stockpiling a large cache
of weapons, Ford was president of the Long Island branch of the Mutual
UFO Network, or MUFON, a collection of UFO enthusiasts who investigated
sightings to prove that extraterrestrials had visited Earth. MUFON
members are not, by nature, violent: Most see their job as simply
gathering evidence, as objectively and dispassionately as possible.
But Ford was not a typical UFO
researcher. He claimed he had been recruited by the CIA at 18, and had
routinely participated in clandestine operations against the Soviet
Union. The KGB, he claimed, had tried five times to kill him, and they’d
given him the nickname “the Fox,” due to his wily nature. But by the
mid-1990s, things had turned: Ford injured himself on the job and his
mother died, an event that, friends said, affected him deeply. And then
there was the forest fire.
The blaze that swept through Long
Island’s Pine Barrens in 1995 was large enough that the smoke was
visible from Manhattan, some 75 miles away, ultimately scorching 7,000
acres. Over time, Ford became convinced that the fire was, in fact,
caused by a UFO crash, and that the Suffolk County Board was involved in
a large-scale cover‑up. He felt that the only way to get answers was to
take control of the government himself, and began conspiring with
Mazzuchelli and another man, Edward Zabo, to kill three county officials
using stolen radium. Zabo, deeply in debt, agreed to provide the radium
that Mazzuchelli would plant in the men’s homes. At a press conference
the day of the arrest, Suffolk County District Attorney James M.
Catterson stood before Ford’s extensive collection of weapons and
explained that when he’d first heard of the plot, “the idea that someone
would attempt to introduce radioactive material into someone’s food or
someone’s living area at first seemed so bizarre that there’s a human
tendency to discount it. It didn’t take very long to realize that this
was some of our worst nightmares come true.”
The past few years, and especially
the current moment, have revealed that such fringe beliefs and
conspiracy theories are becoming more prevalent—and more consequential.
Belief in Atlantis, or cryptids (such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness
Monster), or UFOs, or ancient aliens—has risen dramatically. For several
years Chapman University in California has surveyed American’s fears
and irrational beliefs. In some cases, the numbers have been steadily
creeping upward: Belief in Bigfoot moved from 11 percent in 2015 to 21
percent in 2018. The belief that aliens have visited Earth during modern
times went from 18 percent to 26 percent in 2016, and then to 35
percent in 2018. The notion that aliens visited Earth in the distant
past has more than doubled from 20 percent in 2015 to 41 percent in
2018.
We are, in other words, experiencing a
resurgence in ideas mostly dismissed by science and history. Alongside a
rise in conspiracy theories about vaccines, fluoridation, chemtrails,
and political conspiracies from the Illuminati to QAnon, comes more
ignoring of experts and the embrace of beliefs that were once relegated
to cults.
As for Ford’s little
cult: Both Mazzuchelli and Zabo turned on him in exchange for lesser
sentences, while Ford was pronounced unfit to stand trial and
involuntarily committed to the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in New
Hampton, New York.
“Yes,
this all sounds way out,” District Attorney Catterson said. “But when I
read the Unabomber manifesto, some of his ideas were just as bizarre.
That’s why I take this and the imminent threat to the individuals
concerned here very seriously … This all convinces me that there is a
side to humanity that defies definition.”
Murder plots are clearly an aberration in
the world of UFO and cryptid enthusiasts, most of whom are normal,
law-abiding folks. But there are shades of overlap between these
searchers and the darker strands of conspiracy theory. They share a
similar distrust of established voices—scientific, governmental,
journalistic—that ranges from healthy skepticism to outright paranoia.
By themselves, fringe ideas
don’t necessarily breed paranoia or violence. Much of what attracts
people to them is the idea of wonder and marvel, outside the ken of
humanity, just out of reach. But the toxic mélange of anti-vaxxers,
school-shooting truthers, and right-wing militia groups didn’t appear
overnight. As long as there has been a scientific establishment, there’s
been distrust of it, and as long as there have been democratic
governments, there’s been suspicion about what’s really going on. The
rise in our fascination with things like cryptids and UFOs offers one
vector for explaining how we got to where we are today.
Often, the genesis and evolution of these
beliefs follows a standard, almost predictable, pattern. Something
genuinely anomalous or difficult to explain happens, followed by
increasingly elaborate explanations that resist positive or negative
confirmation. The curious case of Erich von Däniken and his wildly
successful “ancient alien” hypothesis offers a particularly paradigmatic
example.
It begins, as often as not, with a
legitimate, unsolved scientific question—in this case, the Fermi
Paradox, which posited that, statistically, it stands to reason that
there are other advanced civilizations in the universe. In 1950, at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi, for whom the
paradox was named, was discussing extraterrestrials with other
scientists when he asked, “Where is everybody?”
Since then, other
scientists have worked to better understand this paradox and the
probabilities involved, including a young assistant professor at Harvard
named Carl Sagan, who in 1963 offered a highly provisional hypothesis
that perhaps “Earth was visited by an advanced extraterrestrial
civilization at least once during historical times.”
Enter hotel clerk and convicted fraud
Erich von Däniken. He had no formal scientific training, but he liked
the idea that aliens could have visited Earth in the distant past. His
1968 book, Chariots of the Gods?, suggested that the Egyptian
pyramids, the Moai statues of Easter Island, and Stonehenge in England
are all artifacts of contact between humanity and aliens. An instant
bestseller, Chariots of the Gods (the title long ago lost its
question mark) spawned a seemingly endless series of follow-ups by von
Däniken, who turned his idea into such an industry that he opened a theme park in Switzerland devoted to it.
Von Däniken’s success came in part from
his ability to start with legitimate gaps in our knowledge, ignore
evidence that contradicted his own claim, and then magnify the supposed
ignorance of science. He argued, for example, that Egyptologists don’t
know how or why the pyramids were built. In fact, there are detailed
records on this from the Egyptians themselves. But this counterevidence
is immaterial as the main hypothesis grows exponentially. Much of this
is driven by what’s sometimes called apophenia, the tendency to see
shapes and patterns where none exist—the idea that everything is, one
way or another, connected.
A fringe belief system like von Däniken’s
is an endless work in progress, an ever-expanding grand scheme, an
associative process of connecting the dots. Stonehenge, Easter Island,
the Nazca lines, Maya iconography—all are mysteries “solved” by a single
thesis that encompasses all of ancient religion, art, architecture, and
mythology. It is a theory seductive in its simplicity, but built on
cultural chauvinism: Von Däniken and his adherents refuse to believe
that ancient civilizations were intellectually sophisticated enough to
have created wondrous buildings or understood complicated math and
astronomy without outside help.
When archaeologists and sociologists set out
to study their students’ belief in von Däniken’s ancient-astronaut
theory in the late 1970s and early 80s, they found that as many as 28
percent of incoming college students believed in similar theories; more
dismaying, that number stayed consistent across four years of higher
education, including in archaeology.
When I talk to people who believe that
Lemuria or Atlantis is real, that Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster
exists, or that the government is covering up information about UFOs,
it’s easy to hit a wall very quickly. Trying to disprove any of these
beliefs—or really, any conspiracy—is frustrating and foolhardy; it soon
becomes apparent that what matters is not what a person believes but
that a person believes, and that that satisfaction is more important
than truth or falsity.
Rather than debunking these
theories, it may be more important to understand their genealogy and
development. While they appear to be ancient, these ideas are (unlike,
say, the belief in ghosts) a relatively new phenomenon that emerged as a
result of two great, connected shocks of the 19th century: the divorce
of science and religion, and the disenchanting of the world.
For most of the history of the Western
world, science and religion had been linked. The study of the natural
world, for ancient Greeks and medieval Christians, magnified one’s
understanding of God. But the Protestant Reformation and the
Enlightenment set in motion a series of events that would, by the early
19th century, set the two ideas in opposition to one another. The world
of science also became professionalized and concentrated in
universities, museums, and professional organizations. The powerful
allure of pseudoscience is in its claim to heal this rupture and bring
scientific inquiry and mysticism back into harmony.
At the same time, the world was becoming,
as German philosopher Max Weber famously put it, “disenchanted.” In a
1917 article, “Science as a Vocation,” he explained that “the increasing
intellectualization and rationalization” of the 19th and 20th centuries
implied that we could understand anything in the natural world if we
simply set our minds to it. Weber had given a name to a growing feeling
in the industrialized world, that there was no more magic, nothing
inexplicable or mysterious. There has been a feeling among some that
this scientific disenchantment has cost us something, and that Atlantis
and Bigfoot and little green men can reenchant the world.
By the 20th century, much
of the world’s frontiers had evaporated, as colonialism and capitalism
stretched across the globe, taking the vast “unknown” with them. But
there are still those who dream of the margins, the frontiers between a
disenchanted modern world and enchanted, distant places—be they sunken
continents, the Yeti-infested Himalayas, or top-secret government black
sites that cover up visits from beyond our planet.
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